Pilar García stressed UJI’s work to promote creativity, innovation capacity and entrepreneurship between students and teachers, and that the UJI is one of the top five most active Spanish public universities in this line. Justo Vellón insisted on the importance of continuing to work with entrepreneurs in the province of Castellón and on creating new laws that help SMEs in their day-to-day activities. David Cabedo stressed the role played by espaitec in promoting innovative and technology-based entrepreneurship by reinforcing the importance of collaboration between all provincial agents to achieve sustainable projects that can grow.
The population’s values, attitudes and entrepreneurial hopes
GEM data indicated that 24.2% of the population observed business opportunities for 6 months. This percentage has increased by 6.8 points since the 2013 figure, which confirms a certain recovery trend for this perception since 2012, when the lowest figure recorded since 2004 was obtained.
As in 2013, data on self-acknowledging entrepreneurial skills indicated that around 47% of individuals felt they had the necessary skills to set up a business project. This figure has remained more or less stable for all the analysed years. As for fearing failure that holds back the entrepreneurial process, 53.2% of the population did not consider it such a strong impediment to start a business project.
On the negative side, the population who intended to set up in the next 3 years lowered considerably by dropping from 9.8% of the population in 2013 to 5.4% in 2014. Moreover, only 2.4% of the population acted as a formal investor in 2014, as opposed to 4.0% who did so in 2013.
Entrepreneurial activity and business dynamics
In 2014, 4% of the adult population in the Valencian community was involved in entrepreneurial activities that had been set up in the last 42 months. This was 1.5 points lower than in 2013 and was the second lowest value since 2010. A further 5.4% of the population could be classified as a potential entrepreneur group (4.4 points lower than in 2013), and 5.1% (2.5 lower than in 2013) was the figure obtained for the group of consolidated business people. The percentage of this population which had had to cease their business activity was estimated at 1.4%. Entrepreneurial performances induced mainly by exploiting a business opportunity (66.8% of cases) still represented the majority, while around 31.1% of entrepreneurs acknowledged that the main reason for their implication in setting up a business initiative was that they had to. These are slightly figures higher for entrepreneurial activity opportunities than they were for 2013.
The socio-economic profile of entrepreneur beginners
When we examined the mean profile characteristics of the people involved in activities that had been on the market less than 42 months (TEA), the 2014 data showed similar characteristics to those found for 2012 and 2013: a male in 58.3% of cases, mean age of 41 years, university studies in 39.6% of cases and compulsory education in 37.5% cases.
Approximately two thirds of those involved in the preliminary stages of setting up a business (66.7%) had some kind of entrepreneurial training, and of those with short-term entrepreneurial intentions, 36.5% had received some form of specific training.
Characteristics of entrepreneurial activities
As in former editions, of all the recently registered set up entrepreneurial activities, 73.1% of them were in the services sector (54.8% in the consumer sector and 18.3% as services to companies), and the distribution of entrepreneurial initiatives per activity sector was still practically the same.
Regarding the number of owners of initiatives on the market less than 42 months, half (49.8%) the entrepreneurs had decided to approach it individually, and around 20% reported that their initiative had been set up with three partners or more.
The financing needs of recently set up activities (less than 3 months on the market) were moderate, around 6,000 euros, although some stated that their financing requirements were high. Most had resorted to own savings (50%), or those of their family (20%) or friends and people they knew (7%), which left 23% of cases that resorted to banks or credit institutions.
