Non-local intuition: developing electro-physiological measures of decision making serial entrepreneurs

Understanding how and why entrepreneurs decide to pursue one venture as opposed to another has managed to elude entrepreneurship researchers for as long as entrepreneurship research has taken place. Understanding why entrepreneurs choose one venture as opposed to another is a central focus for this paper. Entrepreneurial activity is reflected in an adequate supply of opportunities therefore it is primarily concerned with the discovery and exploitation of profitable opportunities. Many researchers have written on the topic: discussions range from understanding the personality of the entrepreneur, the heuristics of the opportunity selection process to developing an understanding of the cognitive processes involved in opportunity recognition. By contrast, recently there has been an interest in the role and importance of intuition as an adjunct to the decision making process in business. A paper by Chell & Allinson (2000) proposed that entrepreneurs are more likely to resort to intuition in the opportunity selection process because of time pressures and the voluminous amount of information which contributes to the need to find an alternative approach to making decisions quickly. This paper argues that entrepreneurial alertness extends beyond the boundaries of conscious awareness of recognition, development and evaluation of opportunities. A recent experimental test (McCraty et al 2004) on a group of meditators, has found that the heart-autonomic nervous system appears to receive intuitive information before the brain actions the information and that intuition is not confined to cognitive based perception but involves the entire psychophysiological system, manifesting through a wide range of emotional feelings and physiological changes. The purpose of this paper is to both demonstrate and evaluate the significance of electro-physiological measures of intuition in the decision making processes of serial entrepreneurs.