Entrepreneurship education enhances entrepreneurial creativity: The mediating role of entrepreneurial inspiration

Entrepreneurship in higher education increasingly values entrepreneurial creativity as a key driver to enhance the innovation ability of university students. This study examines the relationship between entrepreneurship education and entrepreneurial creativity under a newly proposed framework that recognizes the role of inspiration in the creativity processes, and administered questionnaires among 1873 students across 36 universities in China, who have participated in entrepreneurship classes or maker space. Results reveal that effectiveness of entrepreneurship education has a strong positive correlation with entrepreneurial creativity, which is partially mediated by entrepreneurial inspiration through a bootstrap method test and a robustness test of the SEM model. This finding contributes to understanding the process of enhancing entrepreneurial creativity and promoting university creativity through entrepreneurship education.