Students' Entrepreneurial Engagement and Student Entrepreneurship: Do Coding and Digital Skills Matter?

The literature presents various contributions regarding students' entrepreneurial intentions. However, only a few recent papers have delved into the realm of student entrepreneurship, encompassing both nascent entrepreneurs (i.e., students who are in the process of creating their own businesses) and active entrepreneurs (i.e., students who already own and are running their own businesses). Moreover, to the best of our knowledge, no previous studies have explored the association between individual skills, such as coding and digital skills, and students' entrepreneurial intentions and student entrepreneurship. This article aims at filling these gaps by quantitatively testing if coding and digital skills are significant factors for students' entrepreneurial engagement and student entrepreneurship. Throughout this article, the term "students' entrepreneurial engagement" encompasses both students' entrepreneurial intentions and student entrepreneurship. Drawing on perspectives from human capital and social capital theories, we hypothesized that these individual skills could have a statistically significant positive impact on students' entrepreneurial engagement and student entrepreneurship. To assess coding and digital skills, we categorized them into knowledge and experience, as suggested by the human capital theory. Through several regression analyses on 2608 Italian university students, we validated our hypotheses. These findings contribute both theoretically and practically to the entrepreneurship literature.