Assessing risk perception, self-efficacy, and entrepreneurial attitudes and intentions: implications for entrepreneurship education

Entrepreneurship appears important as an economic and social phenomenon because it increases economic efficiencies, brings innovation, creates jobs (Shane and Venkataraman, 2000). Despite decades of research, we still have only a limited understanding of the process that lead an individual to become an entrepreneur (Markman, Balkin and Baron, 2002). The number of public and private initiatives to train and educate people to be more entrepreneurial have multiplied on both sides of the Atlantic (see for example Fayolle 2000a; Katz, 2003; Kuratko, 2005). Facing this multiplication of entrepreneurship education programmes and the increasing resources allocated to those initiatives it does appear strong needs to evaluate, compare and improve the design of such programmes. The aim of this research, through the understanding of the perceived risk and self-efficacy constructs and their impact on individual's entrepreneurial intention, is to study the possibility to orientate the design, the pedagogy and the contents of entrepreneurship education programmes in order they take wider and deeper into account these key dimensions.Social psychology and cognitive theories offer several understandings of the role of some beliefs and attitudes in the phenomenon of new venture creation. Among all the factors that may influence entrepreneurial cognition, we have chosen to emphasize the role of two particular concepts supposed to impact one's orientation of starting a new venture: risk perception and self-efficacy.To do this, we incorporated scales measuring risk perception and self-efficacy in an existing instrument used to assess entrepreneurship teaching programmes based on the theory of planned behaviour (see Fayolle, 2003; Fayolle and Gailly, 2004; Fayolle, 2005; Fayolle et al., 2005). We suggest that risk perception and self-efficacy, as well as the antecedents of entrepreneurial behaviour described in the theory of planned behaviour (attitudes, subjective norms, perceived behavioural control, and intentions), may consist useful indicators to monitor in order to evaluate and improve entrepreneurship teaching programmes.However, due to the timing of our research and its initial ambition, this work constitutes only a first step: testing our extended framework and proposed tools of measure. The discussion of the results will be done at the light of our main aim and so, the implications will address educational questions both at the theoretical and the practical levels.