What drives return and entrepreneurial engagement among malay overseas-educated returnee students?
Year: 2026
Type: article
Abstract: This interdisciplinary paper blends the principles anchored in two distinguished theories namely; migration and entrepreneurship. In Malaysia and in many other countries, the drivers of international students’ return and their entrepreneurial engagement have not been well researched, and the resulting findings not fully unveiled. As such, policy makers are deprived of valuable insights on an important part of the potential that returnee students could bring to the local economies. This paper focused on the scantly-researched field of returnee entrepreneurship in the context of overseas-educated students. It aimed to understand the return conditions of Malay returnee students who chose entrepreneurial career, and the drivers of their entrepreneurial choice. To do this, the study employed a generic qualitative exploratory design to reflect on the entrepreneurial experience of these students. Semi-structured interviews were conducted to collect in-depth data which were subsequently analysed using thematic analysis. Our findings revealed that students’ return is shaped by two drivers namely: social concerns and institutional obligations which often occur immediately after the end of study. Additionally, the entrepreneurial choice’s drivers are autonomy, role model, employment conditions, and formation of business ideas overseas. Interestingly, we found evidence that the development of business ideas overseas and employment-related issues, as elements that reflect return conditions, were among the reasons that influenced the entrepreneurial choice, and that the development of entrepreneurial intention during the overseas stay was also observed among students who received study sponsors and had a commitment to return. The implications of these findings were discussed. Keywords: Conditions, entrepreneurship, Malay, overseas-educated, returnee, students
Language: English
Subfield: Sociology and Political Science
Field: Social Sciences
Domain: Social Sciences
Open Access status: bronze
OpenAlex ID: W7204268484