Why do wantrepreneurs fail to take actions? Moderators of the link between intentions and entrepreneurial actions at the early stage of venturing

Abstract

AbstractThriving entrepreneurship is a necessary condition of long-term sustainability in all modern economies. However, many entrepreneurs-to-be fail to take real actions in their transition from dreamers to doers. In this paper, we demonstrate that there are significant gaps in the current understanding of the important pre-entrepreneurship stages of starting new companies. In particular, these gaps include a proper understanding of moderators such as procrastination, commitment, and acquiring entrepreneurial knowledge from informal and unstructured sources. A promising way to fill these gaps is researching a promising yet little-known group – wantrepreneurs. Our qualitative study of a group of wantrepreneurs who seriously consider becoming entrepreneurs but fail to take any concrete steps allowed us to propose a number of hypotheses in this area and propose an extension of the Entrepreneurial Event Model.