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1. Introduction
The development of US economy is making efforts to create more vibrant and diverse businesses and to sustain economic growth. The emergence of an entrepreneurial economy creates a growing source of employment and drives economic development and growth. The fashion industry, which focuses on creative and diverse products, has great potential to cultivate small fashion businesses and stimulate the economic development as a whole. Although the population of fashion entrepreneurs has been increasing notably, many new business ventures are still having difficulties in the start-up stage and struggling to develop practical strategies to grow their businesses (Gaskill et al., 1993; Gaskill, 2001). In this study, fashion entrepreneurs are defined as those individuals who are willing to run or are currently running businesses selling any fashion-related products or services for a profit (Lang and Liu, 2019). To facilitate the development of fashion entrepreneurs, the necessary skills and capacity for an individual fashion entrepreneur should be identified to grow and run a fashion business, so that business incubation services can better support them (Miller et al., 2021; Gaskill et al., 1993; Lang and Liu, 2019).
Having a belief that one has the ability to succeed is crucial in any tasks (Bandura et al., 1999). Self-efficacy explains this belief (Barnir et al., 2011; Cardon et al., 2013), and predicts an individual's perseverance and level of effort toward a certain behavior. Self-efficacy reflects the individuals' confidence in having the skills and abilities and being able to effectively apply the skills to perform a certain behavior and complete the tasks (Wilson et al., 2007). Usually, people with high self-efficacy for a given task are more likely to pursue and make an effort to perform the task. Self-efficacy is perceived as domain-specific (Santos and Liguori, 2020) and entrepreneurial self-efficacy is considered as career-related, and reflects an individual's belief and estimation of whether or not he/she has the ability to start, develop, and grow a new business (Schjoedt and Craig, 2017). Entrepreneurial self-efficacy plays a crucial role in determining whether individuals pursue entrepreneurial careers and engage in entrepreneurial behavior (Newman et al., 2019; Maloney, 2019). People with higher entrepreneurial self-efficacy tend to have higher degrees of belief that they possess a viable...