About this Research Topic

Background

Entrepreneurship is a process for engaging people in the social economy and mainstreaming them. This mechanism contributes to population integration, cultural formation, and social mobility. However, the process of entrepreneurship is fraught with risks arising from vague opportunities, market uncertainty, capital market risks, and changes in the external environment. Entrepreneurs need to recognize and solve problems on their own at each stage of their start-up to ensure its smooth development. They thus need to ponder thoroughly each business opportunity and design a reasonable profit model for market competition.

Entrepreneurs need to act as concrete practitioners instead of rational thinkers when transforming their start-ups opportunity from a mere concept into a concrete reality. In comparison with the average employee, entrepreneurs suffer from a high level of psychological stress and have to adjust their intrinsic motivations and emotions to calmly respond to stress. They also need to manage the negative effects of the pressure caused by frequents obstacles. The necessity of entrepreneurial psychology is highlighted through the discussion and exploration surrounding the psychological activities underlying entrepreneurial behavior.

As a relatively young research field, the psychology of entrepreneurship is conducive to understanding successful entrepreneurship from economical, societal, organizational, and individual perspectives. Psychologists can facilitate our understanding of entrepreneurial career choices and the key driving factors for successful entrepreneurship. Moreover, the research on entrepreneurship can also provide new insights into psychology. For instance, entrepreneurial activities reflect the constant changes in their respective area of work. Previous psychological studies have mainly examined the psychological constructs of entrepreneurs, including personality and social factors, cognitive factors, and affective factors. However, many scholars believe that entrepreneurship is an ecosystem that includes creativity, innovation, start-up, makers, venture capital, and other key elements. The entrepreneurial ecosystem is a combination of local cultural views, social networks, investment capital, universities, and proactive economic policies. All these elements come together to create an environment that supports innovative enterprise.

The aim of this Research Topic is to examine the different stages of entrepreneurship activities from a psychological perspective in the hope of fostering interdisciplinary academic dialogues. We thus aspire for scholars to discuss entrepreneurial ecosystem from the perspectives of Organizational Psychology, Educational Psychology, Cultural Psychology, or Personality and Social Psychology. We welcome empirical and theoretical research, perspective papers, as well as review articles. We support authors to broach essential questions, such as the methodological issues of different entrepreneurship activities research. Another important topic that could benefit from further investigations is the expansion of creativity, innovation, entrepreneurship, maker, or venture capital as a global phenomenon. These areas of interest are simply examples and do not constitute limitations.

Keywords: innovation, entrepreneurship, maker, venture capital, creativity

Important note: All contributions to this Research Topic must be within the scope of the section and journal to which they are submitted, as defined in their mission statements. Frontiers reserves the right to guide an out-of-scope manuscript to a more suitable section or journal at any stage of peer review.

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