Do cultural and creative entrepreneurs make affectively driven decisions? Not when they evaluate their opportunities

Abstract

Our research studies the influence of positive affect on entrepreneurs' evaluations of opportunities (i.e. novelty assessments and entrepreneurial selection) as well as how this influence may be different for entrepreneurs belonging to cultural and creative industries. Drawing on arguments on the role of affect in cognition and considering the particular situational and individual-level factors of entrepreneurship in cultural and creative industries, we hypothesize that positive affect influences entrepreneurs' opportunity evaluation. We also hypothesize that this effect of positive affect is barely present for cultural and creative entrepreneurs. We test our hypotheses in a sample of nascent entrepreneurs who took part in entrepreneurship training programmes in six incubators in Spain, who we asked to evaluate their own opportunity. Our results show that positive affect positively impacts the perceived novelty and entrepreneurial selection of non-creative entrepreneurs though this impact is limited for cultural and creative entrepreneurs.