Designing the Cultural Tourism Entrepreneurship Development Model Using Structural Equation Modeling- Partial Least Squares

Entrepreneurship development is a set of public and private policies and practices that can accelerate entrepreneurship. Tourism as an important economic sector requires the presence of entrepreneurs, so it is necessary to identify the factors that have an impact on entrepreneurship development in this area. Cultural tourism is one of the important types of tourism that has a major share among the types of tourism. This article is designed to design a model for this development. The study was conducted in Yazd city and partial least squares structural equation modeling was used for modeling. The statistical population consisted of academic experts, business owners and practitioners of public and private sectors related to tourism. The conceptual model has been designed using 3M model and has been used by experts and theoretical literature and states that three variables of behavioral, structural and environmental factors and conditions are effective on entrepreneurship development. Calculations have been made for the measurement, structural and overall fit of the model, indicating that the model is suitable. According to the path coefficients, 34.6% behavioral factors and 46.5% structural factors directly explain the changes related to the cultural tourism entrepreneurship development variable. Also the environmental condition variable indirectly affects this variable and accounts for 65.1% of the variations in this variable. Meanwhile, among structural factors, introduction of tourism destination and among behavioral factors, empowerment of active tourism elements have the most impact on entrepreneurship development of a cultural tourism destination.