Who becomes an entrepreneur? Researchers have found that people from a wide variety of groups—from young to old, with minimal education to higher education, male and female, and from all ethnic groups—have attempted to launch their own business ideas. With such variety, researchers have looked for what those people have in common. A major commonality has been how they think: cognition. Their motivations may also differ, from desire to be wealthy or famous to fixing a social problem, from being one's own boss to being a boss over others, from living up to expectations of others to carving out a specific kind of identity, from job satisfaction to simply having a job with an income.

Entrepreneurs must be able to recognize, discover, and create business opportunities ...