Digital Entrepreneurship as a Catalyst for Youth Employment and SME Growth in Nigerian Tertiary Institutions
Keywords:
: digital entrepreneurship; youth employment; SME growth; entrepreneurship education; human capital; dynamic capabilities; entrepreneurial ecosystems; tertiary institutions; NigeriaAbstract
Nigeria’s tertiary institutions are increasingly expected to improve graduate employment while stimulating the growth of micro, small and medium-sized enterprises. Yet entrepreneurship and digital-skills interventions are often evaluated as though educational exposure were equivalent to employment creation or firm growth. This conceptual article develops a dual-pathway capability-conversion framework that explains when and how digital entrepreneurship can act as a catalyst for youth employment and SME growth. The framework integrates human capital theory, individual employment-enactment capabilities, venture-level dynamic capabilities and entrepreneurial ecosystem theory, while using decent-work and agency considerations to evaluate outcome quality. Digital entrepreneurship is conceptualised as an institutional architecture comprising integrated curriculum, experiential practice, digital infrastructure, mentoring, incubation and industry–market linkages. These inputs build digital entrepreneurial human capital, which follows two distinct conversion routes. At the individual level, employment-enactment capabilities convert human capital into wage employment, self-employment and digitally mediated work. At the venture level, dynamic capabilities convert human capital into SME survival, revenue growth, productivity, market reach and organisational resilience. SME growth may subsequently generate additional youth employment, creating a cross-level feedback effect. Six proposition families specify the direct, mediated and moderated relationships, while digital inequality, platform dependence, sector, venture stage, time and employment quality delimit the framework’s boundary conditions.
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