Developing entrepreneurial intuition through a new training programme

Abstract

Entrepreneurs often face environments that are highly fluid and characterised by uncertainties. Despite these circumstances, inaction or failure to respond rapidly can translate into costly mistakes or the loss of opportunities. In such conditions, intuition can lend itself to certain entrepreneurial tasks more effectively than analysis and has been found to play a key role in the entrepreneurial process. A small group of authors have endeavoured to outline guidelines and principles aimed at the development of intuition. Yet, their effectiveness remains largely unexplored, with little to no empirical evidence to back their legitimacy. Moreover, these guidelines have not been specifically adapted to the domain of entrepreneurship and entrepreneurial intuition. In order to address these gaps, this study developed, implemented and evaluated an entrepreneurial intuition training programme on the basis of a six-step outline proposed by Baldacchino (2019), which was adopted as the conceptual framework. A mixed methods design was employed to elicit feedback from 12 entrepreneurship students and novice entrepreneurs as training participants, as well as from five academic educators within the field of entrepreneurship. Training participants completed the Rational-Experiential Inventory (REI-40: Pacini and Epstein, 1999) together with feedback forms, whilst the educators participated in semi-structured interviews. Both groups of participants evaluated the effectiveness of the programme very positively. In addition, training participants experienced an increase in their dispositional preference towards intuition when comparing Experientiality scores prior and post training. The study consequently indicates that intuition can be enhanced and developed through the proposed training programme.