Neuroentrepreneurship: an integrative review and research agenda

ABSTRACT

There is emergent literature that converges from neuroscience and entrepreneurship research, but the definitions and interlinkages are still inconsistent. We conduct a systematic literature review of 167 papers on the interface between neuroscience and entrepreneurship to address this. We observe the literature trends examining the interlinkages between neuroscience and entrepreneurial intention through six antecedents, namely - molecular neuroscience, systems neuroscience, behavioral neuroscience, cognitive neuroscience, social neuroscience, and computational neuroscience. Our findings suggest that entrepreneurial intention impacts entrepreneurial activity through five factors, including (1) opportunity recognition, (2) evaluation and risk-taking, (3) entrepreneurial cognition, (4) entrepreneurial behavior, and (5) entrepreneurial decision-making. From our discussions, the links among the neural factors affecting entrepreneurship are identified, and a research agenda highlighting a pathway for future studies is proposed.

KEYWORDS:

• Decision-making
• Entrepreneurial intention
• Entrepreneurship
• Neuroscience
• Opportunity recognition

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

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Notes

1. The human nervous system is examined at several different scales, ranging from the molecules that determine the functional properties of neurons to the large systems in the brain that underlie cognition and behaviour (Bear, Connors & Paradiso 2005).

2. The term phenotype refers to observable traits of an organism (Brooker 2018).

3. Genetic programming combines the expressive high-level symbolic representations of computer programs with the near-optimal efficiency of learning of Holland’s genetic algorithm (Bian, Li, and Cong 1998).