EXECUTIVE SUMMARY Entrepreneurship is the driving force of the modern economy in the foreseeable future through its creation of new business, employment and economic growth. By considering of the important role of the SMEs and garment entrepreneurs to the Macao economy, the purpose of the research is to have an empirical study in the local garment industry, to identify factors influencing the motivation of entrepreneurs to start up business in the territory. The study hypothesized that entrepreneur characteristics have great contributions to the entrepreneur motivation to start up a business. The Manifest Needs Questionnaire (MNQ) developed by Steers and Braunstein (1976) was employed to obtain responses for the four needs under study - achievement; affiliation; autonomy; and dominance. Totally 212 subjects from the member list of the Industrial Association of Macau were collected randomly by the researcher. It was expected independent variables of the need for achievement; autonomy; and dominance are significantly and positively related to motivation to new business establishment; the need for affiliation is negatively related to motivation to start up business. Of the demographic variables, gender; age, marital status, educational level and number of family dependents at starting business were hypothesized to influence the entrepreneurship motivation. It was expected that males had higher motivation to start up business than females did. Age, educational level and number of dependents at starting business are all significantly and negatively correlated to the motivation to becoming entrepreneurs. Marital status is statistically positive correlated with entrepreneur motivation. Moreover, the need for achievement, affiliation, autonomy, dominance and the demographic variables together explains a significant correlation with the motivation to start up business. Reliability of measures, descriptive statistics, measures of central tendencies and dispersion, inferential statistics, t-Test, ANOVA and multiple regression analysis were used to test the hypotheses in the study. Need for achievement was found to be the most significantly and positively variable correlated to the entrepreneur motivation. Need for autonomy, affiliation, and dominance were statistically significantly correlated with the motivation to start up business and in the expected direction. In addition, the number of dependents and educational level at starting business were found to being significantly correlated to the dependent variable in the opposite expected direction — positive. Recommendations were proposed as reference for the government and future studies, limitation of the study were discussed.