Entrepreneurship serves as a great source of global growth and finding opportunities for enhancing entrepreneurial activities are in policy agendas of many governments. In addition, entrepreneurship can serve as an integration tool for ethnic minorities. The idea of current research is novel – empirically investigate entrepreneurship patriotism, satisfaction with entrepreneurship environment, and entrepreneurship intention on the example of the minority group of Russian-speakers taking into account the perception of external context.

The Environment-Readiness Entrepreneurship Intention questionnaire was developed and survey implemented in 2017 by the means of self-reported online questionnaire. The research results indicate that there are significant differences in how entrepreneurship patriotism is evaluated by Russian-speaking minority and Estonians showing that minority group evaluated it significantly lower than representatives of the titular population. Herein the ethnic minority entrepreneurship patriotism hypotheses could be derived for further empirical investigations: higher involvement and integration to entrepreneurship activities of minorities will lead to higher loyalty and attachment to the country of residence.

The results also indicate that Russian-speakers have higher intention to start up, but lower satisfaction with entrepreneurship environment. Herein, the minorities entrepreneurship obstruction hypotheses could be proposed according to which minorities perceive realistic and imaginary barriers to start up, but they have high start-up intention. The topic is highly relevant, because of global migration and benefits that could be gained from minorities entrepreneurship.

SPEAKER

Elina Kallas is former Visiting Scholar at Harvard University, Davis Center for Russian and Eurasian Studies (USA), entrepreneurship lecturer in University of Tartu (Estonia) and founder of start-up. She has got PhD and MA in Economics and Business Administration from University of Tartu. 

She also worked for many years as a HR manager for manufacturing and IT companies. She has carried out many managerial trainings for private and public organizations.

Her current research area is about entrepreneurship patriotism, environment, intention and readiness to startup of Russian-speaking minority in FSU countries.

Elina is the author of the book on creativity (Creative Techniques. 99 ways to find ideas. 2015. Tartu: Ecoprint).