INTUITION OF FAMILY ENTREPRENEURS: AN EXPLORATORY STUDY OF PERCEPTIONS AND EXPERIENCES

Many business problems do not appear in ideal conditions. Sometimes decisions have to be made very quickly, or there is no explicit knowledge regarding a problem, or there is neither enough time nor enough information. Therefore, entrepreneurs are not always equipped to make the necessary decision or to solve the problem. A successful entrepreneur needs to rely more often on intuition in making decisions and in solving problems. Intuition can be considered, for example, as a sudden awareness of knowledge. Using this type of knowledge, a person knows facts or relations, but without knowing why.Previous studies have described the nature of intuition and they have also addressed the intuitive abilities of managers, but the actual use of intuition remains a relatively unchartered research area, as well as the intuition of entrepreneurs. The study reported here is an attempt to broaden our understanding of the intuition of family entrepreneurs. The purpose was to explore through interviews what family entrepreneurs understood by intuition and to establish what kinds of situational factors were involved in experiencing and applying intuition.