ANDRZEJ KRAUZEScott Shane, an economist at Case Western Reserve University who has been teaching entrepreneurship for 20 years, has heard it all when it comes to his undergraduates pitching ideas for new businesses. Some students put in extensive time and research to come up with a business proposal that flops when they try to express it as a convincing pitch. Others put in no effort and wing it after glancing over some information, but come up with a marvelous proposal. “It’s like an intuitive sense,” Shane says, “like they could see what the marketplace would want.”
In Shane’s field, business phenoms who so effortlessly produce innovative ideas and succeed at starting businesses are often referred to as “born entrepreneurs.” For years, Shane’s been interested in whether science could corroborate such a genetic endowment. So in 2008, he turned to a UK registry of several thousand twins to find out. Looking at eight measures related to entrepreneurship, such as the number of years self-employed and the number of businesses owned, Shane calculated that entrepreneurship was between 30 and 55 percent heritable (Management Science, 54:167-79, 2008). “That’s not trivial,” he says.
A year later, Zhen Zhang, now a management professor at Arizona State University, followed up with another twin study, but added a twist. Zhang looked at the sex of the participants from ...
