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Gorkan Ahmetoglu

Gorkan Ahmetoglu
Dr Gorkan Ahmetoglu is an Associate Professor of Business Psychology at University College London (UCL). He is the Director of the Psychology of Entrepreneurship Research Lab (PERL) and the Director of the MSc in Industrial-Organisational and Business Psychology programme. He has previously held the positions of Director of Management and Entrepreneurship and Director of Digital Entrepreneurship at Goldsmiths University. Dr Ahmetoglu is the author of the books Personality 101, The Talent Test (expected in the summer of 2023), and the editor of the Wiley Handbook of Entrepreneurship. He is the co-founder of Meta Profiling Ltd. and the developer of the Measure of Entrepreneurial Tendencies and Abilities (META). He has been associate psychologist of Harvard’s Entrepreneurial Finance Lab since 2011, and is a consultant to a number of Fortune 100 companies, Venture Capital firms, and government bodies on issues related to identification and management of entrepreneurial talent, psychometric assessment, consumer psychology, and D&I. He is also an international public speaker and frequently appears in the media as advisor on these topics.
 

My main focus in research has been the advancement and validation of a novel individual differences framework for the study and measurement of entrepreneurial tendencies. The novel framework and measurement have increasingly been adopted by the wider entrepreneurship (e.g. Global Entrepreneurship Monitor) and intrapreneurship community, and is presented in a theoretical chapter in Wiley Handbook of Entrepreneurship (2017).

The key research output, funded by the ESRC, has been the development of the widely validated Measure of Entrepreneurial Tendencies and Abilities (META; Ahmetoglu et al., 2011). META has been completed by nearly .5 million people (entrepreneurs as well as employees and managers) in 50 different countries. Cuesta et al. (2018), reviewing existing instruments for measuring entrepreneurial personality traits, states

“In an international context, the META questionnaire has probably been the most widely accepted (p.2)”. 

The main aim of my inter-disciplinary research is to utilise META and other psychological tools and techniques to promote innovation in established corporations, facilitate the performance of entrepreneurs/founders (and start-ups), and develop high performing entrepreneurial regions

Specific research streams:

  1. How to identify Entrepreneurial Talent
  2. Using personality profiling and machine learning to identify high impact entrepreneurs
  3. Understanding what more entrepreneurial people do and achieve relative to less entrepreneurial people
  4. Understanding the contexts under which entrepreneurial people thrive, and the context under which they do not
  5. Entrepreneurial activity in developing regions
  6. Entrepreneurial teams  
  7. Gender differences in entrepreneurial behaviour and performance 

Selected Publications: