The mediating role of university entrepreneurial ecosystem on students' entrepreneurial self-efficacy

The importance of developing entrepreneurial skills in students is increasingly getting recognized in engineering education. Several institutions have initiated informal and formal entrepreneurship education programs to expose undergraduate students to entrepreneurial training and practice. Using a wide range of pedagogical approaches and curricular emphasis, entrepreneurship education programs focus on developing an 'entrepreneurially-minded' workforce in addition to encouraging venture creation. As programs continue to grow, more students will be exposed to entrepreneurship education, which brings with it the opportunity to examine how students at different institutions or entrepreneurial ecosystems may differ in entrepreneurship-related skills and characteristics. In our presented exploratory work, we focus on how students' entrepreneurial self-efficacy differs based upon the entrepreneurial ecosystem within which students are situated. We use Mc Gee's Entrepreneurial Self-Efficacy scale to assess students' confidence in their ability to perform five entrepreneurship-related tasks - searching, planning, marshaling, implementing finance, and implementing people. Our findings note statistically significant differences in entrepreneurial self-efficacy for three of the five entrepreneurial selfefficacy measures (planning, marshalling, and implementing people). The implications of our work for engineering institutions interested in developing programs related to entrepreneurship are discussed.