Darker cells mean a higher score for this topic on that metric.
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Quick answers
Does this atlas rank groups by IQ, race or nation?
No. Pathways and evidence stay individual. Scores are browsing aids — never group biological or racial ranks.
Did Schumpeter define a psychological type?
He defined a function in capitalism — new combinations. Later popularisers turned it into a personality.
What is effectuation?
Sarasvathy’s claim that expert entrepreneurs often start from means, not a fixed goal. A research programme, still debated.
Do startup courses create talent?
They create vocabulary and networks. They cannot delete survivor bias or local law.
Is this leadership talent?
Overlap in coordination. Entrepreneurship adds residual claim on the downside — a different skin in the game.
Why is evidence scored modest?
Definitions wander (self-employed vs innovator vs VC-backed). Outcomes are noisy. Hero books outrun papers.
Research on entrepreneurial talent runs from Joseph Schumpeter (1911) through later critiques. Mechanisms are interacting systems.
Evidence percentages below are relative judgements for this atlas, not fabricated precise statistics. Named studies keep their published bands.
Findings
- 1911 · Joseph Schumpeter — New combinations as the job A function, later psychologised.
- 1973 · Israel Kirzner — Alertness Seeing unpriced gaps — a cognitive claim, hard to test cleanly.
- 2001 · Saras Sarasvathy — Effectuation Expert founders often start from means; still a debated programme.
- 1905–19 · Madam C.J. Walker — A scaled venture under exclusion A file of sales systems, not a mystical hustle gene.
- 2010s · Accelerator studies — Networks and selection YC-like programmes mix teaching with picking winners — identification confounded.
- always · Survivor-bias reviews — Dead firms vanish from the syllabus The methods warning that keeps evidence scores modest.
Mechanisms
- Opportunity noticing — Kirzner’s alertness — trained by domain hours.
- Means-first assembly — Sarasvathy: who I am, what I have, whom I know.
- Stamina and stop rules — The ugly middle, plus the talent of quitting.
- Other-people coordination — Sales, hiring, investors — leadership overlap with downside residual.
Evidence
Walker, Honda, Zhang — files, not n.
Influential, still argued.
Sparse, selection-heavy.
Soft and survivor-biased.
Sociology ≠ ranking of peoples.
Debates
- Innate alertness versus domain hours — Kirzner versus Ericsson-in-a-market. Both can be told; hours are more teachable.
- Hero versus team — Biography loves a face. Most surviving firms are coalitions.
- Teaching versus picking — Do accelerators create talent or just photograph it?
Entrepreneurial talent: size the claim to the study. Interaction, not a 50/50 slogan, is the default model.
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