2002/04/01 by Ronald K. Mitchell, Lowell Busenitz, Lowell W. Busenitz +5 · 7 citations
Business, Management and Accounting · #Entrepreneurship Studies and Influences #Family Business Performance and Succession #Innovation and Socioeconomic Development
paper · doi:10.1111/1540-8520.00001
openalex publication_date 2002/04/01 · openalex created_date 2025/10/10 · openalex updated_date 2026/07/30
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.