Systemizing Entrepreneurial Metacognition: Thinking About the Past and Future

This review of the entrepreneurial metacognition literature systematizes the existing literature. Metacognition is vital for entrepreneurs to sense, act, and mobilize cognitive resources under uncertainty. Despite the rapidly growing stream of metacognitive research in entrepreneurship, indicating that the topic is promising and emerging, these bits of knowledge still need to be brought together to provide a big picture of where we have been to explore where we can go. Our review addresses this need by analyzing the literature on entrepreneurial metacognition. We define entrepreneurial metacognition as the mental activities of generating self-awareness and monitoring and controlling one’s cognition about identifying potential opportunities, creating a new venture, and/or managing a new venture. The inductive results reveal five attributes that reflect the essence of entrepreneurial metacognition: (a) adaptive cognition, (b) metaheuristics, (c) self-regulated cognition, (d) cultural adaptation, and (e) metacompetencies. We address definitional issues and empirical patterns, synthesize the attributes of entrepreneurial metacognition, and present a model that links entrepreneurial metacognition’s antecedents and outcomes to advance future research.