A microfoundational account of organizational innovation capability should explain which individual-level attributes distinguish ideators who are better able to generate, select, and elaborate ideas into investment-worthy business concepts. Yet research remains fragmented because prior studies often examine isolated traits and fail to distinguish among key creative ideation outcomes. Drawing on Trait Activation Theory, we conceptualize venture ideation as a staged, trait-relevant context in which cognitive abilities, personality traits, and creative domain experience are differentially expressed across successive stages. We examine this theorizing using a task-based assessment that separates idea quantity, idea originality, and idea quality. Innovation-exposed experts, including R&D experts, managers, and entrepreneurs (n = 208), generated multiple business ideas for a disruptive technology, selected their most promising idea, and refined it into a product or service concept incorporating core elements of a viable business model. Experienced technology-focused venture capitalists evaluated idea quality by indicating whether these concepts merited investment interest. We quantified semantic distinctiveness using multiple large language models as a semantic proxy for selected-idea originality. Divergent thinking predicted idea quantity, but not investor-evaluated idea quality. In contrast, investment-interest judgments were predicted by ideators’ Openness to Experience, creative domain experience, and convergent thinking ability. Overall, our findings show that early-stage venture ideation is not a unitary creative process. Different attributes help ideators generate many ideas and develop selected ideas into investment-worthy business model concepts, advancing a microfoundational account of organizational innovation capability in technology-based venture creation.

PurposeMotivation can serve as the engine that turns intention into action, and, as such, is indispensable in the early phase of the entrepreneurial process, where opportunity recognition and exploitation are key. However, research in this area has so far shed a selective spotlight on specific facets of entrepreneurial motivation, whereas the consideration of basic motives has been widely neglected. Hence, the purpose of this paper is to illuminate the basic motivational foundations of one core aspect of entrepreneurial behavior, namely opportunity recognition.Design/methodology/approachThe study examined how motivation influences the process of recognizing and exploiting entrepreneurial opportunities in a sample of 312 managing directors and managing partners of small and medium-sized enterprises. Opportunity recognition and exploitation were assessed by two different measures: one evaluating the objective number of recognized and realized business opportunities, the other assessing the perceived proficiency in identifying and exploiting entrepreneurial opportunities. Implicit and explicit facets of basic motivation were measured using a comprehensive assessment of human needs.FindingsFindings show that entrepreneurs' achievement motive is an important driver in both the identification and exploitation of opportunity. The power motive affects the perceived ability to exploit business opportunities. Interestingly, the explicit affiliation motive showed an inhibitory effect on the perceived ability of opportunity identification, whereas implicit affiliation motive is affecting the number of recognized and realized business opportunities positively.Originality/valueThis research clearly highlights the preeminence of basic motivational factors in explaining individual early-stage entrepreneurial behavior, making them a prime target for training interventions.

Cognitive and behavioral factors are becoming increasingly relevant in research on the emergence of entrepreneurial action. To date, little research has examined whether an entrepreneurial mindset can be affected by targeted entrepreneurial priming interventions, even though the activation of specific mental concepts possesses the power to stimulate entrepreneurial self-concepts. Such a mechanism is also inherent in certain academic teaching methods like use-case application and storytelling. We developed and applied an entrepreneurial priming intervention, aimed at increasing the level of entrepreneurial self-efficacy and the attitude towards starting a new business of the priming receivers. Therefore, an experimental study with entrepreneurship students, randomly assigned to either the trial group ( n = 47) or the active control group ( n = 51), was conducted. Both our hypotheses are supported, as our findings show a higher level of entrepreneurial self-efficacy and a more positive attitude toward launching a business venture for receivers of a semantical, entrepreneurial prime than for members of the non-primed active control group. These results provide insights into the triggering of students’ entrepreneurial cognition, and help to develop a more profound understanding of the effectiveness of common teaching methods like use-case application and storytelling, both within and beyond an entrepreneurial educational setting.