Abstract:
Entrepreneurship focuses on value creation involving commitment for time, effort,
money, and expectation of financial gain. The ability to recognize valuable business
prospects can be best measured through entrepreneurial alertness. The scholarly
knowledge is limited on how entrepreneurial alertness to business opportunities
triggers entrepreneurial intention, specifically for Charted Accountancy (CA)
students. Thus, the study addresses this gap and investigates the mediating effect of
entrepreneurial alertness on the causal relationship of prior knowledge &
experience on entrepreneurial intention. The study relied on the primary data of 408
students enrolled in the final level of the CA course from the Institute of Chartered
Accountants of India. The data were collected through a structured questionnaire
from the Delhi- National Capital Region (NCR) region of India, which was divided into
five clusters; therefore, a cluster sampling method was used to collect the data. The
structural equation modelling (SEM) method was applied to analyze the causal
relationship. The results empirically contributed to the literature by studying the
entrepreneurial intention of CA students as it is found that students’ knowledge and
experience strongly promote entrepreneurial intention even when entrepreneurial
alertness is added as a mediator. Moreover, entrepreneurial alertness partially
mediates the relationship of prior knowledge & experience and entrepreneurial
intention, ensuring that experienced professionals stand a better chance to have an
entrepreneurial career. The findings enhance the understanding of early-stage
entrepreneurship among specific discipline students.
