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

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.