Vik hi,
Thanks for raising this question, as it's something of interest to me as well. I've been focusing on an unexpected scholarly field to help me find some answers and have this short paper (under review) that might be helpful: Ozkazanc-Pan, Banu, Childhood Fairy Tales and Cross-Cultural Entrepreneurial Schema Formation: Unexplored Intersections. Available at SSRN: https://ssrn.com/abstract=6580193 or http://dx.doi.org/10.2139/ssrn.6580193
Essentially, in the paper, I argue that the proposed CNCS framework suggests that the conditions under which entrepreneurial thinking is formed precede entrepreneurship education entirely and that it's located in the narrative exposure of early childhood, where culturally specific fairy tale archetypes install the agency beliefs, risk legitimacy frames, opportunity prototypes, and power-position schemas that later function as the cognitive infrastructure through which individuals interpret uncertainty and authorize their own action. If this account is correct, entrepreneurship education programs that treat the entrepreneurial mindset as a blank slate to be written upon may be working against entrenched cognitive defaults installed decades earlier and programs designed to surface, examine, and deliberately reorganize those prior schemas, rather than simply layering new content on top of them, may be more effective at producing durable change in how entrepreneurial thinking itself is formed.
looking forward to everyone's thoughts,
Banu
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Banu Ozkazanc-Pan
Professor of the Practice of Engineering
Brown University
Guilford CT
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Original Message:
Sent: 05-01-2026 01:12
From: Victor (Vik) Perez
Subject: From Mindset to Cognitive Formation in Entrepreneurship Education
Dear colleagues,
A persistent assumption in entrepreneurship education is that the "entrepreneurial mindset" can be developed through exposure to content, cases, and experiential activities.
What remains less examined is whether this assumption fully captures what is happening at the level of entrepreneurial cognition.
An alternative perspective is beginning to emerge: what is often described as "mindset" may be better understood as a set of underlying cognitive processes shaping how individuals interpret, frame, and act under uncertainty in opportunity formation.
From this standpoint, the focus shifts from developing mindset as something to be expressed, to shaping the conditions under which cognitive processes are formed.
This raises a further question:
At what stage, and under what conditions, do our interventions begin to influence how entrepreneurial thinking itself is formed?
Best regards,
Victor (Vik) Pérez
Xi'an Jiaotong-Liverpool University (XJTLU), China/UK.
Brain-Driven Entrepreneurship
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Victor (Vik) Perez
Vik Perez Person
Tampere
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