Universities: A Hotbed of Human Resources for New Firms?

Abstract

The article addresses the recruitment problem of new innovative business ventures. Therefore, we used data from a German student survey to investigate the prospective career paths of 1,587 German undergraduate students. More concretely, we analyzed the proportion, characteristics, and needs of students willing to start their own firm and those who prefer the alternative of being employed in an innovative start-up. As for the key results, we found that only a small share of the students wish to be employed in a new innovative firm. Nearly the same holds for those who strive to start up a firm. The two groups generally do not exhibit identical motivations of career choice, but there is a tendency that both are relatively more interested in entrepreneurship education. Moreover, only a small fraction of students who prefer an employment in an innovative start-up right after graduation could imagine starting their own business five years later, which is inconsistent with the “employer-as-a-role-model” argument. Several implications are presented.

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