Give Me What I Want: Identifying the Support Needs of College Student Entrepreneurs

To determine how the success rate of college students’ entrepreneurship can be improved, we sought to identify the support needs of undergraduate entrepreneurs and evaluate the importance of different support needs using data from face-to-face interviews with 138 Chinese college student entrepreneurs. Further, we explored the distribution tendencies of the support needs at different entrepreneurial stages. We found that the support needs of college student entrepreneurs can be divided into 20 types, which can be categorized into core support needs (six types), secondary support needs (six types), and marginal support needs (eight types) in descending order of importance. A cross-stage analysis indicates that the support needs differ during the different entrepreneurial stages. While the needs during the entrepreneurial preparation stage and the startup stage have many similarities, those during the entrepreneurial failure stage are significantly different from those of the other three stages examined, showing heterogeneity. In addition, we identified psychological counseling as an important core support need in the failure stage and demonstrate its critical role in helping college students out of the shadow of entrepreneurial failure. This study expands the research on entrepreneurial support needs. Its findings provide valuable information to help colleges and governments develop more targeted and appropriate support for college entrepreneurs based on entrepreneurial stages to promote entrepreneurial success.