GUESSS - Global University Entrepreneurial Spirit Students' Survey

The economic and social relevance of entrepreneurship in general and new ventures in particular is well-established across the world. Students, as they could be the entrepreneurs of tomorrow, have attracted considerable scholarly and public attention in the last decades. Despite strong research efforts in the past, many questions are still not sufficiently answered. Which individual, societal, family- and university-related factors enhance students' intention to found their own company? How do students' entrepreneurial intentions and activities compare across a multitude of nations? Are there globally applicable best practices? To generate unique insights and contributions that address these gaps, it is thus imperative to further investigate students' entrepreneurial intentions, activities and their antecedents on a global level. This is the overarching goal of the GUESSS research project (Global Universiy Entrepreneurial Spirit Students' Survey). This report presents the results and insights of the 2011 edition of the GUESSS project on the global level. In Spring 2011, a large-scale quantitative survey was conducted in 26 different countries, addressing more than 1 Million students from 489 Universities, leading to a data set with more than 93'000 responses (N=93'265).

Opportunity recognition is a central concept in entrepreneurship research. However, research on entrepreneurship education has so far neglected this topic. There is hardly any systematic evidence concerning the effect of entrepreneurship education on opportunity recognition, one reason for this being that research on opportunity recognition in general has been hampered by a conceptual ambiguity and - until recently - the lack of a reliable and valid measure of this concept. This contribution investigates opportunity-recognition beliefs among intentional and nascent student entrepreneurs in Germany. It applies a refined and extended version of the measure of opportunity-recognition beliefs proposed by Gregoire, Shepherd, & Schurer Lambert (2010). The results support the view that opportunity-recognition beliefs are not a unidimensional concept but consist of related but somehow distinct constructs. Determinants of opportunity-recognition beliefs are investigated using structural equation modeling. I find a negative direct effect of entrepreneurship education and a positive indirect effect, mediated by entrepreneurial self-efficacy. Previous work experience and venture gestation activities are also positively related to opportunity-recognition beliefs. The analysis is based on data from the 2011 Global University Entrepreneurial Spirit Students' Survey (GUESSS) in Germany. This study explicitly only includes people who are currently in the process of evaluating an entrepreneurial opportunity, avoiding problems of hindsight and survivor bias.

What are students' entrepreneurial intentions and activities across the world? This question is of highest social and economic relevance. Students represent the entrepreneurs of tomorrow; their entrepreneurial plans and activities will shape tomorrow's societies and the overall economic well-being. Hence, it is of highest interest for different stakeholders such as academics, practitioners, educators, policy-makers, and last but not least students how many students intend to pursue an entrepreneurial career and how those ntrepreneurial intentions come into being. The GUESSS project (Global Universiy Entrepreneurial Spirit Students' Survey) addresses this question on a global level. For that purpose, the 6th data collection wave in the history of GUESSS was conducted in 34 countries at more than 700 universities between October 2013 and March 2014. This led to a dataset with more than 109'000 complete student responses. This report provides an in-depth analysis of this unique dataset, shedding a nuanced light on students' entrepreneurial intentions and concrete activities. We focused in particular on cross-country comparisons, whereby we also consider numerous other relevant aspects, such as gender and specific social and cultural determinants.