Scientific evaluations showed that STEP has positive short- and long-term effects on students’ entrepreneurial behavior. STEP kick-starts the students’ entrepreneurial careers. More importantly, the studies demonstrated that the positive impact sustains over several years.
The evaluation studies also revealed mechanisms underlying the positive impact of STEP on business creation. STEP students develop a stronger entrepreneurial mind-set. This means that STEP enhances students’ intentions to start a business, the confidence in their entrepreneurial skills, their knowledge about how to start a business, and their action planning for starting a new business. The stronger entrepreneurial mind-set results in students identifying more business opportunities and performing more start-up activities to start a new business.
Evaluation studies also showed that STEP compensates for a lack of financial capital in the start-up process and leads to higher life satisfaction in the short- and long-run. Furthermore, STEP boosts and sustains students’ passion for entrepreneurship, which translates into higher business creation in the long-run. STEP thus impacts on a broad range of positive outcomes.
We use randomized controlled trials (RCT) to assess the impact of STEP. This means that our evaluation studies use the gold standard to assess the impact of interventions and comply with the highest scientific standards. A randomized controlled trial means that applicants are randomly selected into a training group and control group. This guarantees that the students in both groups are equivalent before the training and all differences after the training can be attributed to STEP. Furthermore, we conduct a pre-training measurement and several post-training measurements to assess the long-term impact of STEP over several years.