Understanding the relationship of coding and digital knowledge and experiences on entrepreneurial intention in Italy

This rise of the digital economy in recent years has had a huge impact on the globe, especially in the last decade, with their new ways of doing business. Google, Facebook, Microsoft, and Apple have transformed not only the way people perform business but also how people engage with one another in everyday life. And although growing rapidly, academic research in entrepreneurial intention and digital entrepreneurship still left some important questions unanswered like the role of individual-level factors for instance digital and coding knowledge play in selecting entrepreneurship as a profession especially in students. This thesis provides an overall view of the factors that might impact students to become entrepreneurs in this digital world by studying previous research on entrepreneurial intentions, digital entrepreneurship, and the academic entrepreneurship ecosystem. In addition to the human capital and social capital theories that explain the importance of knowledge, experience, social structures, and relationships in a digital context. This thesis, in partnership with the Social Innovation Monitor (SIM), intends to explore the attitudes and intentions of Italian students toward entrepreneurship, with an emphasis on the role of coding and digital knowledge. by basing the quantitative analysis on a unique data set from more than 2000 Italian students who answered the survey. The dataset for the analysis came from a survey conducted by Digital 360 Group in partnership with the Enel Foundation on the digital and entrepreneurial abilities of Italian university students. Taking into account all the theories, especially the Human Capital Theory we argued that coding knowledge and experience have a positive impact on entrepreneurial intention. Furthermore, from the perspective of the Social Capital theory we would reasonably argue that the digital tools strengthen the social capital and consequently knowledge and experience of digital tools have a positive influence on students’ entrepreneurial intentions. In the end, after performing the regression analyses and robustness analyses, we observed that coding knowledge and experience, as well as digital knowledge and experience, have a statistically significant and positive impact on entrepreneurial intention.