Staying Alert and Being Imaginative: Exploring Entrepreneurial Thinking in Depth
Business life of an entrepreneur depends on the products that he/she introduces to the market. More innovative the products are, higher are the chances of success of the business. What enables the entrepreneurs to come up with such innovative ideas and how that impacts the products that they develop? This question has been intriguing researchers over and over during the last few years. The pieces of this puzzle rest on entrepreneurial alertness and imaginativeness. While alertness is the ability of the entrepreneur to identify profitable opportunities that have been overlooked by others, imaginativeness is the ability to create prototypes of products in mind even before the actual products are made. Exciting evidence from my research with 273 entrepreneurs over a period of 11 years (2004-2015) across North America, suggest that alertness does lead to innovative product introductions, faster product developments and higher number of products developed by the entrepreneurs. However, it hurts the entrepreneur after a certain level (hyper-alertness) due to the overcrowding of ideas and information overload.
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Smita Srivastava
Management
Smita Srivastava is a fourth-year PhD student in Entrepreneurship at Carson College of Business. Originally from India, Smita received her master’s degree in Human Resources from Michigan State University. Her research area centers around entrepreneurial cognition and decision making. She is investigating entrepreneurial thinking in terms of how alertness and imaginativeness are shaping the innovativeness of the products that are being introduced to the market. She is also involved in investigating the temporal effects of seed financing on startups and exploring its connection to startup failures.