Author(s): Héctor Montiel-Campos
The purpose of this study was to investigate whether cognitive style and entrepreneurial alertness are important in identifying university students with the potential to recognize business opportunities. The study also investigated whether these constructs discriminate between individuals studying in business and engineering schools. Data were obtained from students involved in a business school (n=117) and an engineering school (n=75), both at a private university in Mexico. A control group of non-students also formed part of the study, thus providing a comparison between the scores of the target population and the general population (n=51). The results indicate that students were more intuitive than non-students, but it was not possible to identify a significant difference in the entrepreneurial alertness between both groups. Likewise, results show that it was not possible to confirm the difference in the cognitive styles between business and engineering students. Results also show that more intuitive students exhibited higher levels of entrepreneurial alertness and that the students in business school exhibited higher entrepreneurial alertness than the students in engineering school. The findings of this study suggest that cognitive style may be helpful in discerning whether students have the ability to recognize business opportunities, which is an important topic within the field of entrepreneurship.