Entrepreneurship-Educated Black Entrepreneurs and Their Impacts Provided to Black Communities

Rogers, Scorpio

Etd

Entrepreneurship-Educated Black Entrepreneurs and Their Impacts Provided to Black Communities

Public Deposited

Entrepreneurship has emerged as an essential topic in education. Entrepreneurship education has become a highly researched topic, yet the results of that education have not been fully explored. Much of the research focuses on undergraduate students, but the intrinsic value of the learning can ideally only be ascertained post-learning and academic careers. Few studies look explicitly at Black students, nor Black graduates and Black communities, yet entrepreneurship is touted as an integral component of economic development for Black people and Black communities. There is an insufficiency of research codifying entrepreneurial impact in Black communities in general and a scarcity of literature that specifically reviews Black alums who studied entrepreneurship or their entrepreneurial impact on Black communities. This research will assist in addressing this gap by exploring the entrepreneurial impact Black entrepreneurship-educated entrepreneurs provide Black communities in comparison to the entrepreneurial impact provided by Black entrepreneurs without a formal entrepreneurship or business education, who will be referred to as natural entrepreneurs. Education provides individuals with enhanced knowledge and skill. Human capital theory informs that people with greater skill levels, knowledge, and other competencies can achieve higher performance outcomes than those without the same. Based on the tenets of human capital theory, individuals with education specifically focused on entrepreneurship should realize superior entrepreneurial success than those without similar subject matter knowledge if they choose to pursue new venture creation. Entrepreneurial orientation (EO) is a firm-level construct associated with entrepreneurial action and high company performance. Individual entrepreneurial orientation (IEO) is a person-level construct appropriate for measuring and assessing participants' performance. This research examined individuals with entrepreneurship education and those without, and IEO functioned as a covariate to explore the performance of individuals across each group. Business performance and social impact are examined, as measured through gross profits, employee and entrepreneur wages, employment, employment length and mentorship. The analysis illuminates the efficacy of entrepreneurship education for Black people. The analysis informs that there are some areas that entrepreneurship education provides benefits; specifically, it enhances community social impact. However, currently, it is not a transcendent factor in creating entrepreneurs with superior performance.

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