1. Entrepreneurship 3
Cognitive Foundations of Entrepreneurship: Creativity and Opportunity Recognition

2. “People think that at the top, there isn’t much room
“People think that at the top, there isn’t much room. They tend to think of it as an Everest. My message is that there is tons of room at the top.”
--Margaret Thatcher

3. Three Key Processes Idea Generation Creativity Opportunity Recognition
Increasing Relevance to Founding Venture

4. Memory
Working memory—holds limited amount of information fro brief periods
Long-term memory—retains vast amounts of information for long periods
Procedural memory—automatic knowledge gained through practice

5. Mental Frameworks
Mental frameworks help us to interpret new information and relate it to information we already possess.

6. Prototypes
Idealized mental representations of the most typical member of a category.

7. Mental Shortcuts
Heuristics—simple rules for making complex decisions or drawing inferences in a rapid and seemingly effortless manner
Availability heuristic—the more easily we bring information to mind, the more importance we assign to it

8. Thinking “Tilts”
Optimistic bias—expect things to turn out well without basis
Confirmation bias—notice, process, and remember information that confirms current beliefs
Illusion of control—assume that our fate is under our control

9. Creativity Items or ideas produced are both New (original, unexpected)
Useful or appropriate

10. Concepts Building blocks of creativity
Internal mental structures developed to organize information
Categories for objects or events that are somehow similar to each other in certain respects

11. Escaping Mental Ruts
Concepts can be stretched in several different ways
Combination
Expansion
Analogy

12. “An old thing becomes new if you detach it from what usually surrounds it.”
--Robert Bresson

13. Human Intelligence Individuals’ abilities to Understand complex ideas
Adapt effectively to the world
Learn from experience
Engage in various forms of reasoning
Overcome a wide range of obstacles

14. Kinds of Intelligence Analytic intelligence Creative intelligence
Practical intelligence
Social intelligence
Successful intelligence

15. Successful Intelligence
Practical
Intelligence
Analytic
Intelligence
Successful
Intelligence
Success
Creative
Intelligence

16. Confluence Approach Creativity emerges from a confluence of
Intellectual abilities
Broad, rich knowledge base
Appropriate style of thinking
Personality attributes
Intrinsic, task-focused motivation
Environment supportive of creative ideas

17. Broad, Rich Knowledge Base
Having varied work experience
Having lived in many different places
Having a broad social network

18. Opportunity Recognition
Some people are more likely to recognize opportunities because
They have better access to certain kinds of information
They are able to utilize the information once they have it

19. Superior Utilization of Information
Richer and better-integrated stores of knowledge
Higher in intelligence
Higher in practical intelligence
Higher in creativity

20. Additional Aspects Active search Entrepreneurial alertness
Prior knowledge
Social networks
Opportunity
recognition

21. Pattern Recognition
Seeing links between seemingly unconnected trends, changes, events
Connections form an identifiable pattern

22. Enhancing Opportunity Recognition
Exposure to broad range of business experience
Learning to search in the best places
Learning to search in the best ways
Exposure to a broad range of business opportunities