Appendix A: Measuring Entrepreneurship at the Individual Level

I believe to adequately measure individual entrepreneurship you have to address at least four aspects of systematic behavior that constitute an entrepreneurial event. In this section I just briefly want to touch on some ideas for measuring that phenomenon. Many of the nuances about measuring entrepreneurship will become clearer as you read the following chapters, but we can deal with some basic behavioral issues here. First, recognize that most theorists agree that entrepreneurship has cognitive aspects that we need to assess (i.e., the person intentionally tries to have “some” impact, to leverage the environment). Individual potential, aptitude and other predispositions are assumed to be needed in order to organize thoughts and intentions strategically, to be entrepreneurial. If you don’t buy into this, reading further is futile. Buying this, also assume that it’s important to take one further step; that is, to measure and study these factors in all types of people, including non-entrepreneurs as well as potential and actual entrepreneurs. Measurements of individual predispositions tend to require a self-report of some kind (conversely, actual behavior is better measured by some sort of observation or outcome measurement). Predispositions (the intentioned drive to do something) arise both from overt intellectual factors like personality (e.g. as measured by Myers-Briggs type scales), goals, ambitions and inclinations (perceived entrepreneurial yearnings), and latent factors like spontaneity to act entrepreneurially when nature calls us to be creative or competitive. All levels of predispositions are thus measured most directly by asking respondents about psychological progression through situations, goals, aspirations, motivations towards actions.

Secondly, we need to address the more behavioral aspects, and the extent of actual behaviors by actual managers, the degree, that they structure the system to be an entrepreneurial event. Bhide suggests that the study of entrepreneurship requires measurements through time of actual e-activities that are evolving as events move the idea to start-up organization and then through the life cycle phases and contexts such as: initial growth, rapid growth, mature growth, stability and even decline. E-activities should be evident by real, observable behaviors. In Exhibit I-5, I present an initial pass at a three-step approach to measuring important entrepreneurial dimensions related to predispositions and behaviors.