Decoding the Entrepreneurial Capacity: the Case of Entrepreneurial Alertness

Over the last few decades, entrepreneurial alertness has established its place as one of the central concepts in entrepreneurship research. It implies one’s ability to identify opportunities that are overlooked by others and as such plays an important role in the process of opportunity discovery and creation. Entrepreneurial alertness is theoretically set as a multidimensional construct that comprises of scanning and searching for new information, associating and connecting seemingly unrelated pieces of information and making evaluations and judgments about potential opportunities. The purpose of this study is to explore the notion of entrepreneurial alertness among the youth in order to identify its relationship with metacognitive knowledge, metacognitive experience, perception of self-efficacy and entrepreneurial intention. The aim is to provide suggestions and guidelines to scholars and educators about the ways entrepreneurial alertness can be developed and enhanced through teaching methods as well as specific activities offered to students during their university study. The sample includes 206 business students on the undergraduate and graduate level majoring in seven different areas (financial management, marketing, general management, trade and logistics, business informatics, entrepreneurship and economic policy and regional development). Statistical methods applied in the data analysis included correlation analysis, factor analysis and analysis of variance (ANOVA). The results showed a statistically significant positive relationship between entrepreneurial alertness and all four preselected variables: metacognitive knowledge, metacognitive experience, perceived self-efficacy, and entrepreneurial intent. Various student activities outside the classroom contribute to higher levels of students’ entrepreneurial alertness. However, not all activities equally contributed to the development of students’ metacognitive knowledge. Students who volunteered in local non-profit organizations, did an internship in a company that operates in Croatia, participated in providing consulting services to small and medium businesses and took part in national case study competitions demonstrated higher levels of metacognitive knowledge. Finally, the paper provides suggestions to scholars, educators and policy makers in the field of entrepreneurship and education.