Entrepreneurs’ practical wisdom: entrepreneur-event nexus in the entrepreneurial learning process

This study aims at contributing to developing a fine-grained lens of the entrepreneurial learning (EL) process, by especially looking at the recognition of events as critical for learning. Those frameworks emphasizing the experiential learning as a prevalent learning process for entrepreneurs, have identified critical events as key elements for learning. However, how entrepreneurs recognize an event as the one that might generate learning is a process not clearly understood yet. This work addresses this gap and explores the experience of 38 entrepreneurs through in-depth interviews to highlight: (1) the characteristics of those events that entrepreneurs recognize as challenging for managing their own enterprises; (2) how entrepreneurs have transformed these events into knowledge to cope with the managing of their own enterprises. Our findings show that the perception that an event/episode will change positively or negatively the future of the firm yield entrepreneurs to think that they also have to change and act differently. This awareness impacts on their mechanisms of information processing that, according to the Dual-process theory, shifts from an associative (type 1) to an analytic system of analysis (type 2). This work contributes to the EL literature by extending current frameworks on experience-knowledge recognition and transformation.