Undergraduates, as the driving force for mass entrepreneurship and innovation, are attached great importance by the Chinese government in their entrepreneurship. For all undergraduates, it is crucial to generate new venture ideas before starting their own business. Davidson (2015) argued that a new venture idea is an “imagined future venture”, which represents what an individual wants to create, rather than the gradually materializing entrepreneurship itself [1]. In other words, new venture ideas are cognitive, and individuals can envision a new venture idea whether to take action or not. Perhaps over time, the idea will be developed and refined into an opportunity to be utilized, or it may not. If an idea is not developed, it will never become a formal opportunity [2]. Due to the difficulty in verifying the commercial value of entrepreneurial opportunity during undergraduates’ brief academic period, it is more important and practical to focus on new venture idea. Up to date, how a new venture idea develops is still underexplored.
Entrepreneurial curiosity and new venture idea
As a key factor for successful entrepreneurship, curiosity is gradually being valued in entrepreneurship research [3]. Entrepreneurial curiosity is an independent type of curiosity that only points to the field of entrepreneurship [4], which can be understood as an internal desire for entrepreneurial information. Based on a cognitive perspective, entrepreneurial curiosity specifically refers to epistemic curiosity, which was defined as an emotional-motivational state of individuals [5]. According to classification of epistemic curiosity [6], entrepreneurial curiosity in this study is also divided into two types. I-type entrepreneurial curiosity refers to an individual’s thirst for entrepreneurial knowledge derived from interests that means “wanting to know”, which is often accompanied by a sense of pleasure after making new discoveries or acquiring new knowledge. D-type entrepreneurial curiosity originates from the pursuit of cognitive coherence in the brain. When perceived uncertainty and novelty disrupt the original cognitive coherence in the brain, individuals get an uncomfortable sense of deprivation, which is the “need to know”. Furthermore, it stimulates individuals’ D-type curiosity to explore in order to remove the sense of deprivation [7]. Von Stumm et al. (2011) also found that D-type curiosity is an important antecedent for the formation of negative emotions such as anger, worry, and anxiety before deprivation is eliminated [8]. The different feelings accompanied with two types can be explained by the optimal-level model and the driven theory of curiosity, respectively [9].
Optimal-level theorists assumed that curiosity induction is beneficial, involving feelings of interest rather than uncertainty [10, 11, 12, 13], which pointed to I-type curiosity. As a positive emotion, it closely related to interest with the desire to investigate, learn, and participate in new experiences [14], which contributes to generate new ideas. Positive emotions have been discovered and confirmed to be beneficial for stimulating creativity, such as affecting the organization of cognitive materials, increasing the tendency to combine materials in new ways, and finding correlations between different stimuli [15, 16, 17]. The broaden-and-build theory of positive emotions hypothesized that positive emotions broaden the scope of attention and thought-action repertoires. Specifically, positive emotions can extend people’s thinking first, “opening up our hearts and minds, making us more receptive and creative”, which is the expansion function [18]. Moreover, positive emotions can also “construct the best future”, “positive emotions enable us to discover and construct new skills, relationships, knowledge, and production methods”, which is the construction function [18]. Gasper and Clore (2002) confirmed that compared to positive emotions that make people pay more attention to the forest, negative emotions make people “see the trees but not the forest” [19]. Curiosity and other positive emotions, such as interest and wonder, play an important role in the pursuit of scientific ideas [20].
Contrary to the optimal-level account, driven theorists equated curiosity with relatively unpleasant “uncertain experiences”, and reducing it is beneficial [21, 22], which referred to D-type curiosity. Research has found that, when faced with uncertainty, individuals with curiosity often reveal a strong willingness to learn and actively engage in learning, which helps them get more heterogeneous information and knowledge [23]. They often invest a lot of time in activities they focused, collecting and processing information deeply, and are more likely to persist until they achieve their goals [24]. Curiosity also leads individuals to think about tasks from new perspectives, transforming threats brought by uncertainty into challenges, which is greatly beneficial for creative thinking [25], then the transition of thinking aroused by curiosity stimulates their creative ideas [26]. Moreover, by triggering information searching, curiosity helps individuals identify and define problems that need to be addressed, which are critical to form creative ideas [27].
Promotion focus as a mediator
Another factor that affects new venture idea is promotion focus. The concept of promotion focus originates from the regulatory focus theory, which proposed that individuals gradually develop two distinct and relatively stable tendencies of self-regulation focus during their growth, including promotion focus and prevention focus [28]. Individuals with promotion focus are willing to innovate, enjoy taking risks, try and explore new things [29]. They tend to maintain aggressive motivation and pay more attention to positive results, and then adopt a relatively adventurous strategy [30]. Although the tendency of self-regulation focus is relatively stable, it may also be influenced by the current situation or task, thus show a temporary motivational inclination [31].
Compared to individuals with prevention focus, individuals with promotion focus are more likely to seek opportunities actively and extensively, then generate more hypotheses about potential opportunities [32, 33]. They have strong achievement motivation which can promote the formation of alertness and then encourage them to seek new ideas constantly [34]. Promotion focus can also compensate for the low level of creative self-efficacy and entrepreneurial self-efficacy of entrepreneurs [35], activating positive emotional arousal and enhancing individual cognitive flexibility which are beneficial for the development of creativity [36, 37]. Based on the regulatory focus theory, Brockner et al. (2004) explained the entrepreneurial process and found that strengthening the tendency to promotion focus can help generate potentially successful ideas [38].
Moreover, as a behavioral approach, promotion focus occurs after curiosity triggers behavioral tendency. Curiosity can determine attention allocation and task priority, thus forming an active learning and exploration mechanism [39], which helps individuals maintain positive exploratory behavior by enhancing attention [40]. As mentioned above, individuals with I-type curiosity or D-type curiosity are different in reactions to novelty, but both of which serve to promote exploration, which are consistent with the aggressive motivation of promotion focus. Individuals with I-type curiosity often show positive emotions during exploratory learning, such as joyful, and strengthen their intrinsic motivation [41]. Because positive emotions convey a comfortable psychological state, in which individuals are often more easily inspired and more willing to explore new things [42]. As one of the most representative positive emotions, interest stimulates individuals’ cognitive and behavioral tendency to explore, continuously acquiring knowledge and experience that are profit to achieve goals [43]. For D-type curiosity, it can be explained by the information-gap theory of curiosity, which suggests that curiosity comes into being when individuals realize that there is an information gap in their knowledge and understanding. Due to internal pressure, they will explore new information to fill it [44]. That’s to say, the sense of deprivation triggered by D-type curiosity motivates and guides individuals to search for information in order to reduce uncertainty and eliminate cognitive gaps [7]. Besides, individuals with promotion focus are more concerned about positive results, so is individuals with curiosity. Curiosity is a basic motivational tendency related to approaching, which is associated with judgment of positive outcome and thus promotes risk seeking [45]. In summary, I-type curiosity correlates with intrinsic motivation, while D-type curiosity correlates with both intrinsic and extrinsic motivation, which stimulates individuals’ uncertainty avoidance, specific exploration, information search, and goal-oriented learning [46]. So individuals with I-type curiosity always adopt approaches to learning that are funny, carefree and optimistic, while individuals with D-type curiosity are greater thoughtful and more cautious in knowledge-search [47].
Entrepreneurial education as a moderator
In addition, to support undergraduates’ entrepreneurial activities, the Chinese government has issued a series of policies to carry out entrepreneurial education in universities. It includes providing a series of entrepreneurial courses, activities, and support for undergraduates, as well as creating a good entrepreneurial atmosphere, which is to train undergraduates with certain entrepreneurial ability, such as observational ability, entrepreneurial awareness, entrepreneurial thinking, and entrepreneurial skills required for entrepreneurship [48]. Researchers have found that entrepreneurial education can effectively strengthen undergraduates’ understanding of entrepreneurial knowledge and skills, thereby promoting the formation of new venture idea. The knowledge acquired through education is conducive to construct new connections and combinations that can be technically realized [49], which can be explained by “the essence of knowledge is coding”. It’s also helpful for individuals to understand data and forms that are novel, newly generated, and inconsistently patterned, guiding them to focus on the science, technology, and principle that contribute to produce creative ideas [50]. Canavati et al. (2021) divided human capital into knowledge acquired through education and knowledge acquired through experience, which showed that individuals with higher levels of each type of knowledge perform better at generating new venture ideas than those with lower levels, and when individuals have higher levels of both types of knowledge, they do even better [51].
As discussed above, individuals with promotion focus are more likely to generate new venture idea through positive search. Nevertheless, entrepreneurial education makes students are more willing to take a risk [52], and improves students’ entrepreneurial mind, such as innovation, motivation and risk-taking [53]. For undergraduates, the stronger the willingness to take risk, the higher the initiative in entrepreneurial information search. In addition, entrepreneurial education is closely related to individuals’ ability to identify entrepreneurial opportunity [54], high-level entrepreneurial education can elevate the ability to identify entrepreneurial opportunity, which contains information-search and risk-perception capabilities during the “window of opportunity” period [55]. In other words, the higher-level entrepreneurial education undergraduates gained, the greater entrepreneurial information-search capability they are. As such, with the special situation in China, this study will take entrepreneurial education as an important factor to explore the boundary conditions under which two types of entrepreneurial curiosity affects new venture idea.
The present study
This study aims to explore the impact mechanism of two types of entrepreneurial curiosity on undergraduates’ new venture idea. From the above literature research, it can be seen that two types of entrepreneurial curiosity, promotion focus and new venture idea are highly correlated. Moreover, entrepreneurial education can further promote entrepreneurial exploration. Based on prior empirical findings, we created the theoretical model (showed in Fig. 1), and hypothesized as followings:
H1 Each type of entrepreneurial curiosity would positively predict undergraduates’ new venture idea respectively.
H2 Promotion focus plays a mediating role in the relationship between two types of entrepreneurial curiosity and new venture idea.
H3 Entrepreneurial education moderates the mediation effect of promotion focus on the relationship between two types of entrepreneurial curiosity and new venture idea.