Motivations for entrepreneurs

The Motivation factors for scientific entrepreneurship can be related to entrepreneurs in general, or perhaps not.

In [[literature/@wasserman2012The founder's dilemmas: anticipating and avoiding the pitfalls that can sink a startup|@wasserman2012The founder's dilemmas: anticipating and avoiding the pitfalls that can sink a startup]] there's a summary of few 1000's of respondents to a questionnaire, where the summary of the top motivations of male entrepreneurs in their 20's are the following:

1. Power and Influence
2. Autonomy
3. Managing People
4. Financial Gain

Interestingly, non-entrepreneurs top motivations are:

1. Security
2. Prestige
3. Financial Gain
4. Affiliation

Women in their 20's have a similar motivation rank (entrepreneurs):

1. Autonomy
2. Power and Influence
3. Managing People
4. Altruism

I think this last point is an interesting one. Of the few "altruistic" companies I've crossed up to now, all were women-led.

Older cohorts in their 30's and 40's show more or less the same motivations, while Altruism, Variety, and Intellectual challenge start to appear in the top 4.

The difference between scipreneurs may be age-related (most people will be in their 30's when they start a company), and there may be a bias towards the type of person who decided to start a company. For example, scientists are exposed to high job insecurity for very long (unsurprisingly, a very high motivator in non-entrepreneurs regardless of age.)