Understanding the entrepreneur: entrepreneurial attributes, experience and skills

Ever since the appearance of Professor David McClelland's studies on achievement motivation, a subfield of entrepreneurship research has been the search for the prototype entrepreneurial personality or the ideal personality attributes of the entrepreneur. The purpose of this article is twofold: (1) to examine how the search for a prototype entrepreneur has been wrong–headed and (2) to argue that the focus of entrepreneurship education and training programmes should be skill development, not behaviour modification. This is not to suggest that the personality and behaviour of the entrepreneur are unimportant to our field. The entrepreneur is a focal point of our field and there is a need to continue to seek understanding of the diversity of entrepreneurial behaviour and how that behaviour shapes the firm, and how it is shaped by the larger cultural environment.