Cognitive Maps in Entrepreneurship: Understanding Contexts

In the original chapter we showed that cognitive maps were a viable tool for examining the cognitive structures of entrepreneurs and how we could reveal the differences in these structures between entrepreneurs and managers. Since then we have seen a growing interest toward entrepreneurial cognition (Mitchell et al. 2014), where it has become highly obvious that understanding cognitive differences is central for understanding what, how, why, and when entrepreneurs do. Or how do entrepreneurs think, before they do, and how does that thought impact their doing? In fact, we somewhat provocatively pointed out that managers, and especially CEOs have been portrayed as those that cognize, that is, those who decide and think (and implying that entrepreneurs were not). Yet research into entrepreneurial cognition—which is still rather recent—have argued that entrepreneurs do think differently and structure their realities differently (Busenitz and Barney 1997; Mitchell et al. 2002, 2007; Carsrud et al. 2009; Brännback and Carsrud 2009) In this chapter, we presented cognitive maps as an efficient tool and method for analyzing the differences. Cognitive maps were presented as a method that originated from work by Kelly in 1955 (Kelly 1955) and that it had successfully been applied in, for example, political sciences (Axelrod 1976), but frequently in strategic management (Eden 1988; Huff 1990; Brännback and Malaska 1995; Brännback 1996; Hodgkinson 1997).