Partly due to the current crisis and its high unemployment rates, the labor market increasingly requires multidisciplinary engineers with additional skills to their own. Engineering education therefore faces new challenges and these include equipping engineers with greater entrepreneurship. Although entrepreneurship education has consequently been integrated into the new engineering degrees, is this enough to boost entrepreneurship among engineers and on what does their level of entrepreneurship depend? This research work aims to analyze the impact of entrepreneurial motivations on entrepreneurial intentions among future engineers and identify the role than entrepreneurship education plays in the development of the engineers’ entrepreneurship. The results indicate that the need for independence is the key factor in the entrepreneurial intent of future engineers and confirm the positive contribution that entrepreneurship education has on their entrepreneurial intentions. Finally, recommendations are offered which could help the various agents involved increase the effectiveness of actions aimed at promoting firm creation in this area

One effect of the economic crisis on the business world has been the drastic reduction in staff and this in turn highlights the need for self-employment and the creation of new companies to establish a solid industrial fabric to support the creation of wealth, employment and welfare. In this context, the aim of this research is to confirm a theoretical model based on Expectancy Theory to explain self-employment in terms of an individual’s motivation and ability to start a business. Because of the lack of additional information about entrepreneurial motivation, we conducted a field investigation of Spanish self-employed workers who had established a manufacturing company during the last three years. The results confirm the supposition that expectancy, instrumentality and valence enhance entrepreneurial motivation. This study concludes that businesses are created not only by those with the ability and aptitude to do so, but also by those with the motivation.

Organisations undertake profound changes to fit in a rapidly evolving digital setting. However, although the IT capabilities of the organisational members play a critical role in this, the mechanism driving IT capabilities towards enhanced firm performance is not fully understood. A theoretical model to analyse the role of digital orientation and digital transformation in this relationship is introduced and tested on a set of 246 firms through the Partial Least Squares-Structural Equation Modeling method (PLS-SEM). This research contributes to the literature by introducing the social aspect to the study of technology management, delving also into the antecedents of digital transformation. Results confirm a positive effect of IT capabilities on firm performance through the development of a digital orientation and the digital transformation of the organisation.

Newly created enterprises increase the dynamism of economies and generate employment. Thus, they are the object of growing research interest. Forming a new company represents a decision based on both personal and subjective motives, as well as on the environment. But regardless of the origin, a founder's motivation represents a commitment to a project or business idea, and thus dictates the future success of the enterprise. This article investigates the motivational profiles of entrepreneurs, and why they choose to create new industrial enterprises. To detail this profile, we present the results of an empirical study of 101 entrepreneurs who have founded companies. The results offer significant conclusions for both academics and practitioners. Firstly, making money or being one's own boss does not appear to be sufficient reasons to create a new venture. Secondly, the motivation content of entrepreneurs influences their decision to start a business. From these conclusions, some relevant guidelines are suggested