Cultural heritage embodied in traditional crafts is an integral part of any nation which reflects the culture and tradition of a particular region. Although the importance of handicraft has been widely recognized, the literature regarding preservation of traditional craft is scarce. The present paper aimed to explore and identify issues faced by traditional craftsmanship in developing countries and to address those issues in order to contribute to the sustainability of traditional craft heritage and ensure continuous transmission of craft skills and knowledge from generation to generation. Our study identified several key issues which poses substantial challenges to the preservation of traditional craft heritage in developing countries. In order to add empirical evidence, we examined the case of Pakistani handicraft industry that provided further understanding of highlighted issues which traditional craft heritage face. We have suggested some policies to promote, develop and preserve the traditional craft heritage. The significance of these policy suggestions is underlined with the case study of Pakistan.

Countries all over the world have been constantly exploring ways to rescue and protect intangible cultural heritage. While learning from other countries’ protection measures, the Chinese government is also constantly exploring ways that conform to China’s national conditions. As China’s first batch of intangible cultural heritage, lacquer art boasts a brilliant history, but many people are not familiar with it today. Moreover, in the process of modernization, the lacquer art transmission is declining day by day, and it is facing unprecedented major crises such as loss and division of history into periods. Hence, it is essential to verify and reveal the challenges and dilemmas in the lacquer art transmission, and come up with corresponding protection measures around these problems. First of all, this research, through literature review, “horizontally” explores the current research status and the universal problems of lacquer art transmission from the macro level. With a view to make up for the deficiencies of the existing research and further supplement the empirical evidence, the current research, with the transmission of “Chengdu lacquer art” as an example and through in-depth interviews, tracks and investigates the whole process of transmission of Chengdu Lacquer Art Training Institute, and “vertically” analyzes the survival situation of lacquer art transmission and the core problems affecting transmission behaviors from the micro level. In the final conclusion, the research comes up with corresponding countermeasures and suggestions for the identified key problems, which is of significant reference value for facilitating the live transmission and sustainable development of Chinese lacquer art.

Purpose: Entrepreneurial mentoring is widely regarded as an effective way to train novice entrepreneurs all over the world. However, the effectiveness of this approach and the determinants are not well understood under country-specific conditions. The purpose of this paper is to build a conceptual framework and use empirical analysis to explore the mentoring effect and its determinants, especially in the Chinese context.Design/methodology/approach: The paper uses data from 172 young entrepreneurs which had been supported by Youth Business China, Mianyang Office since 2008. The factor analysis and structural equation model have been applied to analyze the data to investigate the quantitative relationship and path of the mentoring effect of entrepreneurship with mentor’s factors, young entrepreneurs (mentees’s factors) and their interrelationship.Findings: The assessment scores of the entrepreneurship mentoring effect both in experience level and effectiveness level are relatively high, in the satisfactory range. The entrepreneurship mentoring effect, measured by the experience and the performance level, is determined by the coupling interaction of the mentor, the mentee and their interactive relationship. Among them, the mentor’s characteristic, the most important being his/her intention, has the biggest effect on the mentoring effect, significantly bigger than the mentor’s quality and skill. However, the mentor’s intention is not strong as expected. The interactive relationship between the mentor and the mentee also has a significant positive effect on entrepreneurial mentoring effect. The study also discovered the mentee factors have comparatively smaller effect on both the interactive relationship and the mentoring effect. Furthermore, it is found that the absorptive capability and learning intention of the young entrepreneur are relatively weak.Research limitations/implications: The construction of the index system of this research reflects the overall characteristics of the research objects and their static relationships. Therefore, the dynamic change of the mentoring relationship in different phases of the mentorship has not been taken into account. Also, self-serving bias may exist as this research measures the mentoring effect by the feedback on the mentor’s perception, using surveys completed by the mentees to measure both the mentee’s traits and the mentor’s qualities.Practical implications: This study provides guidance on how entrepreneurship could be promoted and on how educational institutions in China can make the mentoring process a positive and effective system in order to enhance the mentoring effect.Social implications: The empirical conclusions of the present study can be applied to other business incubator, entrepreneurship education institutions and for the improvement and promotion of entrepreneurial mentoring system in China.Originality/value: This paper probes into the mentoring system in the context of China from a new perspective and proposes an original conceptual model to study the entrepreneurship mentoring effect and its determinant.

This research established the youth entrepreneur satisfaction forming path and behavior intention model on the base of classical customer satisfaction index model, and took the 172 youth entrepreneurs as research object, who have been supported by China Youth Entrepreneurship Program (YBC) Mianyang Office since 2007. This study applies factor analysis and structural equation model to reveal the satisfaction formation mechanism which affects by the youth entrepreneurs expectations, guidance quality and guidance value perception, as well as the entrepreneurs’ subsequent behavior affected by the satisfaction. The results show that the mentor image has significantly positive effect on the youth entrepreneur expectation. The latter affects the satisfaction through the guidance quality perception to exert influence on the youth’s guidance value perception; youth entrepreneur expectation, guidance value perception and guidance quality perception have positive effects on satisfaction. As for the youth entrepreneurs’ behavioral intention, the youth’s satisfaction had significantly negative effects on their complaint and significantly positive effects on their loyalty. In addition, there were significantly negative effects between the youth entrepreneurs’ complaint and loyalty.