Nature Plus Nurture: Do Teenage Activities Predict Entrepreneurial Success?

Rather than simply looking at the linkage between personality and propensity for entrepreneurship, Martin Obschonka and his colleagues looked at what people did in their teenage years and the role these formative experiences played in adulthood. In conducting their study, Obschonka and his colleagues focused on nearly 500 German scientists. Obschonka and his colleagues found that subjects' personalities were associated with their propensity to engage in entrepreneurial behaviors, both in their teenage years and later in their professional lives as scientists. They also found that by considering both the person and his or her early entrepreneurship-related experiences, they could better explain why some scientists were more likely to commercialize their work and become entrepreneurs.