Digital Scholarship and Initiatives

Postulates that the BIA's financial assistance programs for Indian small business initiators may have had limited success partially due to an incompatibility between Indians' socio-cultural features and the entrepreneurial mindset. The authors' methodology was to test 284 undergraduate students at UNC-Pembroke. The group included Black, White, and Indian students. They were given both the Meyers-Briggs Type Indicator and a survey developed by the authors (exhibit 2) which measures entrepreneurial competencies. They found that with only two exceptions, the students were essentially equal in personality type distribution. They also discovered that “with an overall score of 5.12, Indian students have a significantly less-pronounced entrepreneurial focus that do White students (5.33), but are more focused than Black students (5.02)” (pp. 316-317). Surprisingly, the average entrepreneurship score of Indian students who currently had an idea for a business, versus Indian students who did not, declined. The authors offer suggestions for ways to help prepare Indian students as well as adults for entrepreneurship.