Entrepreneurs move their venture creation process from an uncertain, unknown future toward somewhat more certain and knowable. To support present actions about future outcomes on this journey, entrepreneurs essentially need to understand what they know and don’t know yet. Individuals, however, are not destined to have a complete awareness of their ignorance. It is precisely unawareness why a certain opportunity has not yet been exploited, but decisions require fast strategies to simplify information and not lose the opportunity. Thus, knowledge only might not naturally advance opportunities. This book provides insights about how entrepreneurs cope with this apparent contradiction. Based on qualitative and experimental insights, the book explores the relevance of knowing what you don’t know with the help of the science of self-awareness. A key point is that metacognition plays an essential role to overcome cognitive barriers to come to logical judgments and decisions.

This e-book brings together scholars in both the neurosciences and organizational sciences who have adopted various approaches to study the cognitive mechanisms mediating the social behavior that we see within organizations. Such an approach has been termed by ourselves, and others, as ‘organisational cognitive neuroscience’. In recent years there has been a veritable increase in studies that have explored the cognitive mechanisms driving such behaviors, and much progress has been made in understanding the neural underpinnings of processes such as financial exchange, risk awareness and even leadership. However, while these studies are informative and add to our understanding of human cognition they fall short of providing evidence-based recommendations for practice. Specifically, we address the broader issue of how the neuroscientific study of such core social behaviors can be used to improve the very way that we work. To address these gaps in our understanding the chapters in this book serve as a platform that allows scholars in both the neurosciences and the organizational sciences to highlight the work that spans across these two fields. The consolidation of these two fields also serves to highlight the utility of a singular organizational cognitive neuroscience. This is a fundamentally important outcome of the book as the application of neuroscience to address economically relevant behaviors has seen a variety of fields evolve in their own right, such as neuromarketing, neuroeconomics and so forth. The use of neuro-scientific technologies,in particular fMRI, has indeed led to a bewildering (and somewhat suffocating) proliferation of new approaches, however, the speed of such developments demands that we must proceed carefully with such ventures or risk some fundamental mistakes. The book that you now hold will consolidates these new neuroscience based approaches and in doing so highlight the importance of this approach in helping us to understand human social behavior in general. Taken together the chapters provide a framework for scholars within the neurosciences who wish to explore the further the opportunities that the study of organisational behavior may provide.

A unique account of how booms and busts arise from internal disputes over trust between financial corporations.