Founders

CHAPTER 1

Motivational Traits of Prospective Entrepreneurs

Introduction

Gartner described the “trait approach” to studying entrepreneurship as based on the assumption that “the entrepreneur is . . . a particular personality type, a fixed state of existence, a desirable species that one might find a picture of in a field guide” and explained that research based on this approach has necessarily focused on identifying and enumerating a set of characteristics (i.e., traits) that describe this idealized type of person we call an “entrepreneur.”1 Gartner described the activities of researchers quite simply asking the question: “Who is an entrepreneur?” This approach assumes that a person, the “entrepreneur,” is the basic unit of ...