Entrepreneurship and innovation: A comparative analysis of social representations among nursing students

Promoting entrepreneurship and innovation among nursing students requires understanding how these concepts are constructed as social representations and their specificity. To describe and compare the content and structure of the social representations of entrepreneurship and innovation among Brazilian nursing students from three regions and to identify their specificity and overlap. Grounded in the structural approach to Social Representations Theory, this study included 582 undergraduate nursing students from four Brazilian public universities. We collected data using a free word association task prompted by the inducing terms “entrepreneurship” and “innovation” and analyzed using prototypical and similarity analyses. The social representation of entrepreneurship is anchored in personal attributes and can be summarized as follows: (a) the central core focuses on the individual, expressed through personal attributes viewed as essential to entrepreneurship; (b) entrepreneurship involves management tools; and (c) it emphasizes business development. The social representation of innovation, in turn, centers on novelty and the future and is organized as follows: (a) it is oriented toward novelty and future goals, focusing on the creation of products or technologies with sustainability in mind; (b) certain personal attributes are required to develop innovation processes; and (c) it is underpinned by knowledge and scientific research. We identified two distinct objects structured at the cognitive and psychosocial levels: entrepreneurship centers on perceptions of the entrepreneurial actor, whereas innovation concerns the goals of the creation process. • The central elements of social representations provide support for professional activity. • These social representations influence the formation of the professional identity nursing. • These social representations influence the interactions in healthcare environments and their professional practices. • This approach aligns with contemporary needs for culturally aligned care.