Learning entrepreneurship in higher education tourism: Proposal of a conceptual model for evaluating the entrepreneurial capacity of students

Entrepreneurship is crucial to the economic and social growt of any place. The development of entrepreneurial attitudes and behaviours should be a priority for everyone to develop the ability to generate employment, income, and foreign exchange and satisfy the needs of specific niche markets. Entrepreneurship helps to obtain more action flexibility, natural availability for innovations and control of risk, training, and qualification of labour, constant activation of the local economy, and the reduction of regional asymmetries. This is intended to present an article that proposes a model of an instrument for evaluating the entrepreneurial capacity of students in the higher education area of tourism in Portugal. It is underpinned by a deep exploratory study, that was carried out through PhD research during the past decade, about this reality that is little or poorly studied. A non-experimental model has supported the methodology once no new situations were constructed.