Entrepreneurial Intentions among Management Students: Determinants, Barriers, and Policy Implications

This study provides a comprehensive empirical investigation of entrepreneurial intentions among management students in India, grounded in the Theory of Planned Behaviour and enriched by domain-specific moderators and a detailed analysis of barriers. The findings confirm that attitude toward entrepreneurship, perceived behavioural control, and subjective norms are significant and robust predictors of EI, with attitude emerging as the dominant force. Entrepreneurship education quality and prior entrepreneurial exposure meaningfully amplify these intentions, underscoring the critical importance of how—and not merely whether—entrepreneurship is taught in management programmes. The barrier analysis exposes a complex interplay of psychological, socio-cultural, and structural factors that suppress entrepreneurial intentions even among students with positive attitudes and high self-efficacy. Addressing these barriers requires coordinated action from management institutions, government bodies, and the corporate sector. Future research should adopt longitudinal designs to track whether EI translates into actual entrepreneurial behaviour, and should explore sector-specific and technology-domain-specific EI patterns, given India's rapidly evolving digital economy landscape. Gender-disaggregated analyses and cross-country comparative studies would further enrich the emerging body of knowledge on entrepreneurship in developing economy contexts.

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