Measuring the Entrepreneurial Mindset: The Motivations behind the Behavioral Intentions of Starting a Sustainable Business

Abstract

The aim of this study was to investigate the entrepreneurial mindset that underlies the behavioral intentions of starting a sustainable business. The research was driven by the factors that are the key drivers of the economy through fostering growth, job creation, technology adoption, and innovation, as well as poverty alleviation. The research adopted a descriptive research design, with the primary data collected from those respondents with at least two years of sustainable business experience. The model comprised entrepreneurial education, innovativeness, and risk-taking as the independent variables, creativity as a mediating variable, and entrepreneurial intention as the dependent variable. The research adopted structural equation modeling to analyze the research objective and verify the hypothesis. The findings indicate that entrepreneurial education, innovativeness, and creativity significantly and positively influence entrepreneurs’ intention to start a sustainable business. Creativity was found to be influenced significantly and positively by entrepreneurial education, risk-taking, innovativeness, and creativity. The research recommends that to enhance the entrepreneurial mindset and the intention to start a sustainable business, the factors that should be enhanced are entrepreneurial education, innovativeness, and creativity. Innovation leads to the development of new products and services in the market; entrepreneurship education equips a person with entrepreneurship fundamentals, while creativity fosters the progress of a sustainable business toward achieving its objectives.