Management students’ entrepreneurial mindset : What kind of factors affect their opportunity recognition capabilities?

Abstract

The current complex and dynamic markets need business professionals with an entrepreneurial mindset to recognize opportunities. I decided to explore the cognitive factors associated with the management students’ opportunity recognition capability. First, I use the managerial cognition capabilities, pattern recognition, structural alignment, and mental model theories, to make a non-linear model of the opportunity recognition process. Second, I sampled professionals and technicians who are currently studying engineering as a second profession and engineering post-degree students. Through a self-applied survey, I measured the level of the relationship between self-reported alertness activities (AL) and self-perception of opportunities capabilities (OR). Also, I measured other variables such as age, work experiences, tenure, educational levels, and functional specialization. Third, I used mental model proxies such as entrepreneurial knowledge (EK), entrepreneurial education (EE), and entrepreneurship experience to measure their effect on OR. In general work conclusion, time may be enough to build mental models with a positive effect on individuals' alertness and entrepreneurial knowledge, but opportunity recognition entails that the content of management students’ mental models should be specific prototypes or exemplars to match with market failures that they can exploit. So, Higher Education Institutions must innovate because the traditional curriculum does not expose management students to entrepreneurial education.