Beyond the business plan: A psychological framework for cultivating innovative and entrepreneurial competence in higher education

This research takes entrepreneurship education beyond venture checklists and investigates how higher education links with innovative and entrepreneurial competence. We test a psychological model according to which growth mindset is positively related to innovative and entrepreneurial competence indirectly through entrepreneurial self-efficacy, where the perceived university support of entrepreneurship enhances the entrepreneurial self-efficacy-competence relationship. The survey was cross-sectional and conducted in four non-megacity Chinese ecosystems: Hangzhou, Nanjing, Wuhan and Xi'an to sample the difference in industrial foundation and university facilities. A preliminary power analysis suggested a target of about 450; given the anticipated loss of response, 630 questionnaires were mailed, 513 of them returned, and 472 of them passed quality preregistered data-quality checks. Innovative and entrepreneurial competence was represented as a hierarchical construct and the model was estimated in SmartPLS (v4) in a two-stage form with 5000 bootstraps. The values of reliability, convergent and discriminant validity, multicollinearity, and common-method diagnostics were at accepted levels. Growth mindset was positively correlated with innovative and entrepreneurial competence (β = 0.18, p < .001) and entrepreneurial self-efficacy (β = 0.50, p < .001); and entrepreneurial self-efficacy was positively correlated with innovative and entrepreneurial competence (β = 0.52, p < .001). Growth mindset partially mediated this relationship with competence, with the indirect effect of growth mindset on competence through entrepreneurial self-efficacy being significant (β = 0.26, p < .001). Additionally, the relationship between entrepreneurial self-efficacy and perceived University support was also significant (β = 0.11, p = .003), suggesting that the influence of entrepreneurial self-efficacy on the relationship with competence was strengthened by University support. The model explained 25% of the variance in entrepreneurial self-efficacy and 49% of the variance in innovative and entrepreneurial competence.