Entrepreneurship in hospitality is a major contributor to the growth and development of the economy of a country. A large proportion of the hospitality businesses are small owner-operated restaurants as compared to big chains of hotels and restaurants who also have their own market share. Considering the nature and challenges faced by the hospitality entrepreneurs becomes an important issue for the researchers. Hospitality education has evolved considering the needs and thoughts of the millennials. The millennials do understand the needs and desires of the contemporary guests and have come up with strategies to present their food products and enhance service standards to stay competitive in the market. The millennial guest has, with rapid advance of technology, an enormous amount of preferences to choose from. The aim is to investigate the motivational factors which leads the young graduates to opt for entrepreneurship and the role of hospitality education to guide the students towards it.
TopIntroduction
Tourism has an important role towards the economy of a country. Tourism leads to a combination of activities such as transport, food and beverage, accommodation, travel itinerary and event management for the tourist. The role of tourism and hospitality industry is quite high considering the role played by it in creating employment and as a global industry create significant profit to many related sector. It is being considered as an important and one of the fastest growing industry. To the world’s GDP the contribution of tourism is about 10 percent and is also a major source of foreign exchange earnings. The travel and tourism of India has been ranked 7th in the world for its contribution towards the GDP and has a great role of providing employment.
The entrepreneur is an individual who implements a new combination means of production which plays a crucial role through innovation thereby bringing in an agent of change. An innovating entrepreneur creates a dynamic equilibrium which generates suitable conditions for creating opportunities for employment, wealth creation, creation of new methods and technology. Entrepreneurship is built upon a collection of factors at individual, societal and at national level. Entrepreneurship is depended upon motivation of individual, individual experience, the role of socio- cultural traditions as well as educational opportunities to obtain necessary skills and adequate support from financial institutions. Studies have also concluded that innovation and entrepreneurship do flourish in an environment where the individuals are being empowered to explore new ideas.
Contributing towards national economy entrepreneur play a pivotal role as they help in creating employment, raise productivity, diversify and restructure the economy and reduce market inefficiency. (Echtner, 1995; Ray, 1988). An entrepreneur has a major role to play as it creates business and provide employment. Entrepreneurship is a major factor which provides us with the transition from the industrial to information society. With the increase in importance of entrepreneurship, has led to increase in number of entrepreneur and also fast growth of economy of the country. Education institutions also have a major role in providing entrepreneurship education by inculcating the knowledge and skill amongst its students (Balaban & Ozdemir, 2008; Yilamz & Sunbul, 2009; Solmaz, Aksoy, Sengul, & Sarusik, 2014).
Concept of Entrepreneurship
Entrepreneurship is defined as the motivation, desire and skill necessary for an individual to successfully manage a business (Sewell & Lorraine, 2010). The definition of entrepreneurship varies based upon the opportunity it is defined upon an emphasize upon the identification of entrepreneurship as innovation (Kobia & Sikalieh, 2010).
The literature on entrepreneurship specifies a certain number of common characteristics which are necessary or an individual to be an entrepreneur which are
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Need for achievement: As per the theory of need for achievement is what influences human actions which is mostly psychological driven (McClelland, 1961). The individuals with the high need towards achievement are more like an entrepreneur and have ambition to be successful.
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Locus of control: It is the perception of person’s ability towards specific events in an individual’s life. The locus of control is of two types internal (who believe that they can control their own life) and external who believe that incidents of life are caused by external sources (Lee & Tsang, 2001).
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Propensity to take risk: As per the classic economic theory the risk takers are entrepreneurs, due to their nature and job roles and have less probability to avoid risk. Entrepreneurs are said to take calculated risks (Kirby, 2004)
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Tolerance of ambiguity: It is a process which perceives the ambiguous situation to be neutral or even desirable, and intolerance of uncertainty to understand about the situation as threatening (Budner, 1962; Wagener, Gorgievski, & Rijsdijik, 2010)