Starting a business takes more than a good idea. Many young people say they would like to work for themselves, yet researchers have had few tools designed to measure how strong that ambition is, or whether entrepreneurship courses change it. A new study from Indonesia offers a questionnaire built to measure the drive to succeed in business.

A researcher at Universitas Lambung Mangkurat in South Kalimantan developed and tested the tool with 683 people across Indonesia. The findings appear in The Open Psychology Journal. The questionnaire is called the Entrepreneurial Achievement Motivation Measure.

Participants were recruited through an online survey between March and July 2025 and had to be interested in entrepreneurship, have some business experience, or be running a business. Nearly all were students, mainly undergraduates. Most were women, and about two thirds of the first group were younger than 25.

The tool rests on a long-standing theory of achievement motivation, which splits the drive to succeed into two parts. Achievement thought covers how people think about success, including their wish to achieve, their planning, their hope of success, and their fear of failure. Achievement behaviour covers how they respond in practice, including their feelings after success or failure, the obstacles they meet, and whether they seek help.

The first version had 32 statements, each rated on a five-point scale from strongly disagree to strongly agree. Seven experts in entrepreneurship education and curriculum development checked the items for relevance. An analysis of the first group of 308 people then removed four weak statements, leaving 28.

When this version was tested on a second group of 375 people, it did not fit the data well at first. Eight more statements were dropped over two rounds of refinement. The final 20-item questionnaire showed an excellent fit on standard statistical tests, and its two parts proved related but distinct.

Scores were then compared with two related traits. Locus of control is the belief that your own actions shape what happens to you, while self-efficacy is confidence in your ability to carry out tasks and reach goals. Both were positively linked with the new measure, and the thinking part showed the stronger connections, particularly with locus of control.

The study suggests the questionnaire could help schools, universities, and government bodies identify people with a strong drive to run a business. It could also show whether entrepreneurship training or education programmes change that drive, by testing people before and after a course.

The study has clear limits. The sample was dominated by undergraduates, all answers were self-reported, and the links with locus of control and self-efficacy were modest. The behaviour part of the questionnaire also fell just short of the usual benchmark for reliability.

Because entrepreneurial motivation may be shaped by culture, education systems, and economic conditions, the measure still needs testing outside Indonesia and with more people who already run businesses. For now, it offers universities a structured way to gauge how much their students want to succeed in business.