In a nutshell
Students who feel more financially capable also feel more entrepreneurial, suggesting that the issue may not be a lack of willingness to take risks, but a lack of understanding of what those risks actually are.
Entrepreneurship education has a bit of a fixation with risk. We encourage students to embrace it, tolerate it, even seek it out. “Take more risks” has become one of those phrases that sounds motivational but starts to unravel the moment you ask what it actually means in practice.
This study offers a slightly different take. Instead of focusing on whether students are willing to take risks, it asks the question: what if the real issue is that many students don’t fully understand them?
The authors look at something called digital financial literacy, which is essentially a student’s ability to make sense of money in a modern, digital context. Not just basic budgeting, but understanding financial tools, evaluating opportunities, and navigating uncertainty in environments shaped by platforms, data, and rapid change. It’s the kind of competence that sits in the background of many entrepreneurial decisions, but is rarely treated as a core part of entrepreneurship education itself.
Using survey data from over 1,200 university students, the study finds that students who report higher levels of digital financial literacy also report a greater capacity to deal with risk. They are better at assessing uncertain situations, more comfortable making decisions under ambiguity, and more likely to interpret risk as something manageable rather than something to avoid. That shift matters, because it feeds directly into entrepreneurial intention, or the likelihood that a student sees entrepreneurship as a realistic path.
Publication year: January 2026
Authors: Amit Pandey; Priyanka Chadha
Institutions: TAPMI School of Business, Manipal University Jaipur, India; Manav Rachna International Institute of Research and Studies, India
Study type: Quantitative study using Structural Equation Modelling (PLS-SEM)
Sample Size: 1,289 university students
Research focus: The role of digital financial literacy in shaping entrepreneurial intention and perceived entrepreneurial growth
Research Methodology: Cross-sectional survey data analysed using PLS-SEM with bootstrapping
Main findings: Digital financial literacy is positively associated with both risk-taking capacity and entrepreneurial intention. Risk-taking capacity partially mediates the relationship between digital financial literacy and entrepreneurial intention. Entrepreneurial intention is strongly associated with self-reported entrepreneurial growth.
Citation: Pandey, A., Chadha, P. Integrating digital financial literacy into entrepreneurship education: Building risk-taking capacity and entrepreneurial intention for entrepreneurial growth among university students. Entrepreneurship Education (2026). Link
What is particularly interesting here is how risk is framed. It is not treated as a personality trait, something you either have or you don’t, but as a capacity that can be shaped. In other words, students are not necessarily avoiding entrepreneurship because they are inherently risk-averse, but because the risks involved feel unclear, overwhelming, or difficult to evaluate. When those same risks become more legible, the picture changes.
This reframing also helps explain why simply encouraging students to “be more entrepreneurial” often falls flat. Motivation without understanding does not get you very far. If anything, it can make uncertainty feel even more intimidating. By contrast, building the ability to interpret financial situations seems to reduce that friction, not by removing risk, but by making it easier to engage with.
At the same time, these findings should be read with some caution. The study is based on self-reported survey data, meaning it captures how students perceive their abilities and intentions rather than what they actually go on to do. The relationships between variables are also very strong, which may partly reflect the way the data was collected rather than perfectly clean real-world effects. So while the results point to an important pattern, they do not provide a definitive roadmap for curriculum design.
Still, the underlying insight is hard to ignore. If risk-taking is partly a question of interpretation, then entrepreneurship education may need to spend less time encouraging students to take risks, and more time helping them understand what they are looking at in the first place.
Related reading: Making Entrepreneurship Feel Doable, and Why Students Who Want to Start Businesses Still Don’t. For related learning, see Finance for Start-ups, Entrepreneurial Mindset, and Trendspotting and Future Thinking.
