Master's Thesis from the year 2017 in the subject Business economics -
Company formation, Business Plans, grade: 1,0, Technical University of
Munich (TUM School of Management), language: English, abstract: This
thesis is approaching this issue of opportunity recognition based on
team creative cognition and a product-oriented view at creativity, and
thus at how the team discussion process of idea-generation is shaping
entrepreneurial opportunities. Substantial gains can be made by
entrepreneurial teams when recognizing promising business ideas.
Academic research at the intersection of entrepreneurship and cognition
has thus recently focused on how entrepreneurial teams generate business
ideas and opportunities in order to understand the team decision
processes of recognizing original and feasible opportunities. Therefore,
creativity (original and feasible outcome) in its multifaceted cognitive
manner plays an essential role in generating ideas. However, empirical
research on the influence of entrepreneurial team cognition (ETC) on the
generation, recognition, and configuration of such ideas is still
lacking. Based on existing literature in creative cognition the entire
idea-generation process is operationalized through convergent and
divergent thinking phases and analyzed through conducting a quantitative
experiment to examine possible relationships between the created
variables. It turns out, that in convergent thinking, entrepreneurial
teams generated and recognized less original but more feasible idea sets
and final opportunities. In this regard, divergent thinking has an
enhancement effect on original sets of ideas. These first findings are
finally discussed against the background of ETC and shown to help to
facilitate entrepreneurship research in this context to new insights
separated from personal creativity skills, and further to assist
entrepreneurs in recognizing opportunities in a practical way.
