Neuroentrepreneurship symposium 2015 Academy of Management

Is “Neuroentrepreneurship” Worth Pursuing? (15922)
A panel symposium for the 2015 Academy of Management
Primary Sponsor: ENT
Other Proposed Sponsors: MOC, TIM (also MED, RM)
Presenters/Panelists
Norris Krueger (chair/organizer)
Russ McBride, University of Utah & Rob Wuebker, University of Utah
Pablo Martin de Holan, INCAES and EM Lyon
Julia Binder, TU Munich & Denis Gregoire, HEC Montreal
Dina Pereira, University Beira, Portugal
Aparna Sud, MIT
Invited Discussion Provocateurs
Gabi Kaffka, Twente, Netherlands
Silvia Fernandes Costa, ISCTE-IUL, Lisbon
Beate Cesinger, New Design University, Austria
Andrew Maxwell, York University
Abstract
Last year, we asked: Why is that presentations on “neuro-entrepreneurship” are so well-attended
(and applauded) yet little traction has really occurred? Similarly, we asked why it was that in
entrepreneurship we hear a regular drumbeat calling for nurturing the entrepreneurial mindset yet
we see little progress in rigorously defining that. Nor do we see much progress is applying what
we do know.
The potential is significant; it seems that every issue of a neuroscience journal offers something
that speaks to entrepreneurship and related phenomena. The diverse presenters in 2014 showed

this potential for great research and the sizeable audience was skeptical yet supportive, launching
a learning community.
This session brings together some of the leading thinkers on these questions, each bringing a
unique perspective on the question of “where next?” for “neuroentrepreneurship." Our format
here will be to raise some provocative questions like the ones above and the chair will provide a
brief overview and introductions. Next, our panelists will brief us on their current work and then
reflect on these provocative questions. We have a diverse set of scholars, both rising and veteran,
from Europe and North America and as you will see very differing perspectives on moving
neuroentrepreneurship forward.
Overview
Last year, we asked: Why is that presentations on “neuro-entrepreneurship” are so well-attended
(and applauded) yet little traction has really occurred? Similarly, we asked why it was that in
entrepreneurship we hear a regular drumbeat calling for nurturing the entrepreneurial mindset yet
we see little progress in rigorously defining that. Nor do we see much progress is applying what
we do know.
The potential is significant; it seems that every issue of a neuroscience journal offers something
that speaks to entrepreneurship and related phenomena. The diverse presenters in 2014 showed
this potential for great research and the sizeable audience was skeptical yet supportive, launching
a learning community.
This session brings together some of the leading thinkers on these questions, each bringing a
unique perspective on the question of “where next?” for “neuroentrepreneurship." Our format
here will be to raise some provocative questions like the ones above and the chair will provide a
brief overview and introductions. Next, our panelists will brief us on their current work and then
reflect on these provocative questions. We have a diverse set of scholars, both rising and veteran,
from Europe and North America and as you will see very differing perspectives on moving
neuroentrepreneurship forward.
Like strategy, entrepreneurship has begun to wrestle with the microfoundations of its key
phenomena. One term that has come increasingly in vogue is the “entrepreneurial mindset”. On
one hand, this is a healthy recognition that there are clearly cognitive underpinnings for
entrepreneurial action and those underpinnings lay fairly deep. On the other hand, the term is
rarely defined and almost never defined in satisfying ways that allow us to rigorously test, for
example, critical antecedents. We argue here that the cognitive microfoundations are crucial to
understanding entrepreneurial thinking and action.

Entrepreneurship scholars have long nibbled around the edges of cognitive science, in large part
because to skillfully use its theoretical concepts and empirical tools is challenging. However, we
will argue here that the investment will yield exceptional returns [Krueger 2004; Krueger & Day
2010]. Consider these opportunities:
We can ask questions that we could not ask before.
We can ask questions in better ways than before.
We can ask questions that we could not even think to ask before.
In short, looking at the microfoundations of entrepreneurial cognition (and action) through the
lenses offered by neuroscience is a) already giving us new insights to what exactly the murkily
defined “entrepreneurial mindset” actually comprises, b) helping understand how it changes and
c) how we might rigorously measure it.
Value Proposition for Sponsors:
As the overview delineates, neuro-entrepreneurship has immense potential to bring powerful new
theories and powerful new methods to the study of entrepreneurial individuals and
entrepreneurial organizations. It is also clearly speaks to important new insights into
entrepreneurial learning. (If we are to truly understand the “entrepreneurial mindset” we need
these tools.) However, that promise remains unfulfilled despite its apparent sexiness atop its
research potential.
The time has more than come to turn a critical eye on neuroentrepreneurship and its potential,
ask some hard questions and bring together a diverse group of senior and junior scholars to share
their insights and their current work. Doing this in a symposium permits us to also engage the
expertise that might be found in other Divisions and Interest Groups. I hope you can join us –
there will be fireworks.
FORMAT
Dr. Krueger will provide a brief overview of the state of the art in neuroentrepreneurship and
introduce the panelists.
Each panelist will provide an overview of their specific research areas, focusing on what we have
and, more important, what we have not learned to date. Each will emphasize the critical
implications, whether for research, teaching, practice or theory.
We will have expert discussion facilitators on call to further expand on the implications.
Also, past experience with this topic suggests providing time for audience members to contribute
beyond the usual (and all-too-brief) Q&A period.

PANELISTS and PROVOCATIVES
Norris Krueger, Entrepreneurship Northwest [chair]
Overview of current progress, both potential and pitfalls.
The first signs of genuine potential?
Herbert Simon was one of many who long ago noted that what we say and think (and do) is a
deeper ‘symbolic’ level where attitudes and deep beliefs may drive our behavior in ways of
which we are not terribly mindful. Deeper still are neurological and endocrinological influences
that are well below our cognizance but are nonetheless malleable. The hormone oxytocin has
itself become a cottage industry for decision making research. For example, levels of oxytocin
affect levels of trust in us. However, increasing trust will increase oxytocin production.
Note that neuroscience itself is fraught with methodological peril, often producing (and
publishing) exciting results that sadly lack statistical power to support their claims. Moreover, it
is a misconception to equate “neuroscience” with neuroimaging. Much of the very best work is
done via experimentation.
Consider the first entrepreneurship research article ever published in Nature was out of the
neuroscience labs at Cambridge. Barbara Sahakian’s team partnered with the Judge Institute to
compare top managers with serial entrepreneurs on emotion-independent (“cold”) cognition and
emotion-dependent (“hot”) cognition, finding that the entrepreneurs preferred and were better at
hot cognition. It is easy to see the possibilities for extending this model.
Welpe and associates research entrepreneurial emotions through clever, rigorous
experimentation. One study found that between- and within-subjects, experimenters could induce
different cognitive states by envisioning either an economic venture or a social venture with
significant cognitive consequences such as significant differences in fear of failure (Krueger,
Grichnik & Welpe 2006).
Zald and colleagues found in a population of entrepreneurs with low levels of risk-aversion had
visibly more dopamine receptors in key areas of the brain. Knowing that interventions can
change the number of dopamine receptors suggests evidence of neuroplasticity in a seemingly
entrepreneurial setting.
A major construct in entrepreneurship research is entrepreneurial intentions, usually tested with
some variation of Ajzen’s Theory of Planned Behaviour. However, what are we to make of
Benjamin Libet’s work in the 1980s that showed clear evidence that the brain’s automatic
processing forms the intent well before we are mindful of it? And where can we best deploy
concepts from neuroscience to

From Novice to Expert
Global entities from the Kauffman Foundation and NESTA to the OECD and EU have become
vitally interested in how to assess what really happens in entrepreneurial learning. How do we
assess entrepreneurial learning, especially as it has become clear that the critical impacts are at a
very deep level (e.g., the work of Martin Lackeus, the OECD’s Entrepreneurship360 assessment,
etc.)?
Research into what differentiates experts from novices and the mechanisms associated with that
trajectory increasingly draw from cognitive science. What happens to us in the alleged ‘10,000
hours of deliberate practice” that has become a meme? One thing that confirms observations
from educational researchers suggest that no amount of learning knowledge content can
guarantee reaching the mindset of an expert. What differentiates experts is not how much they
know but rather how they structure their knowledge. And how they see their world depends
primarily on deep cognitive structures (scripts, maps, etc.) that are in turn influenced by changes
in deep beliefs and assumptions that anchor those structures.
The implications for learning are neither surprising nor non-obvious. In the entrepreneurial
setting, however, it affords us multiple opportunities to assess whether teaching and training
interventions change deep beliefs in ways that a) change knowledge structures and b) in positive
directions.
But let us begin with a skeptical (if ultimately positive) perspective from a trained cognitive
scientist
Toward a Study of Neuroentrepreneurship
Russell McBride*
Robert Wuebker
Department of Entrepreneurship & Strategy
David Eccles School of Business
University of Utah
Neuroentrepreneurship has made progress since the first optimistic claims about it and
neuromarketing hit the news many years ago. But there has been limited adoption.
Entrepreneurship should be a field sympathetic to the neuroentrepreneurship agenda, and by and
large it is. People think it should be important, and while its relative level of importance might
differ there is general interest.
Yet the empirical results from studies linking questions of interest in entrepreneurship to
techniques from cognitive science and neuroscience have been less than impressive. After

completing a literature review, you can see that the empirical results are either mixed or muddled
or trivially true. Of greater interest for scholars are that - unlike in Finance or Strategy - the
findings (mixed, muddled, trivial, or otherwise) are not making a dent in the theoretical
development in the field. So unlike in other domains, neuroentrepreneurship is not opening up
new avenues of thought or realms of study, given the findings.
What is going on here? The suggestion we shall make is that, first, there are a variety of
hindrances within entrepreneurship theory. In particular:
A. One of those things is that Finance and Strategy have base-level aggregate theories that make
generally useful and reasonable claims about the world in relationship to individuals, or they do
not (e.g. they are *theories*), but entrepreneurship does not.
B. Another problem is that the "theory" that entrepreneurship has starts from priors that are not
just difficult to work with (an example in Finance would be uniform unchanging preference
functions) but ontologically broken. Finance has difficult to work with simplifying assumptions,
but there is *theory* there and the theory rests on ontologically coherent foundations. This is
generally the case with Strategy (it is a little harder to make this claim) but not the case in
Entrepreneurship.
But a more central problem for neuroentrepreneurship is not any kind of theoretical issue within
entrepreneurship (or entrepreneurship in relation to strategy, finance, management, or
organizational behavior) but rather in the background theory of how the brain works on the one
hand and what the context of entrepreneurship is on the other hand. The first problem, put
simply, is that what don’t know how the mind works and so neuroscience does not know how to
interpret the data that it gets because it doesn’t know (beyond superficial details) what the brain
does to fulfill some job in the mechanics of the mind. If we understood the mechanics of the
mind, i.e., how the mind works, neuroscience would know how to assimilate the results it gets.
It’s true that we do not know how the mind works, but it’s 2015 and we do know how the mind
does not work. It is not a computer. This means that we need to cut short work based on the
computational theory of mind (CTM) that still underlies much of work in cognitive psychology,
cognitive science, and neuroscience. A rejection of CTM implies that man is not primarily an
"information processing device" or "thinker" or "rational decision maker" or "rational utility
maximizer" but rather first and foremost a living being engaged in survival in its environment
driven by needs, values, and desires which may or may not be rational. This implies a rejection
of the rational agent model and the boundedly-rational agent model. This implies the injection of
motivators (needs, values, and desires) into any remotely complete understanding of the mind as
suggested by Reed Montegue (2012) and McBride (2009), among others.
The end of CTM requires a collection of tools to replace the best top-down go-to tool that has

been ubiquitously relied upon since the mid-20th century--the (universal) Turing machine.
Various suggestions have been proffered, starting with Norbert Weiner's "cybernetics"
homeostatic system to various forms of attractor networks (Scott Kelso, Walter Freeman,
Terrance Deacon, among others) and thermodynamic-inspired systems, all of which are bottom-
up. Bottom-up systems require a lot more work to apply to conceptual and reasoning efforts as a
model, but much easier to integrate into any kind of attractor network model that demands the
pull of various motivators.
The second problem is a failure to understand the context of entrepreneurship. Entrepreneurship
takes place within the realm of social reality. This simple fact lies in stark contrast to the bulk of
the work going on in neuroeconomics where most are busy either scanning for data in support of
preference function violations (a.k.a., bounded rationality), typically with fMRI experiments, or,
when the “social” nature of entrepreneurship is recognized, they turn to game theory on the
assumption that some kind of ‘correlated equilibrium’ (e.g., Nash equilibrium) is the core
feature. As Searle (forthcoming) points out, these equilibrium strategies can’t even begin to
explain the basic facts about social reality.
The neuroscience that will be relevant is the sub-set of neuroscience that looks at neural activity
of the central nervous system of an agent in social contexts. This implies the emphasis on the
prioritization of results like mirror neurons, empathy, simulation semantics, the dopamine system
& habits in social context, and communication. The most important result here is simulation
semantics as a model for the mind. Simulation semantics is the single greatest result of second-
generation cognitive science and suggests that semantics (aka, "sensemaking") is achieved not by
examining the symbols in one's mind that serve as mapping referents to objects in the real world,
but rather by the agent simulating internally what he is presented with. Extensive empirical work
supports this.
Recent work by Elisabeth Pacherie (2008, 2013) illustrates what quality work looks like that
could be incorporated into neuroentrepreneurship. She looks at the experience of agency in a
group and found that the degree of synchrony in a group action increased the experience of group
agency, as did the effort of the action. An fMRI version of some of this work would not be hard
to set up.
In summary, we take a more critical view of the possibility of neuroentrepreneurship, not out of a
lack of hope for the study, but rather as a critical analysis to facilitate the success of its growth
and prospects for the future.
*Russ McBride
Dept. of Entrepreneurship & Strategy, David Eccles School of Business University of Utah
Cognitive Scientist in Residence

Director of The Foundry
Director of the Social Ontology Research Group
Ph.D. in cognitive science & philosophy at U.C. Berkeley
A.M. in cognitive science & philosophy from Stanford U.
From here, we shift gears to a new study that looks at the alchemy of turning problems into
opportunities in the sustainability arena with powerful insights.
RE-FRAMING NEGATIVE SOCIAL PROBLEMS INTO POSITIVE
ENTREPRENEURIAL OPPORTUNITIES
Julia K. Binder
TUM School of Management, Technische Universität München
Alte Akademie 14, 85354 Freising, Germany
Denis A. Grégoire
Department of Management, HEC Montréal
3000, Chemin de la Côte-Sainte-Catherine
Montréal (Québec), CANADA H3T 2A7
We are continually faced with a series of great opportunities brilliantly disguised as
insoluble problems – John W. Gardner, U.S. Administrator (1912-2002)
Entrepreneurial efforts have the potential to provide economic solutions to important
social and ecological problems (Cohen & Winn, 2007; Pacheco, Dean & Payne, 2010;
Thompson, Kiefer & York, 2011). Yet the more a social or ecological issue appears crucial to
solve, the more it tends to be shrouded in a negative aura of crisis, disease, misery, pollution,
suffering and other dire consequences. This implies that in practice, the potentially most-
impactful entrepreneurs must overcome the dual challenge of coming-up with non-obvious
insightful entrepreneurial ideas while also battling the negative dread that surrounds the very
problems they seek to address.
This is not a trivial challenge. Interestingly, extant research on entrepreneurship has
begun to consider both the influence of affect and emotions in entrepreneurial pursuits (see
Baron, 2008; Cardon et al., 2012; Foo, Uy & Baron, 2009; Hayton, & Cholakova, 2012), but also
the effects of framing on such pursuits (see Cornelissen & Clarke, 2010; Cornelissen & Werner,
2014; Santos & Eisenhardt, 2009). Unfortunately, however, these two research literatures have
so far evolved in parallel to one another. As a result, extant scholarly understanding of the
strategies entrepreneurs can mobilize to face this dual challenge of identifying positive

opportunity ideas from the negative circumstances they seek to address is necessarily
incomplete.
To correct this situation and advance theory and empirical research on the practical
dynamics fostering social and sustainable entrepreneurship, we develop and test a model of
entrepreneurs’ efforts to reframe negative problems into positive entrepreneurial opportunities.
In this particular symposium presentation for the 2015 Academy of Management Conference, we
will discuss the gist of our theoretical developments, and present some preliminary results from
an initial series of empirical studies.
THEORETICAL SKETCH
Affective dynamics in opportunity identification
Owing to the methodological challenges inherent to studying opportunity identification
and evaluation (see Dimov, 2007; Grégoire, Shepherd & Lambert, 2010), research on the role
and influence of affective dynamics on the identification / development of entrepreneurial
opportunities per se (and not their evaluation) remains dominated by theoretical papers (e.g.,
Baron, 2007; 2008; Foo, Uy & Murnieks, 2014; Hayton & Cholakova, 2012). By and large,
theorists have advanced that the experience of positive emotions should facilitate opportunity
identification – at least up to a certain point. Exploring such hypothesis empirically, Perry-Smith
and Coff (2011) observed that when stimulated with a pleasant mood, groups in a creativity task
tended to generate more ideas. That said, they also observed that groups with more balanced
moods (neither too positive nor too negative) performed better at selecting more novel ideas. In
their study for the validation of a new measure of entrepreneurial alertness, for their part, Tang,
Kacmar and Busenitz (2012) have noted a strong correlation between positive affect and the
search for new opportunities. These advances notwithstanding, however, much remains to be
learned about the influence of entrepreneurs’ experience of positive / negative emotions in their
efforts to identify promising opportunity ideas for new entrepreneurial projects.
From framing to opportunity identification
Frame analysis dates back to at least 1958, when James March and Herbert Simon
published ‘Organizations’ – their influential monograph on organization theory. According to
these authors, ‘frames of reference’ consist of simplified cognitive representations, which guide
an individual’s perception and can eventually serve as a means for action (March & Simon,
1958). The assumption is that frames serve as knowledge structures that support an individual’s
thinking, reasoning and sense making, which in turn direct the interpretation and behavioral
responses to stimuli (Starbuck, 1983). In a recent review by Cornelissen and Werner (2014), the
authors review the substantial body of research on framing in the management and organization
literature. More specifically, these authors summarize extant academic contributions into three
broad categories of framing research, according to whether they are articulated 1) at the micro-
level (i.e. individual’s cognition and decision-making); 2) at the meso-level (i.e., referring to
organizational processes of meaning construction); or 3) at the macro-level (i.e., with respect to

frames of reference in the realm of institutions and sense making dynamics taking shape at the
broader social and cultural level).
Because they are thought to guide one’s perception and interpretation of information
stimuli (Starbuck, 1983; Gavetti & Levinthal, 2000), frames of references based on knowledge
built up from previous experiences appear particularly influential in opportunity identification
efforts. Though such frames of reference are usually portrayed as helpful cognitive resources, a
growing body of literature emphasizes individuals’ strong commitment to their extant frames
(Weick, 1993) – and thus their constraining influence on people’s interpretation of new and
ambiguous stimuli. With this in mind, Cornelissen and Clarke (2010) recently drew attention to
the notion of re-framing, which refers to the challenging task of breaking an activated cognitive
frame to allow for a more meaningful interpretation of stimuli, particularly in novel and
unfamiliar situations (see also: Cornelissen & Werner, 2014).
Building on arguments that entrepreneurship offers means to realize sustainable
developments in a business context (Dean & McMullen, 2007; Cohen & Winn, 2007), the
questions of how, when and why entrepreneurs succeed in overcoming the negative framing of
social and environmental problems thus become highly relevant. Yet, little is known about the
cognitive processes that entrepreneurs mobilize to transform negative social and ecological
problems into positive opportunities for sustainable development As a result, academic
understanding of the dynamics fostering social and sustainable entrepreneurship remains
incomplete – with important implications for extant abilities to provide useful guidance to social
and sustainable entrepreneurs, or to any policy initiatives aiming to support such efforts.
METHODS
To better examine these questions, we conduct a verbal protocol study (Ericsson &
Simon, 1993) with 20 experienced sustainable entrepreneurs. More specifically, we present these
entrepreneurs with four short newspaper articles that describe a social or environmental problem,
and ask them to “think out loud” as they interpret the issues at play and seek to identify
entrepreneurial solutions to possibly address these problems. Verbal protocol studies are well
suited for the phenomenon under study, as they allow for observing participants’ cognitive
strategies in real time (see Grégoire, Barr & Shepherd, 2010). To augment the study’s validity,
we developed the newspapers articles on the basis of published pieces, and worked with
professional journalists to ensure that their style and overtones were consistent with practice.
In order to unpack the effects of framing on entrepreneurs’ identification efforts, we
manipulate the text of the newspaper articles to convey either a positive or a negative frame.
Consistent with prior research (see Levin et al., 1998), we articulate this manipulation by either
emphasizing the possible gains that would be realized by addressing the problems, or the
possible losses that would ensue by not addressing them. As part of the research design, we not
only validate the manipulation’s effectiveness with third-party experts, but also assess the extent
to which participants express positive or negative emotions vis-à-vis the excerpts they read. In

turn, we content-analyze the qualitative data generated with the verbal protocols to examine the
strategies effectively mobilized by participants to identify possible opportunities in the different
situations (positive or negative).
Considering Patzelt and Shepherd’s (2011) findings that individuals differ with regard to
their entrepreneurial knowledge, sustainable knowledge and orientation, our research design also
controls for individual variations in these variables.
EXPECTED THEORETICAL IMPLICATIONS
We hope to make three potential contributions with this study. First, we seek to augment
understanding of the cognitive processes required for re-framing negative problems into positive
opportunity ideas. So far, framing studies have mainly focused on the inputs and outputs of
framing. By contrast, little attention has been paid to the underlying cognitive processes than
enable the passage from one frame to another (Scheufele, 1999). By focusing on the cognitive
process of transforming social problems into opportunity ideas, our study’s theoretical insights
and empirical findings will hopefully make meaningful additions to the growing literatures on
frame breaking. Second, we seek to draw attention of the mutual import of the affect and framing
literature for extant research on the identification of entrepreneurial opportunities. Third, we
hope to add to the growing literature on entrepreneurship for sustainable development by
providing insights into the cognitive resources and strategies entrepreneurs can mobilize to
identify high-impact opportunities for sustainable development. We believe this will provide a
basis to develop pedagogical exercises and material to help nascent entrepreneurs identify /
develop more and better entrepreneurial ideas to address important social and ecological
problems.
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Baron, R.A. 2008. The role of affect in the entrepreneurial process. Academy of Management
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Cardon, M. S., Foo, M. D., Shepherd, D., & Wiklund, J. 2012. Exploring the heart:
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Cohen, B., & Winn, M. I. 2007. Market imperfections, opportunity and sustainable
entrepreneurship. Journal of Business Venturing, 22(1): 29-49.
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reasoning and the creation and justification of new ventures. Academy of Management
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Cornelissen, J. P., & Werner, M. D. 2014. Putting Framing in Perspective: A Review of Framing
and Frame Analysis across the Management and Organizational Literature. Academy of
Management Annals, 8(1): 181-235.
Dimov, D. 2007. Beyond the single‐person, single‐insight attribution in understanding
entrepreneurial opportunities. Entrepreneurship Theory and Practice, 31(5): 713-731.
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We next turn to experimental results assessing the use of event potential data to differentiate
entrepreneurial and non-entrepreneurial subjects.

How neuroscience can enhance our understanding of entrepreneurship: Revisited!
Pablo MARTIN DE HOLAN
EM LYON Business School INCAE Business School pmdeh@em-lyon.com
Entrepreneurship research seems to love the mind and its workings. A great deal of
entrepreneurship research has focused on phenomena that take place in the mind of the
entrepreneur, such as entrepreneurs’ cognition (Mitchell et al., 2002), knowledge (Shane, 2000),
intuition (Mitchell, Friga, & Mitchell, 2005), and mindsets (Haynie, Shepherd, Mosakowski, &
Earley, 2010) among many others. This is congruent with the widespread agreement in the hard
sciences about the importance of the brain for any phenomenon involving cognition. Indeed,
many social sciences have begun to explore the potential of relatively new technologies issued
from the neurosciences to understand many dimensions of human cognition and behavior, among
which perception and misperceptions, and decision making.
I discuss some different ways in which neuroscience can help entrepreneurship researchers to
understand certain pivotal entrepreneurship phenomena. In particular, I wish to share a body of
unpublished evidence on entrepreneurial brain cortical activity that tests the “mind” of the
entrepreneur with neuroscience tools. That is, we present early, exploratory evidence from a
series of studies that utilize technologies issued from the neurosciences and apply them to
questions of interest to entrepreneurship. Although relatively new for our field, these tools have
been validated in other disciplines such as economics and marketing, and have shown great
potential to help clarify questions such as how entrepreneurs perceive and act upon opportunities,
how they perceive them, what areas of their brain are mobilized when they do so, and whether
these differ from other, less entrepreneurial subjects. In addition, they can provide insight about
how entrepreneurship orientations are developed and reinforced positively or negatively, with a
great potential to modify the way entrepreneurship is taught across the world.
Early results of this on-going research program provide early evidence that
1) Entrepreneurs DO process information in a different way than control groups.
2) Those differences in information processing DO have consequences for their cognition and
behavior. Specifically, evidence indicates that entrepreneurs act earlier on certain stimulus, but
process their action slower than controls.
3) Faced with opportunities in a lab experiment, entrepreneurs are able to select a good
opportunity faster than control, and make fewer mistakes than controls.
4) Evidence, and prior research, would indicate that these factors are largely learned and
reinforced by practice.
These early results are encouraging for future research on entrepreneurship, and help triangulate
data and evidence found with other methods, and probably refine theory. By developing a more

accurate understanding of the ways in which entrepreneurship takes place in one´s brain, we
could test a multitude of questions that have only been approached tangentially through
methodologies that capture the phenomena partially, at best.
Finally, we offer insights about the issues and limitations of these methods, and provide
suggestions and advice to other researchers interested in the emerging field of
neuroentrepreneurship.
We next turn to a pair of studies that are still in progress
New Areas and Opportunities for Research: Affinity for Risk
Aparna Sud, MIT/Chile
Background
As we are entering an increasingly digital age marked by exponential advances in technology,
our labor dynamics have shifted remarkably. Machines, algorithms, and robots are replacing day-
to-day activities and it is becoming more and more vital for us to our ability to think globally,
systemically and creatively on the job as opposed to simply executing higher order functional
skills.
There has been a big spotlight recently on the “entrepreneurial mindset” that many are trying to
achieve. However, much is still unknown about the modality of thought for entrepreneurs versus
the neurotypical brain. If we can uncover more about the entrepreneurial brain and apply
principles of neural plasticity, the average person can exercise and activate their brain in
different fashions to strengthen newfound neural pathways. Doing so can lead to advanced neural
network formations attributing to an enhanced ability to perform complex cognitive skills,
thereby allowing each and every one of us to learn these certain entrepreneurial traits.
By linking areas of the brain activated during different functions in entrepreneurs, we may be
able to glean information on the key areas of the brain attributing to the entrepreneurial mindset,
allowing us to better define this mindset, identify areas of the brain to strengthen in order to
achieve this mindset, and develop key training activities to activate these areas. Taking the
viewpoint that the brain is in fact another muscle to be refined, "mapping" the brain of
entrepreneurs versus managers could have profound impact on the ability to realize the currently
intangible “entrepreneurial mindset” for our future leaders, innovators, and work force.

One specific arena of note is the intuitively pleasing that somehow entrepreneurs are inherently
risk-takers. Despite the vast empirical evidence that they are not, there is considerable evidence
of an affinity for uncertainty.
Entrepreneurial Affinity for Risk
Of particular interest to me is “brain mapping” affinity for risk in entrepreneurs. As an initial test
to research the biological and neural basis that drives a hypothesized high risk-taking behavior in
entrepreneurs and an uncanny ability to cope and respond favorably to uncertainty, activity in the
anterior cingulate cortex activity could be tested.
The ACC has shown to be related to decision-making and uncertainty, anticipation and
preparation before task performance, detection of errors from some standard, and regulation of
emotions. Activity in this brain region can therefore attribute to advanced adaptive behavior that
may be distinctly present in entrepreneurs as opposed to managers.
Peter Bryant’s team in Spain showed that the Stroop task can activate the ACC due to the nature
of this conflict resolution task, in addition to certain risky behaviors such as gambling. If one of
the above tasks is tested with entrepreneurs versus a control group of managers to determine
activity levels in the anterior cingulate cortex, then only we can begin to discover what
encompasses a true “entrepreneurial mindset” that is supported by hard neural scientific research.
(And, consider this in the context of Sahakian, et al.’s findings that entrepreneurs appear superior
to managers at “hot” cognition even where both groups were high-performers at cold cognition.)
Overall Impact for Businesses
If it is the case that ACC levels are heightened during the tested tasks, then the concept of brain
plasticity can be leveraged to develop a heightened affinity for risk in individuals with low
activity in this region by continual activation of the ACC. For instance, mediation exercises have
been found to activate the ACC, and can be implemented as a daily technique to further mature
the anterior cingulate cortex.
The overall impact of such research can be applied in several manners. As an example, many
large corporations are trying to become more innovative but desperately failing. However, it has
yet to be tested whether employees working within a corporation governed by restrictive
processes and clear functional roles are risk-averse due to the nature of their work and
environment. In this way, large companies may perhaps be killing the very entrepreneurial spirit
they seek to achieve. But if daily meditation exercises for instance can be integrated before
morning meetings, perhaps employees can retain certain entrepreneurial traits despite the “non-
entrepreneurial” red tape and processes of large companies.
Furthermore, activities that can hone the anterior cingulate cortex or other brain regions highly
developed in entrepreneurs can start to be implemented as an educational module to help develop

our next generation of leaders, movers, shakers equipped with 21st
century skills. The hope being
that such an application can perhaps lead to an enhanced work force and improved economic
state over time.
Of course, the foregoing is speculative and hinges on great empirical work being done. As such,
I look forward to comments and ideas from the panel and audience.
Aparna Sud bio
Aparna Sud graduated from MIT with a dual degree in Management Science and Neuroscience.
She is fascinated in the new field of neuroentrepreneurship and the potential of up and coming
research in its ability to apply scientific discoveries of the brain to improve businesses and drive
overall economic growth.
Aparna has work experience in various sized organizations ranging from small startups to a
Fortune 500 financial service company. During her most recent engagement at Pfizer she helped
develop and implement innovative strategic projects for their BioTherapeutics R&D division.
She is actively involved in the local and global entrepreneurial scene through different
organizations such as H@cking Medicine, helping promote healthcare innovation through
worldwide hackathons, and Female Entrepreneurs of the World, supporting woman founders and
entrepreneurs in different cities worldwide through insights, events, and research.
Neuro…creativity?
Dina Pereira, University of Beira, Portugal
What defines a creative person? What characterizes an entrepreneur? What lies in the genesis of
these? Is an entrepreneur a creative person? Is it mapped somewhere inside the brain – the
propensity to be creative and to be entrepreneur?
Creativity can be defined as the ability to produce responses that are novel and appropriate to a
situation. Several studies point to diverse findings, suggesting that there exists an association
between creativity and 7R polymorphism in the dopamine receptor D4 gene (DRD4) (Mayseless
et al, 2013), others state that gray matter volume inside the brain affects individuals’ creativity
levels, that oxytonergic circuitry enables the day-to-day creativity humans (Li et al, 2014), that
some normal brains, performing better on standard creativity measures, are more “disinhibited”
in their organization, with certain regions having lower cortical volume (Jung et al., 2010c),
lower white matter fidelity (Jung et al, 2010a), and (at or below a verbal IQ of 116) anterior
cingulate biochemistry tending to “gate” frontal information flow (Jung et al, 2009a), that greater
functioning in frontoparietal and temporal regions, including the cingulate cortex (left anterior,
BA 32), hippocampus and amygdala, dorsolateral regions (Brodmann areas [BA] 8, 9, and 47),
lingual gyrus, temporal pole and orbitofrontal regions are related to creativity (Haller, 2014).

Authors like Huettel et al. (2006) defend that decision making processes under ambiguity and
uncertainty are correlated to activities in the amygdala, orbitofrontal cortex, inferior frontal
gyrus, and insula. Additionally, a recent study (Lawrence et al., 2008) compared serial
entrepreneurs to top managers and concluded that successful entrepreneurs and managers shared
more ability at rational analysis (the so called “cold cognition”). Notwithstanding, entrepreneurs
denoted an important focus in analyses that engaged both rational and emotional thinking (the
named “hot” cognition). They argue that 'hot' and 'cold' cognition tend to occur in different areas
of the brain's front lobes. Zald et al (2009) stated that entrepreneurs are different from the general
population in the numbers and density of dopamine receptors in their cerebral cortex. For
instance, Sheeran et al. (2014) found that changing risk appraisals affects intentions and
behaviors.
As seen below neuroscience focuses on the “ultimate black box” – the brain - and infers
information from images of brain activity and similar techniques (Camerer et al. 2005),
providing alternative and novel ways to conceptualize and measure important facets of
entrepreneurial decision making. Scholars like Baron (2006) defend that neuroscientific
methodology is well-suited to research the pre-entrepreneurial decision processes and the
cognitive and emotional processes underlying them. Others like Cacioppo and Petty (1985), or
Camerer (2006) argue that if perception of an opportunity is of extreme importance, one should
identify the neurological markers of opportunity perception in real time and of their antecedents.
Neuroscientists started to cross frontiers between neuroscience and human learning in the
assessment of educational activities (Sigman et al., 2014). Costa et al. (2013) also stress that we
must link learning activities to change in mental prototypes of “entrepreneur” and “opportunity”.
As so, to study entrepreneurial aptitudes we must use theories and tools from neuroscience.
McGuire and Kahle (2014), for example, argue how how very simple cuing can have an
important effect on economic judgments.
Shyti (2014) demonstrated that manipulating entrepreneurial over-confidence can affect choice
under ambiguity. In short, looking inside the black box at the microfoundations of
entrepreneurial cognition (and action) through neuroscience is currently pointing to new insights
on what is really underneath entrepreneurial mindset and is also detecting how it can change and
how we can rigorously measure it. It can also give us insights on how to better educate
entrepreneurs.
In this project we intend to understand the relations between creativity and entrepreneurial
aptitude, by using the approaches and contributions from the neurosciences. We have the
intention to provide insights for teaching entrepreneurial and creative mindsets by focusing on
neuroscientific approaches. We will cross concepts like creativity, entrepreneurial aptitude,
genetics, creativity training by:
(i) Realizing a theoretical/background analysis

(ii) Establishing a framing on scales of creativity and entrepreneurial aptitude
(iii) Select among a sample of “creative people and non-creative ones, assessing them with the
creativity scales selected
(iv) Select a sample of entrepreneurs and aspiring entrepreneurs and test their “creativity”,
comparing with non-entrepreneurs, assessing them with the creativity scales and the entrepreneurial
aptitude scales selected
(v) Use a sample test of small groups of 3 to 5 individuals
(vi) Mapping both samples, by using gene testing
(vii) Apply the course Applied NeuroCreativity to a sub-sample from the above samples
(viii) Apply transcranial magnetic stimulation to a sub-sample from the above samples of at least
10 individuals
(ix) Apply both techniques to a major sample composed on the above samples
(x) Mapping again the genetic of both groups and assess creativity and entrepreneurial aptitude
also by reassessing with the creativity and entrepreneurial aptitude scales/measures
This study is still in its genesis and we are eager to get input from our new friends on the panel
and our future friends in the audience.
Finally, I would like to again note that we have four discussion facilitators in reserve to be
deployed as needed, each with their own “Feynman Question” for the panel, individually and
collectively. As you will see, they will keep us focused on the implications for entrepreneurial
learning. They will also “work the crowd” to ensure audience questions get answered.
Discussants
Beate Cesinger, New Design University, Austria
Dr. Cesinger has strong interests in deep entrepreneurial beliefs as they relate to the Dark
Triad (e.g., narcissism).
Silvia Fernandes Costa, Portugal/Netherlands
Dr. Costa presented in 2014 on how entrepreneurial training can develop mental
prototypes at a deep level.
Gabi Kaffka, University of Twente, Netherlands
Dr. Kaffka also presented in 2014 on the impact of accelerator training on entrepreneurs’
deep beliefs.
Andrew Maxwell, York University, Canada
Dr. Maxwell is a recent Heizer Award winner, a successful tech entrepreneur, award-
winning teacher and founder of the Canadian Innovation Centre/

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