Social entrepreneurial intention: educating, experiencing and believing
基于巴西220名参与Enactus项目的大学生调查数据，发现体验式项目通过培养同理心和自我效能感，提升社会机会识别能力，进而增强社会创业意向，对高校教育者和政策制定者有参考价值。
With current social, environmental and economic challenges, there is an increasing need to encourage more sustainable business models, which include social entrepreneurship, in the education of our future leaders and entrepreneurs. This has resulted in significant research and practice towards improving students’ social entrepreneurial intention with higher education programmes. We used survey data collected from 220 university students in Brazil. These students participated in the Enactus programme, which exposed them to social entrepreneurial experience and entrepreneurial education. Our findings highlight the importance of experience-based programmes in forming empathy, essential to self-efficacy development, and in improving the ability to identify social opportunities, which together are indispensable for developing social entrepreneurial intentions. This paper contributes to social entrepreneurship education literature by emphasising the need to integrate experience-based opportunities into higher education programmes. It confirms that social entrepreneurial actions are contextually driven and should be addressed and developed closer to the needs. This results in empathic individuals who can see opportunities others do not see and become social entrepreneurs. In regard to public policy support and the encouragement of social entrepreneurship models, our findings emphasise the need to help universities and encourage experiential programmes to develop students. In this way, universities which develop social entrepreneurship education programmes have the opportunity to act as agents of change, developing human capital to address the social/environmental challenges and create a fairer society.