| dc.description.abstract | There is a lack of research exploring the diverse motivations and reasons for why certain
individuals decide to engage in entrepreneurship while others do not. Entrepreneurship is
argued to be a key driver of economic growth, and it is vital to understand this why in order to
facilitate for continuous development of entrepreneurial action. The term "entrepreneurship"
is ambiguous, and there are several approaches that propose different ways of viewing the
entrepreneur. This study explores entrepreneurial motivation amongst different types of
entrepreneurs as well as factors that may influence motivational change.
To explore entrepreneurial motivation, we conducted a survey in order to retrieve information
from entrepreneurs representing three diverse cohorts: British Tech, Norwegian Art and
Young South African. The participants were asked to define their main motivation, rate
different types of motivation and to outline whether their motivation had changed since the
start-up. The responses revealed that the entrepreneurs were strongly motivated by intrinsic
factors, such as self-realization, creating innovative products and controlling their own time.
This contradicts to the traditional view of the entrepreneur as an extrinsically driven
individual, mainly concerned with generating monetary rewards. However, our results also
revealed considerable variation of motivation types between the different cohorts. These
findings emphasize the importance of exploring the complexity of entrepreneurial motivation
in order to understand what motivates different types of entrepreneurs.
Additionally, we examined the influence of financial, practical, personal and partnership
challenges on motivational change. In this part, our analysis did not reveal any remarkable
findings. However, the lack of significant results contributes to the assumption that the reasons
for motivational change are many and complex. Hence, it may be necessary to study
motivational change in a broader context in order to reveal why change occurs. This entails
examining the interaction of internal and external factors shaping the environment of the
business. | en_US |
