Global Entrepreneurship Week: Assessing the Level of Awareness and Impact on Students’ Entrepreneurial Mindset Development

Global Entrepreneurship Week: Assessing the Level of Awareness and Impact on Students’ Entrepreneurial Mindset Development

Bello Alhassan¹, Onipede E.A² , Saka T.A³

¹Entrepreneurship Development Centre, Kwara State State Polytechnic, P.M.B 1375, Ilorin

²Agricultural and Bioenvironmental Engineering Department, Kwara State State Polytechnic, P.M.B 1375, Ilorin

³Business Administration and Management Department, Kwara State State Polytechnic, P.M.B 1375, Ilorin

DOI: https://dx.doi.org/10.47772/IJRISS.2025.9010219

Received: 01 November 2024; Accepted: 11 November 2024; Published: 13 February 2025

ABSTRACT

There is much believe that the social gathering at Polytechnics has a substantial impact on the development of entrepreneurial attitudes and mindset on students. The Global Entrepreneurship Week (GEW) is an annual event that occurs over the span of one week and includes the participation of millions of entrepreneurs, investors, policymakers, researchers, educators, entrepreneurship support organizations and interested individuals in the field of entrepreneurship. As the acceleration of change increases, the need for opportunity discovery, evaluation and utilization of business opportunity intensified. This present paper seeks to determine the level of awareness and impact of GEW on our students’ entrepreneurial mindset. Samples were drawn from the five academic institutes of the Polytechnic. Seven hundred and fifty students were randomly selected across the institutes to include ND and HND programmes. The two parts questionnaires were tagged “Awareness of GEW programme” and “Impacts of GEW programme. Hypothetically, the results revealed that 70% of the students are quite aware of the GEW and 60% were positively impacted. It was concluded that GEW is in indeed an entrepreneurship programme worth celebrating every November of the year. This was followed by valuable recommendations.

Keywords: Entrepreneurial mindset, Global entrepreneurship week

INTRODUCTION

The Global Entrepreneurship Week (GEW) is a substantial annual event celebrated across the globe, bringing forth ambitious and well-established entrepreneurs, policy-makers in the field, educators, mentors, facilitators, and various stakeholders in the domain of entrepreneurship. The event usually takes place during November period of the year. Global Entrepreneurship Week (GEW) is considered a celebration of the innovators and job creators who launch startups that bring ideas to human life, navigate economic growth of the country and, of course, amplify human welfarism. GEW encourages people everywhere through local, national and global activities designed to help them explore their potential as self-starters and innovators.

Kwara State Polytechnic, Ilorin is one of the pioneers and famous Polytechnics in the country that complies with the National Board of Technical Education’s directive to introduce entrepreneurship education during the 2007/2008 academic session. In her bids to fostering the entrepreneurship education, the management establishes the Directorate of Entrepreneurship Development Centre which was saddled with the responsibilities of training and skill acquisition of all prospective students of the Polytechnic. By default, the Centre regulates and bring forth, all measures to ensuring the participation of students in their designed practical activities.

Entrepreneurship Development Centre (EDC) of the Kwara State Polytechnic is a unique domain within the polytechnic premises, equipped with necessary facilities and segmented into various workshops and laboratories for learning, training and skill acquisition. The Centre has visionary leaders, coordinators and facilitators that designed, proposed and harnessed all the Centre’s resources toward achieving the predetermined goals of entrepreneurship. Most of her activities are executed within the Centre while few are out-sourced. Her training for various organizations, associations and individuals had blowed the trumpet of the Centre beyond the state. Today, it’s one of the frontier Centres recognized by the NBTE in the development of entrepreneurship education.

The EDC, Kwara State Polytechnic, aligned with the world innovators and great entrepreneurs to celebrate the usual Global Entrepreneurship Week. The last celebrated in November 14^th – 17^th, 2023 was recorded as the third edition of her GEW celebration. Since its creation in 2020, more than a million people from roughly 16 local governments in the state have participated in entrepreneurship-related events, activities and competitions amongst the students. This present study, therefore, seeks to assess the awareness and impact on the Kwara State Polytechnic students’ entrepreneurial mindset development.

Problem Statement

Entrepreneurship has generally been recognized as a good medium and strategy for economic development of an individual, a community and a nation at large (Bello et al 2021). Innovation is the heart of entrepreneurship, and at the EDC we have an incredible array of skills and world-leading innovation and technology initiatives. Yet, the Centre collaborates with industries and mentors to promote her entrepreneurial activities since all students of the Polytechnic are made mandatory to take the course at each level of their education. The celebration of GEW was also gauged as a medium to lure students to entrepreneurship activities. However, few students still claimed void about what GEW is all about and why is it celebrated. The recorded attendance at the just concluded GEW programme was an indication that not all population of the school were present, hence, the need for this research.

Objectives of the Study

In line with the international communities, the general purpose of Global Entrepreneurship Week remained as medium of inspiring, engaging, and connect people through entrepreneurship. For this study, the specific objectives include;

1. To ascertain the level of awareness of GEW programme amongst the students of Kwara State Polytechnic, Ilorin.
2. To determine the impact of the GEW programme on the entrepreneurial mindset development amongst the students of Kwara State Polytechnic, Ilorin.

Research Questions and Development of Hypothesis

The economic growth of the country can be attained through individual’s financial stability which could be achieved through entrepreneurship. Attending GEW programme can lure participants towards entrepreneurial journey. The research questions framed for this study include

1. What is the percentage level of Kwara State Poytechnic student’s awareness about GEW programme?
2. What is the percentage impact of GEW programme on the development of entrepreneurial mindset of students of Kwara State Polytechnic, Ilorin?

Based on the two main research questions raised, the following hypotheses were developed to be tested:

H_10: Most students of the Polytechnic are aware of GEW celebration

H₁₁: Only few students of the Polytechnic are aware of the GEW celebration

H₂₀: GEW programme has positive impact on student’s entrepreneurial mindset

H₂₁: GEW programme has negative impact on student’s entrepreneurial mindset

LITERATURE REVIEW

Concept of Entrepreneurship

The readiness to pursue a business by bearing all the attached risks in return for the reward is entrepreneurship. Entrepreneurship is the dynamic process of change, vision and creation (Bello et al., 2018). The ability to create and build something from practically nothing can also be the termed entrepreneurship. Shane and Venkataraman (2000) define entrepreneurship as the discovery, evaluation and exploitation of opportunities. It basically requires an application of energy and individual’s passion toward the creation and implementation of new ideas and of course, creative solutions. Business remained the building block of our modern society. Financial stability can easily be achieved through a small-scale business set up. It is recognized as a major part of economic growth.

Entrepreneurship Education

Any education that can provides the recipients with real life skills that would enable them to discover opportunity, scrutinizing it, harnessing the resources and eventually implement can be term entrepreneurship education. Thus, it is a practical education that is tailored towards student’s mindset development on entrepreneurship. Fayolle and Gailly (2004) defined entrepreneurship education as any pedagogical programme, associated with inculcating entrepreneurial skills and qualities in learners. This education emphasizes spotting, planning, implementing, running and managing of the business. Traditional education teaches students using the casual thinking technique or predictive thinking (Sarasvathy, 2015). Creative thinking is the emphasis of entrepreneurship education. As such, instead of spending hours in a classroom, creative thinking is learnt by engaging in doing it.

Entrepreneurship Mindset

With the teaching of entrepreneurship education, it’s believed that the recipient would have thrilled and unleashed into the domain of innovation and creativity, although, it will be challenging to reconcile an entrepreneurial mindset with our current system of traditional education. Any set of attitudes or skills that entice individuals to the opportunity spotting, organization of resources and finally to the creation of value can be termed entrepreneurial mindset. The inclination to discover, evaluate and exploit opportunities is called entrepreneurial mindset (McGrath and MacMillan, 2000). Despite an increasing interest in understanding what an entrepreneurial mindset is, it’s one major objective of entrepreneurship education.  As a human being, we are constraint in our ability to absorb and process initiative that would drive to promise land. Some of the indices of entrepreneurial mindset are represented in figure 1, although they are by no means exhaustive. Businesses are mostly accomplished with risk and uncertainties. Good mindset is an essential skill require to overcoming all the hurdles that are attached to the business.

Figure 1: Index of Entrepreneurial Mindsets

 Concept of GEW

GEW involves the entrepreneurial activities of engaging individuals to the basic needs of entrepreneurship while connecting them to the potential collaborators, mentors and investors. During the one-week programme, occurring at November, individuals are inspired through the motivating lectures on entrepreneurship, testimonies by successful entrepreneurs and orientations by business related organizations. Individuals were helped to identified their potentials and encouraged toward business startups.

Emergence of GEW

Global Entrepreneurship Week was founded in 2007. GEW has become the world’s largest celebration of innovators and job creators who launch start-ups that bring ideas into life. It took place every November, and engaged over millions of people across the globe. The foundation was aimed to celebrate successful entrepreneurs (through their success stories, testimonies and challenges encountered) and to encouraging the potential youths toward fostering entrepreneurship mindsets.

The Goal of GEW

The goal of the week includes exposing our teeming students to the concept of entrepreneurship and creating models to be applied in various spheres of their life. The goal of GEWis to create accessible opportunities for people to connect, gain insights and take action on their entrepreneurial goals. The GEW week provides medium for attendees to join various workshops, competitions, networking events etc, to help them create vibrant entrepreneurial ecosystem. The event is designed to bring testimonies and encouraged potential entrepreneurs to be job creators.

Entrepreneurship Development Centre, Kwarapoly

Event of Global Entrepreneurship Week has become a deal of occurrence by the Entrepreneurship Development Centre of the Polytechnic. The management of the Polytechnic supports the initiative and offered all the necessary facilities required to stage the event in line with the global standards. The last but one event was tagged with a theme: Business Opportunities Beyond Educational Environment. The event features, among others, the following activities

• Opening ceremony and lecture session by the guest speaker
• Orientation from Business Organizations: Corporate Affairs Commission, National Agency for Food and Drug Administration and Control, Bank of Industry, etc
• Inter-Institutes Quiz Competition: Structure of business plan and its impact in accessing loan
• Students conduct observations in school, neighbourhood and city to identify needs and find solutions
• Experiential workshops on entrepreneurial skills: Showcasing of the skills by student apprenticeship
• Trade fair day: this marks the end of GEW programme

Generally, Global Entrepreneurship Week was created for the purpose of motivating the young ones, particularly our students to be job creators. It aims to expose attendees to the benefit of being self-reliance and creative minds as basis of entrepreneurship. Generally, it is a celebration of business and creativity which motivates our students to work on their potential ideas. This event had a massive lunch in the Polytechnic in year 2021. It was recognized as the Centre’s first largest campaign to promote entrepreneurship.

METHODOLOGY

This segment of the research was organized and implemented to serves as a roadmap for attaining the research purpose. The awareness and impact of GEW were perused. The descriptive evaluation and correlational methodology were used in line with the results obtained from the survey. In the process of data collection, the researcher sent an online question to the respondents –this saves time and money. The population, considered, were mainly the final students of the Polytechnic who have been introduced and acquainted to entrepreneurship education since their enrolment into National and Higher National Programmes of the Polytechnic. The GEW programme, which had its first edition in 2022, drawn it attendees within and outside the Polytechnic and harmonized the activities to attain all the preset objectives of the GEW. Meanwhile, the Polytechnic has various programmes of study which were confined into five distinct institutes, namely: IAS, IES, IFMS, IICT and IOT (Bello et al., 2021).  To achieve a statistically significant sample size, equal number of responses were drawn from each institute and generalized as the representative for the entire population. For clarity, this study explores the “awareness” and “impact” of GEW on the entrepreneurial mindset of the Polytechnic’s students. Thus, the independent variables were hypothesized as HI and H2 depicted on the Figure 2: This uses entrepreneurship education as perquisite to the knowledge of GEW week while the target remained entrepreneurial mindset. The online and designed instruments contained ten questions each for evaluation of awareness and impact of GEW on the development of entrepreneurial mindset. Subsequently, the mean values for the research questions raised were calculated as

For each result obtained above 2.5 were rated as satisfactory and below as not satisfactory

Figure 2: Research Framework

FINDINGS AND DISCUSSION

The responses of the respondents were tabulated and discussed accordingly. These give an account of awareness (knowledge) and impact (entrepreneurial behaviour) of GEW programme on the students of Kwara State Polytechnic, Ilorin. The results indicated on the Table 1 and 2 are in line with the purpose for which the research was conducted.

Table 1: Responses on Awareness of GEW Programme

Survey 2024

From the ten items designed for the respondents, seven were satisfactory while the remaining three were not satisfactory. This implies that, all things being equal, 70 % of the respondents agreed on that they were aware of the existence of GEW particularly as the final year students of the Polytechnic. Basically, students were not properly informed of the objectives for which entrepreneurship centre was established. Similarly, the result indicated that GEW programme and its schedule of occurrence were not properly understood by the students. Information on what, when, who and where GEW takes place is not adequately disseminated by the tutors and lecturers of entrepreneurship education.

Table 2: Responses on the Impact of GEW Programme

Survey 2024

To ascertain the level of impact on students’ entrepreneurial mindset development, ten research questions were raised. The first question which was tagged “how many times have you attend GEW programme” had a mean value of 3.50 which suggests that most of the final students did attend the GEW programme. However, in most of their opinion, the programme schedule was not flexible (x = 2.27). The evaluation to be carried out, to understanding that the purpose for which the GEW was organized, particularly on the part of the organizer, was not satisfactory. Similarly, there was unsatisfactory remark on the duration of the programme as evidenced by mean value of 2.22. Interestingly, many students had mind changed toward becoming an entrepreneurs. It was also realized that many were still willing to attend the GEW and encouraged friends likewise. Thus 60 % satisfactory remark is an indication that many would have developed entrepreneurial mindset.

Test of Hypothesis

The total number of questions raised = 10

Number of satisfactory counts = 7

Number of not satisfactory = 3

Percentage level of awareness = 7/10 ×100 % =70%

The analysis of the mean values for all the items in the instrument for awareness shows that 7 out of 10 were quite informed of the GEW. Thus, we rejected the H₁₁ and accepted H₁₀.

Similarly, for the impact of GEW programme, we have:

The total number of questions raised = 10

Number of satisfactory counts = 6

Number of not satisfactory = 4

Percentage level of impact = 6/10 ×100 % =60 %

From the foregoing, we rejected H₂₁ and accepted H₂₀ which states that GEW programme has positive impact on student’s entrepreneurial mindset development

CONCLUSION

The findings on the importance of GEW on student’s entrepreneurial mindset development were accomplished via twenty research questions raised, each ten tagged as “awareness” and “impact” of GEW. It was realized that many (precisely, 70 % satisfactory recorded) of the students are quite aware of the existence and organization of GEW programme by the Entrepreneurship Development Centre and generally, 60 % of the responses showed positive impact of GEW on the entrepreneurial mindset development. Thus, GEW should be celebrated annually to increase development of entrepreneurial mindset in students.

RECOMMENDATIONS

The GEW programme and indeed its organization had become part of the objectives of Entrepreneurship Development Centre worth fulfilling. However, this paper seeks to provide the following recommendations for the enhancement of the programme and its implementation without jeopardizing the core purpose for which the Centre was established:

1. Adequate sensitization about GEW programme should be made via orientation programmes, student union government, departmental forum meetings, associations and many other social gatherings within and outside the Polytechnic.
2. Lecturers and Facilitators of entrepreneurship education should remain steadfast on the reiteration of the GEW (essence and the needs).
3. The Polytechnic authority should continue with the usual support to the Centre for the fulfillment of the GEW and its general objectives.
4. The objective of the GEW should be well defined during the orientation, lecturing periods and practical classes organized by the Centre.
5. The Centre should design a platform, possibly online, to obtain the feedback from the students before, during and after the GEW programmes to ascertain student’s readiness for the programme and lessons acquired in due course.
6. As part of the mandates, the EDC should clearly redefine its vision, mission, core objectives and general objectives to the students at all possible gatherings to enhance information on GEW, skill acquisition and collaboration assistance available at the Centre.
7. Students should be kept informed on the need to embrace entrepreneurship as vital course that combat unemployment and brings about job satisfaction

REFERENCES

1. Bello, A., Saka, T. A., and Obafemi, A. (2021). The Efficacy of Entrepreneurship in Development Entrepreneurial Traits on Students. International Conference of Offa Polytechnic.
2. Fayolle, A., & Gailly, B. (2004) .Using the Theory of Planned Behaviour to assess Entrepreneurship Teaching Program: A First Experimentation. Paper presented at 14th Annual International Entrepreneurship Conference, University of Napoli Federicoii, Italy.
3. McGrath, R.G. and MacMillam, I. (2000). The Entrepreneurial Mindset. Harvard Business School Press
4. Shane, S. and Venkataraman, S. (2000). The Promise of Entrepreneurship as a Field of Research. Academy of Management Review, 25(1), 217-226