EXAMINING THE EFFECTS OF CREATIVITY AND WILLINGNESS TO TAKE RISK ON YOUNG STUDENTS' ENTREPRENEURIAL INTENTION

The role of entrepreneurs as innovativeness source to reach new paths to economic growth and higher levels of welfare, has become a main topic in economic policies and a fruitful field for economic research, especially since 2007's world economic recession. That is why, if we want to design entrepreneur friendly policies, the first necessary step is to understand and identify the personal motivations and characteristics which define the desire or intention to become an entrepreneur. On this basis, we consider that the search for business opportunities involves the entrepreneurs' own creative discovery of something new. In line with that, our paper aims to analyse whether creativity and risk propensity constitute individual factors affecting the students' business start-up intentions. In order to achieve this goal, we performed several regression models to test the importance of self-perceived creativity, like innovativeness proxy, and attitudes towards risk as entrepreneurial intention determinants of university students. The results from a questionnaire-based survey using a semantic differentiation metric scale evaluation show the significance of self-perceived creativeness and risk over a specific demographic profile to determine the entrepreneurial intention for our sample.