Chapter 8: The Dark Side of the Entrepreneur: Aligning Dreams and Business Ideas Through Education

How do entrepreneurs formulate a business? What affects the way they realize their business ideas? According to managerial literature, the idea that drives an entrepreneur could be influenced by several factors, such as personality, background and experience, emotions, cognitive psychological determinants of business ideas, and even company strategies. The literature is divided about which factors are most important in encouraging people to establish new entrepreneurial initiatives. Research aimed at understanding entrepreneurs is similarly inconclusive.

More generally, the determinants of entrepreneurs’ attitudes and behaviors have been investigated by many scholars from various countries and fields, with a view to explaining the phenomenon from different perspectives. For instance, Simpeh (2011) summarized previous research on the topic and identified six different theories used to explain the phenomenon. These were economic, psychological, sociological, anthropological, opportunity-based, and resource-based entrepreneurship theories. Here, we use a psychological perspective to overcome the problems of the traditional behavioral-cognitive approach. Some types of cognition are suitable for explaining entrepreneurs’ attitudes and behaviors, and distinguishing them from other people, but this approach stresses the relevance of feelings, affect, emotion and passion in the entrepreneurship process. In particular, the psychoanalytic perspective enables us to explain the determinants of entrepreneurial attitudes and behaviors. It stresses Freudian and Jungian views of dream interpretation, to help us understand how entrepreneurs convert their dreams into business ideas. Most psychoanalytic studies in organizational research have investigated how group dynamics, leadership, power dysfunctions, and emotional human subjectivity affect organizations (Fotaki, Long, & Schwartz, 2012). We, however, stress the psychoanalytic approach to explore mutual influences among dreams, business ideas and education.