[INENT Research Seminar] The Ask: Deliberate Practice and the Development of Entrepreneurial Expertise
October 21st, 2025
12am – 1pm in Collines Building (L712) & on Zoom
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Speaker: Tiago RATINHO – IÉSEG SCHOOL OF MANAGEMENT
abstract
Current wisdom in the scholarly community holds that entrepreneurs are inventive resource mobilizers, sharp network users, and skillful at executing. And yet the processes by which they develop expertise remain underexplored. Weaving the well-established literature on expertise with contemporary entrepreneurship theory, we venture into an exploration of how entrepreneurial expertise is developed through a specific type of experience – asking stakeholders for resources needed. We test our assumptions in a sample of 620 entrepreneurs from two countries (US and India). Our findings suggest that while mere asking experience does not directly enhance entrepreneurial expertise, deliberately practicing asking significantly mediates this relationship. This highlights the importance of deliberate practice in asking as means to refine entrepreneurial skills. Our results provide insights for entrepreneurship education and future research by identifying “the ask” as a fundamental unit of practice in entrepreneurial expertise development.