Confidence, Commitment Key to Early Venture Success
Jun 8th, 2009 | By Dawn R. Rivers | Category: ResearchOne of the things you hear fairly often is that piece of conventional wisdom that ‘not everyone is an entrepreneur.’ That may be true superficially but, according to the results of an interesting study out of Australia, even those who are not born entrepreneurs can be made into entrepreneurs. The paper in question is entitled “Entrepreneurial attitudes and action in new venture development,” written by Rose Trevelyan of the Australian School of Business, University of New South Wales. Interestingly, the data set used in this research comes from the U.S.; Trevelyan used the Panel Study of Entrepreneurial Dynamics (PSED) for her study.
In this study, the author uses cognitive psychology to develop several hypotheses about entrepreneurial attitudes about themselves and their ventures: that confidence in self and in the business, commitment to the career choice of entrepreneurship, and entrepreneurial attitudes should all be positively associated with venture performance. Her research of the PSED data and subsequent analysis found that those first three hypotheses were strongly supported and the fourth hypothesis (that entrepreneurial attitudes should be positively associated with venture performance) was also supported but less strongly. Sounds like a no-brainer but, if confidence and commitment are key to success, that is encouraging because they can be taught. Given the current state of the economy and the probable increase in “forced” entrepreneurship, that is a good thing to know.
