Purpose – Universities provide entrepreneurship-specific education (ESE) to equip students with the entrepreneurial alertness and risk-taking assets required to pursue entrepreneurial careers. Building upon insights from a dynamic view of human capital, the paper explores the linkage between ESE investment, alertness, and risk-taking asset accumulation, and the outcome relating to the intention “to become an entrepreneur” (henceforth termed an “entrepreneurial mindset”). Design/methodology/approach – Survey information from 189 students from three universities in the Ukraine was hand collected. Hierarchical multiple ordinary least squares regression analysis and slope analysis were used to test presented hypotheses. Findings – ESE students reported higher intensity of entrepreneurial mindset. Further, ESE students who accumulated the connection entrepreneurial alertness asset reported higher intensity of entrepreneurial mindset. ESE students were more oriented to higher entrepreneurial mindset when they had accumulated more connection entrepreneurial alertness asset. ESE students who accumulated the risk-taking propensity asset reported lower intensity of entrepreneurial mindset. ESE students were more oriented to higher entrepreneurial mindset when they perceived less risk. Originality/value – The paper makes a novel contribution by considering whether ESE promotes different elements of entrepreneurial alertness and risk-taking assets. Building upon insights from a broader conceptualization of the entrepreneurial alertness asset (Tang et al., 2012), the paper conceptualized for the first time the linkage between three elements of entrepreneurial alertness and student entrepreneurial mindset. Further, the paper conceptualized linkage between two elements of risk-taking relating to risk-taking perception asset and risk-taking propensity asset, and higher intensity of entrepreneurial mindset. Assets relating to entrepreneurial alertness and risk-taking perception need to be honed in transition economy contexts associated with political structures that did not promote individual risk-taking.
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