Winter, 2002 93The failure of past "entrepreneurial personality"-based research to clearly distinguish the unique contributions to the entrepreneurial process of entrepreneurs as people, has created a vacuum within the entrepreneurship literature that has been waiting to be filled. Recently, the application of ideas and concepts from cognitive science has gained currency within entrepreneurship research, as evidenced by the growing accumulation of successful studies framed in entrepreneurial cognition terms. In this article we reexamine "the people side of entrepreneurship" by summarizing the state of play within the entrepreneurial cognition research stream, and by integrating the five articles accepted for publication in this special issue into this ongoing narrative. We believe that the constructs, variables, and proposed relationships under development within the cognitive perspective offer research concepts and techniques that are well suited to the analysis of problems that require better explanations of the contributions to entrepreneurship that are distinctly human.

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In this article, we take note of advances in the entrepreneurial cognition research stream. In doing so, we bring increasing attention to the usefulness of entrepreneurial cognition research. First, we offer and develop a central research question to further enable entrepreneurial cognition inquiry. Second, we present the conceptual background and some representative approaches to entrepreneurial cognition research that form the context for this question. Third, we introduce the articles in this Special Issue as framed by the central question and approaches to entrepreneurial cognition research, and suggest how they further contribute to this developing stream. Finally, we offer our views concerning the challenges and opportunities that await the next generation of entrepreneurial cognition scholarship. We therefore invite (and seek to enable) the growing community of entrepreneurship researchers from across multiple disciplines to further develop the "thinkingdoing" link in entrepreneurship research. It is our goal to offer colleagues an effective research staging point from which they may embark upon many additional research expeditions and investigations involving entrepreneurial cognition.

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In this study we examine three research questions concerned with entrepreneurial cognition and culture: (1) Do entrepreneurs have cognitions distinct from those of other business people? (2) To what extent are entrepreneurial cognitions universal? and (3) To what extent do entrepreneurial cognitions differ by national culture? These questions were investigated in an exploratory study using data collected from 990 respondents in eleven countries. We find, in answer to question one, that individuals who possess “professional entrepreneurial cognitions” do indeed have cognitions that are distinct from business non-entrepreneurs. In answer to question two, we report further confirmation of a universal culture of entrepreneurship. And in answer to question three, we find (a) observed differences on eight of the ten proposed cognition constructs, and (b) that the pattern of country representation within an empirically developed set of entrepreneurial archetypes does indeed differ among countries. Our results suggest increasing credibility for the cognitive explanation of entrepreneurial phenomena in the cross-cultural setting.