Knowledge that Transforms

The failure of past “entrepreneurial personality”—based research to clearly distinguish the unique contributions to the entrepreneurial process of entrepreneurs as people, has created a vacuum within the entrepreneurship literature that has been waiting to be filled. Recently, the application of ideas and concepts from cognitive science has gained currency within entrepreneurship research, as evidenced by the growing accumulation of successful studies framed in entrepreneurial cognition terms. In this article we reexamine “the people side of entrepreneurship” by summarizing the state of play within the entrepreneurial cognition research stream, and by integrating the five articles accepted for publication in this special issue into this ongoing narrative. We believe that the constructs, variables, and proposed relationships under development within the cognitive perspective offer research concepts and techniques that are well suited to the analysis of problems that require better explanations of the contributions to entrepreneurship that are distinctly human.

Even though the entrepreneurship literature places much emphasis on opportunity recognition, little is known about how entrepreneurs actually evaluate opportunities. This study uses a cognitive approach to examine opportunity evaluation, as the perception of opportunity is essentially a cognitive phenomenon. We present a model that consists of four independent variables (overconfidence, belief in the law of small numbers, planning fallacy, and illusion of control), a mediating variable (risk perception), two control variables (demographics and risk propensity), and the dependent variable (opportunity evaluation). We find that illusion of control and belief in the law of small numbers are related to how entrepreneurs evaluate opportunities. Our results also indicate that risk perception mediates opportunity evaluation.

Conceptual arguments for the association between cultural characteristics and entrepreneurship have existed for decades but only in the last 10 years has this relationship been the focus of empirical scrutiny. In this article, we review and synthesize the findings of 21 empirical studies that examine the association between national cultural characteristics and aggregate measures of entrepreneurship, individual characteristics of entrepreneurs, and aspects of corporate entrepreneurship. The study concedes that a predominant number of empirical studies have used Hofstede's conceptualization of national culture and that other domains have been underdeveloped. A preliminary model that integrates past findings is extended. The review highlights fruitful avenues for future research.

Literature on the creation of organizations is often cast within a masculine gender framework. This paper draws from three theoretical perspectives to develop a new perspective that broadens the view of organizational creation by encompassing the relative balance of feminine and masculine perspectives in the entrepreneur's venture start-up process and new venture attributes. We elaborate the relatively less visible feminine and personal perspective and compare this with the traditional or masculine perspective. Important to the discussion is the distinction between biology (sex: male and female, man and woman) and socialized perspectives (gender: masculine and feminine). While research and the general public often use the concept of gender loosely to signify sex, we follow a more precise feminist distinction. The paper advances new concepts of gender-maturity (an individual difference) and gender-balance (an organizational quality).