The Factors Influencing Entrepreneurial Opportunity Recognition : Case Study at Two Graduate Schools of Business

Various entrepreneurship measurements especially on intention and its determinants had been done at tertiary education level. This study adopts the previous specifically developed instruments on opportunity recognition, intention, self-efficacy and alertness for entrepreneurial research. The mentioned instruments
were developed by McCline et al. (2000), Chen et al. (1998), De Noble et. al. (1999) and Hills and Shrader (1997) respectively. All instruments were adopted and proven
suitable for local context with high reliability.
In addition to the major objective to test of possible relationship between the four major measurements, demographic factors, working background and experience as well as academic background and performance are also being tested to identify its possible role as the determinants.
The analysis was based on total of 125 respondents from Graduate School of Universiti Utara Malaysia (GS-UUM) and International Business School of University Technology Malaysia (IBS-UTM). These two institutions were selected
based on their entrepreneurship programmes’ objectives, so as enable the research to measure the effect of educational intervention on entrepreneurial opportunity recognition and entrepreneurial intention. The analysis was done at both individual level of the two cases and at aggregate level to facilitate the comparison. Despite the slightly lower than expected respondent rate, the drawback was mitigated by
applying non-parametric and small sample size alternatives.
Generally, higher entrepreneurial opportunity recognition capability leads to higher entrepreneurial intention. However, research findings shows lower academic performance, lesser number of years with current organization, lesser number of years of prior experience, lesser industry hookup and lesser industry hookup
contribute to higher entrepreneurial intention. Other research findings could only be applied on a more confined scope. At GS-UUM, the higher the entrepreneurial self-efficacy, the higher the entrepreneurial intention, but lower in term of entrepreneurial alertness. At IBS-UTM, entrepreneurial alertness contributes positively to entrepreneurial opportunity recognition capability,
which again leads to higher entrepreneurial intention. These indicate that the prediction power of either the entrepreneurial opportunity recognition or entrepreneurial self-efficacy is not universal. The limited prediction power may be explained by the respondent groups’ differences in term of demographic and working background. It raises the question of the need to establish contingency or situational entrepreneurial intention model.