Considering that many unanswered questions remain regarding the antecedents to entrepreneurial intentions, the purpose of this study is to develop insights from existing theories in entrepreneurship frameworks and apply these in the social entrepreneurship context. Consequently the study examines to what extant beliefs and cognitions shape social entrepreneurial intentions.,Hypotheses were statistically tested using multiple regression analyses based on survey data (n = 156) from individuals in South Africa.,Results support the hypotheses where entrepreneurial alertness significantly explained social entrepreneurial intentions, while self-efficacy showed a positive mediating effect in this relationship.,Policymakers encouraging social entrepreneurship should not only focus on external support factors such as financial support but also deliberately develop interventions by focusing on beliefs and cognitions, which the study has identified as important predictors of social entrepreneurship intentions.,By introducing previously unrelated individual-level factors to social entrepreneurship, closer empirical links are created between these factors in this study.

Entrepreneurial alertness, self-efficacy and social entrepreneurship intentions

There is emergent literature that converges from neuroscience and entrepreneurship research, but the definitions and interlinkages are still inconsistent. We conduct a systematic literature review of 167 papers on the interface between neuroscience and entrepreneurship to address this. We observe the literature trends examining the interlinkages between neuroscience and entrepreneurial intention through six antecedents, namely - molecular neuroscience, systems neuroscience, behavioral neuroscience, cognitive neuroscience, social neuroscience, and computational neuroscience. Our findings suggest that entrepreneurial intention impacts entrepreneurial activity through five factors, including (1) opportunity recognition, (2) evaluation and risk-taking, (3) entrepreneurial cognition, (4) entrepreneurial behavior, and (5) entrepreneurial decision-making. From our discussions, the links among the neural factors affecting entrepreneurship are identified, and a research agenda highlighting a pathway for future studies is proposed.

Neuroentrepreneurship: an integrative review and research agenda

The growth of undergraduate entrepreneurship education programs and research, both within and outside of business programs, has led to a diverse array of academic literature on this topic. The diversity of perspectives has led to many conceptual and educational challenges that remain unresolved within the literature. The following conceptual paper offers a critical perspective on challenges that have been identified. A narrative-style literature review was conducted to explore challenges emerging from both (a) the practice of teaching entrepreneurship and (b) the definitions and assessment of entrepreneurial mindsets and skills that result from those education processes in entrepreneurship education, particularly within an undergraduate engineering education context. We achieve this objective by discussing previously dispersed sources of literature from disciplines that have critically discussed and explored entrepreneurial themes, such as business education, sociology, psychology, and philosophy. Contemporary debates within multiple disciplines are integrated and organized as challenges to inspire new theoretical discussions among scholars, educators, and other practitioners that can inform a more comprehensive way to conceive and assess entrepreneurship in engineering education. Seven challenges were identified ranging from the definition of entrepreneurship in education to the role of ethics in the teaching and assessment of entrepreneurship. We use these seven challenges and research questions as a starting point for the disambiguation of the working definition of entrepreneurship in the context of engineering education.

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Seven Challenges in Conceptualizing and Assessing Entrepreneurial Skills or Mindsets in Engineering Entrepreneurship Education

This study examines trait and context antecedents of entrepreneurial persistence in new venture creation. Two personality traits, entrepreneurial self-efficacy and tenacity, differently impact subsequent entrepreneurial persistence behavior in different industry contexts. These relationships are tested using logistic regression in a sample of entrepreneurs from the Panel Study of Entrepreneurial Dynamics (PSED-II; Curtin & Reynolds, 2018). In developing the PSED-II dataset, 31,845 individuals were screened using phone interviews in order to identify a sample of 1,214 nascent entrepreneurs. Results of the current study identify significant relationships between entrepreneurial persistence in efforts to launch a new business and entrepreneurial self-efficacy and tenacity. However, the relationships have diminishing returns and vary with the industry context of the business (manufacturing, retail, services). In the retail industry sector, neither trait was significant; however, in manufacturing industry contexts, tenacity seems to matter more for continuing to pursue new ventures than self-efficacy, while in services industries, self-efficacy seems to matter more than tenacity.

/pdf/entrepreneurial-tenacity-and-self-efficacy-effects-on-23ufosh45a.pdf

Entrepreneurial tenacity and self-efficacy effects on persisting across industry contexts

Despite the growing prevalence of causal mapping procedures in the organizational strategy field and the growing body of research on entrepreneurial cognition, there have been surprisingly few investigations on how scholars might use causal cognitive mapping to elicit entrepreneurs’ cognition. Based on the complementarity between the visual graph method and the matrix-multiplication method, this article outlines an integrative method that both overcomes the methodological issues of causal cognitive mapping and expands the qualitative methods used in the field of entrepreneurial cognition. By performing an empirical comparison, this article provides step-by-step guidance to empower scholars who either choose between these two methods or seek to use these methods in a complementary manner. Particular emphasis is placed on the methodological contributions that expand the entrepreneurial cognition toolbox. The methodological limits and potential improvements of these two methods regarding causal mapping are discussed.

https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/pdf/10.1080/00472778.2020.1866185

Causal cognitive mapping in the entrepreneurial cognition field: A comparison of two alternative methods

The purpose of this paper is to expand the recent lines of inquiry into entrepreneurial cognition by focusing on the structure of values as an important aspect of cognition. Value theory, or axiology, posits that the capacity to value and to make value judgments is a distinctly human function – one that is a higher order process than is pure cognition alone.,This study is designed as a quantitative discovery. A well-established assessment instrument from the field of value science is used to measure deep-seated, evaluative thought patterns for a sample of founders of early stage startups and a comparative sample of senior managers. Value structures underlying cognition for individuals across these samples are compared to reveal both similarities and differences between the groups.,This study identifies a cognitive process underlying opportunity recognition, evaluation and exploitation, known as integration. This study finds that entrepreneurs have stronger capacities for integrative thinking than do managers. In contrast to other published research, this study finds that early stage entrepreneurs are not characterized by hubris, an inflated sense of self-efficacy, nor an exceptional capacity for action.,This paper extends the study of entrepreneurial cognition by applying an empirical measure of the foundational levels of cognition. It reveals heretofore unarticulated differences, as well as similarities, between entrepreneurs and managers.

Clifford G. Hurst

Papers

An axiological measure of entrepreneurial cognition