Founder passion, neural engagement and informal investor interest in startup pitches: An fMRI study

By Scott A. Shane, Will Drover, David Clingingsmith, Moran Cerf. 2020

93 citations recorded by the source corpus.

Abstract We explore how variation in entrepreneurs' displayed passion affects informal investor interest in start-up ventures by examining neural responses to entrepreneurs' pitches using functional Magnetic Resonance Imaging (fMRI). We find that founders displaying high passion increase investor neural engagement by 39% and investor interest in the venture by 26% over those displaying low passion. A one standard deviation increase in neural engagement is associated with an 8% percent increase in investors' interest in investing in a start-up company relative to the mean. Moreover, our findings indicate that neural engagement may account for some of the effect of founder passion on investor interest. Our study has implications for both research on, and the practice of, entrepreneurship.

Subfields: Accounting, Management of Technology and Innovation

View Paper: https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/74fb6606ba8218d78084dea1410493daad8be029

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In Accounting

In Management of Technology and Innovation

Citations in the corpus

The Psychology of Entrepreneurship (2020, background): “For instance, although studies have reported that entrepreneurs exhibit distinctive activity in certain regions of the brain relative to their counterparts, we need to know more about the implications of this neural activity for entrepreneurship (Laureiro-Martinez et al., 2014; Nofal et al., 2018; S”