Metaphors of Entrepreneurship among Polish Students: Preliminary Research Findings

Objective: In Poland entrepreneurship is often perceived as an extremely risky process and entrepreneurs are often portrayed in a negative light. The research goals of our exploratory study is to identify the entrepreneurship metaphors among Polish management students. Research Design & Methods: Authors decided to run both qualitative and quantitative research. In the first part we addressed 124 management students on three levels BA, MA and MBA. The respondents were asked to give their metaphorical expressions on paper. The next step was to prepare a questionnaire based on 7 point Likert scale. This questionnaire was run among BA management student group composed of 82 students. Findings: Our results suggest that there are several major entrepreneurial narratives evident among all three groups including creativity and innovation, competition, war, journey, risk, adventure and exploitation. Implications & Recommendations: The empirical findings serve as a starting point for further in-depth research on entrepreneurship metaphors. It is recommended that in order to gain a complete picture of the issues underlying the results, both qualitative and quantitative research on a bigger sample should be undertaken. Contribution & Value Added: The originality of this work lies in studying some aspects of entrepreneurship metaphors among non-entrepreneurs in Poland. With regards to the research limitation, it must be highlighted that it was a pilot study and the results cannot be generalized.