Types of Technological Entrepreneurs: a Study in a Large Emerging Economy

This study identifies the profiles of technological entrepreneurs. Understanding what drives entrepreneurs can help policy design to incentivize entrepreneurship, support the development of better assistance for nascent businesses, and facilitate the matching between investors’ and entrepreneurs’ interests.

Through the application of an online questionnaire, 325 Brazilian owners of technological startups answered their reasons to enterprise. The data was processed using Ward’s hierarchical clustering algorithm, generating four distinct clusters. The first, financial success entrepreneurs, are concerned about financial outcomes of their startups.

The new challenges group seeks self-realization, innovation, and independence by means of their enterprises. Leaders are driven by the will to lead and motivate others, relegating other factors. Finally, there are pessimistic entrepreneurs, who rank all reasons lower than other entrepreneurs. These results highlight that even within the class of technological entrepreneurs, from the same country, there are sizeable groups with different factors regarding reasons to enterprise, shedding some light on conflicting results in the entrepreneurial motivation literature.