Student entrepreneurship : the impact of the thesis supervisor on students' entrepreneurial entry

The purpose of this thesis is to study the relationship between students and their thesis supervisor, to improve the understanding of student entrepreneurship and its determinants. In line with most studies, we linked student entrepreneurial entry to intention models, based on the principles of the Theory of Planned Behaviour and the Social Learning Theory. In the specific, we assumed that the role model represented by a thesis supervisor with entrepreneurial experience can predict the entrepreneurial entry of the supervised student. We focused on student entrepreneurs who graduated from Politecnico di Milano and we collected information from several sources (PoliMi academic office, the Italian Business Register, PoliMi web site, LinkedIn and the Internet in general) to perform a quantitative analysis based on secondary data. Consistently with extant studies, we developed some reasonable hypotheses and tested them through a probit regression model. The estimates provide evidence of the direct effect of the thesis supervisor’s entrepreneurial activity on the supervised student’s entrepreneurial entry, while the interactions with some moderators are not significant. The infrequency of the observed phenomenon and the scope of the sample, indeed, forced us to work with small numbers that represent the main limitation of our research work. Other limitations pertain to missing data and lack of time to perform additional checks of robustness. Nevertheless, the results of the estimates provide insights for university managers, who should create a pro-entrepreneurship environment to promote student entrepreneurial entry, both indirectly, by means of academic entrepreneurship, and directly. Overall, this research work presents few points of novelty. First, it examines a new type of relationship as antecedent of students’ entrepreneurial entry. Secondly, it exploits the role model framework in a new context, i.e. entrepreneurial behaviour in the university environment. Finally, it suggests to practitioners a new approach to foster the creation of new firms by students.