This study aims to identify the characteristics of groups of students in business and engineering, in a comparative way, which qualifies them as future innovative professionals, spreading the knowledge frontier. Five factors were highlighted: assertiveness, leadership, risk tolerance/accessibility, dedication and competence in information. The focus was on identifying the presence of entrepreneurial characteristics, contrasting the ranks of engineering and business, and the relationship of these characteristics with age and gender of respondents, allowing a comparative analysis of their educational backgrounds. To discuss that, this paper made use of a data set obtained from a research applied to students of the Federal University of Goiás. This study is part of an ongoing research that will investigate students’ profiles for a period of ten years, understanding the role carried out by institutions of higher education, through this case study. The research main instrument is a questionnaire developed by the University of Northern Iowa (USA) and applied to students of business (economics, business administration and accounting) as well as engineering majors (civil engineers) of the Federal University of Goiás. To analyze the data the study will make use of multivariate analysis, such as factor analysis (FA) via PCA (principal component analysis), followed by a logistic regression of gender in relation to the entrepreneurial profile of students, as well as an OLS linear regression of age in relation to these same factors. The results pointed out that both groups presented innovative traces in common, such as: assertiveness, dedication, leadership and informational competence; and, individually, the engineer group showed accessibility to be a major factor, versus risk tolerance for the business group. In the logistic regression analysis the innovative characteristics were assertiveness and leadership for the business majors; versus dedication and accessibility for the engineering majors. This allowed the considerations that the assertiveness was associated with the female students, while leadership was consistent with the male respondents, for the business students; as for the engineers it was identified a higher dedication trait for women in face of a more pronounced accessibility for men. Regarding the age analysis it was only possible to identify significance for the business group, which presented a higher dedication for older students.
