Entrepreneurs are Way More Creative than Managers: Study
Bangalore: A study was conducted on 25 entrepreneurs and managers while they performed simple tasks that replicated what we call exploitation and exploration type of innovative decisions. The findings are enlightening.
The study groups performed two types of tasks, exploration and exploitation basedwhile their brain activity was constantly being monitored. tasks. Exploitation tasks are ones associated with finding new ways to optimize the performance of current tasks based on refinements of existing practices. Explorative tasks are ones involving disengagement from the current task to search for alternative courses of action and new things to do to achieve overarching goals, rather than doing current things better. In those processes, individuals need to forgo immediate gratification and engage in experimentation with untried approaches.
The study found that when entrepreneurs performed explorative tasks, they used both the left and right sides of the frontal parts of their brains i.e. the entire pre-frontal cortex. In comparison, managers tended to use primarily the left sides of the frontal part of their brains.
This is a big difference as the right side of the pre-frontal cortex is associated with creative functions involving high-level thinking (like poetry, arts, etc.), whereas the left side is associated with rational decision-making and logical thinking. So, in a way, it means that entrepreneurs seem to be capable of using the entirety of their high-level thinking capacities (“executive functions”), while managers were more narrowly focused on rational and logical reasoning.
This can explain why entrepreneurs can take high risk decisions when compared with managers but this does not imply that entrepreneurs are smarter than managers. This also raises the nature versus nurture debate, does the nature of work change the way a person thinks or is it conditioned by birth? Regardless of the triumph of nature over nurture or vice versa, this study can explain why some entrepreneurs are more successful than others and why some managers go on to become entrepreneurs.
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