Page 123 - 1-Entrepreneurship and Local Economic Development by Norman Walzer (z-lib.org)

112 Thomas S. Lyons, Gregg A. Lichtenstein, and Nailya Kutzhanova

inventors who started a business and those who did not start a business.
The first group of technological entrepreneurs tended to have signifi-
cantly higher self-efficacy. The technological entrepreneurs tended to
have stronger regrets about business opportunities while technological
nonentrepreneurs tended to have stronger regrets regarding career and
education decisions. The two groups did not differ in terms of the quan-
tity of these regrets.
The importance of feedback to the cognitive process is demonstrated
in a study by Gatewood et al. (2002). Groups of students were given
positive or negative feedback about their entrepreneurial abilities (re-
gardless of actual abilities). Results showed that the group receiving
positive feedback had higher entrepreneurial expectancies than the
group receiving negative feedback. The type of feedback, however, did
not affect the task effort or quality of performance. The study also found
that males had higher expectancies about entrepreneurial ventures than
did females.
Politis (2005) brings attention to the role of experience in the entrepre-
neurial process. The process of entrepreneurial learning is suggested to con-
sist of three main components: (1) entrepreneurs’ career experiences, (2)
the transformation process, and (3) entrepreneurial knowledge in terms of
increased effectiveness in opportunity recognition and in coping with the li-
abilities of newness.
An important entrepreneurship policy consideration emanating from
this research is that the incremental and slow character of entrepreneurial
learning does not prove the effectiveness of formal training and education.
Stimulating activities should be based on developing creativity, critical
thinking, and reflection that will enhance the motivation and ability to de-
velop entrepreneurial knowledge (Politis 2005).
The cognitive approach represents a wide variety of studies uncovering
the internal thinking processes of the entrepreneur. There are many useful
cognitive concepts such as perceptions, biases, or intentions, and theoreti-
cal models have been adopted and applied to explain the entrepreneurial
process, as in the studies described above. The cognitive approach’s main
contribution to the field is its reorientation of entrepreneurial theory to-
ward the entrepreneur or, in other words, “the people side of entrepreneur-
ship research” (Mitchell et al. 2002, 100).
In contrast to the personality trait approach, the cognitive perspective en-
deavors to explain variations among entrepreneurs. The cognitive approach
also incorporates the dynamics of the entrepreneurial process. It explains
that entrepreneurs do not come to entrepreneurship fully ready to succeed,
but, instead, learn and develop throughout their career. The entrepreneurs
in the cognitive perspective are not significantly different from the general
population and can gain or lose from the processing of limited informa-