Entrepreneurial motivation for engaging in business creation : a study of the composition and complexity of entrepreneurial motivation and motivational change

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.