Entrepreneurial Cognition in Serial and Parallel Entrepreneurs: The Necessity to Segregate Success and Failure

Entrepreneurship and the cognitive processes of entrepreneurs have drawn the attention of researchers in recent years and resulted in the tremendous growth of the segment in the academic literature. To date, researchers have not clearly identify that entrepreneurial element that makes entrepreneurs different from others. This study reviews the literature on serial, habitual, and parallel or portfolio entrepreneurship and not only argues the importance of differentiating between them but also identifying failure versus success when conducting research, especially when researching cognition. The identifying entrepreneurial element that researchers seek lies deep within the metacognitive processes of multi-success entrepreneurs; those who have demonstrated the repeated ability to succeed. Many extant entrepreneurship studies are inconclusive or misleading due to sampling error because they report findings from samples where, based on widely known statistics, most of the entrepreneurs eventually failed or just got lucky once. This paper also suggests that successful serial or parallel, labeled multi-success in this paper, entrepreneurs engage in pessimistic falsification, not excessive optimism, during the early stages of opportunity evaluation and they often engage in entrepreneurial fishing through the allocation of specific but limited resources to test the waters before proceeding with new ventures.