Five Minds for the Entrepreneurial Future: Cognitive Skills as the Intellectual Foundation for Next Generation Entrepreneurship Curricula

Abstract

This article proposes a new perspective on entrepreneurship curriculum design, one that is founded upon the emerging research into the cognitive skills that successful entrepreneurs possess and deploy. Specifically, this article utilises Gardner’s ‘minds’ approach as a theoretical framework specific to the challenge of developing curriculum for teaching entrepreneurship. Following Gardner, each entrepreneurial mind developed in this article is a meta-category representation of a host of cognitive sub-skills that have been identified through research to be unique to successful entrepreneurs. The five minds for the entrepreneurial future are: (1) The Opportunity Recognising Mind, (2) The Designing Mind, (3) The Risk Managing Mind, (4) The Resilient Mind and (5) The Effectuating Mind. Taken as a whole, these five minds provide an intellectual foundation for entrepreneurship education and curriculum development. The articulation of the aggregated cognitive sub-skills in terms of entrepreneurial minds provides curriculum designers with a handy taxonomy, not unlike those used by general education curriculum designers. In addition, each of the entrepreneurial minds is based on a rich and growing literature that focuses on the cognitive skills that successful entrepreneurs possess.