Peter Bryant

IE University · Department of Entrepreneurship

Human beings try to interpret and read other minds. This is the process of cognitive empathizing, which can be implicit and intuitive, or explicit and deliberate. The process also qualifies as a form of complex problem-solving, where the focal problem is another person’s mental states. Hence, cognitive empathizing by digitally augmented agents will...

Agents evaluate their performances to assess progress, learn, and improve. In doing so, they refer to criteria of various kinds. Some criteria are deeply encoded in mental models, organizational procedures, or cultural norms and logics, while other evaluative criteria are adaptive and may upregulate or downregulate, depending on the agent’s goals,...

Autonomous agents are self-generative, meaning they can manage their own development and reproduction without external direction. For artificial agents, self-generation entails the composition of algorithmic systems and metamodels. For humans, it involves the composition of life narratives and identities. That said, many people have few self-genera...

Human and artificial agents are both committed to learning. Evaluation of performance is a key driver. This is the case for adaptive feedback, which is generated from the evaluation of performance outcomes. It is also true for feedforward guidance, which results from real-time monitoring of ongoing processes. Augmented agents will learn in both way...

Each major period of civilized humanity exhibits dominant metamodels of agentic form and function, which vary in terms of capability and supportive technology. The chapter identifies three such periods. The first is premodernity, which predates the European Enlightenment and industrialization. It was characterized by stable social systems, in which...

This multidisciplinary work analyzes the impact of digitalization on civilized humanity, conceived in terms of purposive, goal-directed agency. More particularly, it examines the close collaboration of human and artificial agents as augmented agents, viewing them both as complex, open adaptive systems, which vary dynamically in context. This first...

To supervise and enjoy the benefits of digitalization, humanity must develop the science of augmented agency. This future science will be multidisciplinary, joining the human and computer sciences, as well as neuroscience and related fields of human science and engineering, but also going further. In fact, the novelties of digital augmentation tran...

Three organizing agentic modalities consistently occur, namely, individuals, relational groups, and collectives of various kinds. Digital augmentation transforms these modalities. Particularly, the infusion of artificial agency compresses traditional hierarchies and layers. It also strengthens organizing capabilities, enabling new agentic forms and...

Human and artificial agents are both intelligent problem solvers. Therefore, problem-solving will be central to their collaboration. Among notable developments in this domain is the capability for artificial agents to sample and search in a very farsighted fashion, or to be hyperopic, which is the technical term for farsighted vision, the opposite...

To monitor and manage the dilemmas of digitalization, augmented agents must self-regulate in a collaborative fashion. Artificial agents are advancing rapidly in these respects and some are fully self-generative. They are increasingly capable of complex, fast, sensitive self-regulation. In consequence, augmented agents will have the potential for ef...

This open access book will examine the implications of digitalization for the understanding of humanity, conceived as a community of intelligent agency. It addresses important topics across a range of social and behavioral theories and identifies a range of novel mechanisms and their social behavioral effects. Across the book, the author highlights...

Entrepreneurship can be broadly defined as the identification and organized exploitation of novel opportunities for value creation and capture, where the value outcomes may be commercial, social, institutional, or cultural in nature. Hence, entrepreneurship has wide relevance for societies and economies. As a field of practice, entrepreneurship has...

Scholars of ambidexterity focus on the need for strategic leaders to explore and exploit opportunities synergistically. Yet it remains unclear how such dynamic capabilities develop. Addressing this question, my paper investigates the role of social cognitive self-regulation in fostering ambidexterity as a dynamic capability among entrepreneurs. Res...

Windows of entrepreneurial opportunity can open unexpectedly and briefly, typically under conditions of risk and uncertainty. Founder entrepreneurs must therefore be alert, tolerant of ambiguity and able to respond quickly when opportunity knocks. But does this mean that founders´brainsfounders´brains work differently, compared to other people, whe...

Decision making in entrepreneurs is a key aspect of their skills, but much about these processes remains unexplained. During a Stroop task, concomitant N200, P300 and N450 event-related potentials were measured in 25 founder entrepreneurs (FE) and in age- and sex-matched non-founders/non-entrepreneurs (NFNE). Reaction times were shorter amongst FE....

Entrepreneurial ventures need frequently to adapt. Yet their adaptive capacity is often limited by the legacies of imprinted founding characteristics. The question then arises whether it is possible to explain and manage the imprinting process so that the capacity to adapt is enhanced, rather than diminished. I address this question by developing a...

Moral awareness underpins moral reasoning and ethical decision making. This mixed methods study investigates a critical feature of these phenomena among entrepreneurs, namely the influence of social cognitive self-regulation on moral awareness. Results suggest that entrepreneurs with stronger self-regulatory characteristics are more morally aware a...

Although studies show that regulatory focus influences decision making and risk taking, theories of risky decision making typically conflate different regulatory orientations and the related distinctions between the positive and negative risks associated with acts of omission and commission. In contrast, we argue that different regulatory orientati...

Purpose The paper seeks to explore the role of self‐regulation in the use of decision heuristics by entrepreneurs. Design/methodology/approach An exploratory mixed‐methods study incorporating qualitative and quantitative data, and generating propositions to guide future research and practice. Findings The findings suggest that entrepreneurs use h...

Entrepreneurs must exploit existing opportunities while continuing to explore and innovate. That is, they must be ambidextrous (O'Reilly III & Tushman, 2007). In this paper, I investigate the role of social cognitive self-regulation in entrepreneurial ambidexterity. I draw on Regulatory Focus Theory which describes two related self-regulatory orien...

This exploratory study focuses on an important self-regulatory factor known as regulatory pride which is a potential determinant of entrepreneurial goal-setting and career choice. I report a mixed methods study of these phenomena using a sample of 30 founder-managers. The study integrates measures of regulatory pride derived from a survey questionn...

Ambidexterity describes the synergistic combination of exploration and exploitation in organizational learning and innovation. Within entrepreneurial firms, exploration largely maps onto opportunity search and recognition, while exploitation maps onto opportunity exploitation. Yet ambidexterity is hard to achieve, as exploration and exploitation of...

Entrepreneurs are typically motivated by a desire for freedom, which is here defined in terms of the acquisition and exercise of capabilities in the pursuit of valued outcomes. At the same time, evidence suggests that entrepreneurs are more strongly motivated by promotion focus, which refers to the fundamental self-regulatory orientation towards po...

A mixed methods study investigated the role of self-regulation in entrepreneurial decision-making, including the significance of learning in relation to those processes. Findings from survey data measuring three existing self-regulatory constructs—regulatory pride, entrepreneurial self-efficacy, and metacognitive aware-ness—suggest that entrepreneu...