Dance your way through entrepreneurial irrationality, errors, and rejection: unveiling entrepreneurial cognition, decisions, and learning under complex circumstances
Creators: name: Dinh, Anh Phuong
Publisher: name: TU Dortmund
Year: 2021
Subjects: subject: Entrepreneurial cognition &amp; decision
subject: Entrepreneurial education
subject: Opportunity
subject: 330
subject: Geschäftschance
subject: Unternehmerausbildung
subject: Unternehmensgründung
subject: Kognition
subject: Rationalität

description: The entrepreneurial journey is an emotional rollercoaster with unpredictable ups and downs, and entrepreneurial actions are performed in an ill-defined environment. For educational psychologists, the strengthening of students’ abilities to solve and reflect on ill-defined situations of the venturing process is the main learning objective. The discipline of entrepreneurship can benefit from research that enables clarification towards the entrepreneurial context and understanding of the individual’s behavior that promotes new venture formation. Hence, this dissertation contributes to establishing a better understanding of the complex and dynamic entrepreneurial context and particularly on the cognitive aspects that facilitate entrepreneurial activities. The focus lies particularly on promoting academic entrepreneurship. There is growing recognition that research on college students is central to the development of entrepreneurial activities and this group should receive higher attention. For this purpose, four studies have been carried out to provide novel insights into entrepreneurial cognition, learning, and academic entrepreneurship. The first study is dedicated to detangling the complex nature of the entrepreneurial environment. Literature calls for novel research that provides more clarity on the role of rationality that enables to unveil the relationship between the precarious circumstances and entrepreneurial action. More so, integrating the concept of rationality in entrepreneurship education can help prepare college students towards situations in which lack of information is dominant. While the first study strives to understand the contextual environment of entrepreneurial decisions, the second study investigates entrepreneurial activities from a cognitive-psychological point of view. A central concept for entrepreneurial activities is opportunity recognition. The second study focuses on cognitive factors that affect the process of opportunity recognition. The intention of this study is to explain the emergence of entrepreneurial opportunities and to contribute to differentiating between entrepreneurs and non-entrepreneurs. The third study continues with analyzing factors that influence entrepreneurial activities and examines the impact of entrepreneurial rejection on the individual’s decision to continue with the entrepreneurial opportunity. Finally, the last study is dedicated to understanding troubling concepts during the process of entrepreneurial learning. Entrepreneurship education bears the potential to equip future entrepreneurs with the entrepreneurial competencies required to deal with challenging situations during the venturing process. Thus, the final study investigates troublesome knowledge in entrepreneurship education in order to provide practical implications for dealing with these obstacles.