Risk Assessment in Entrepreneurship: Attitude to Ambiguity

This presentation describes a novel approach to entrepreneurial practice, namely, how to help an entrepreneur cope with a risky decision that has many “unknowables,” or much probabilistic ambiguity. Early career scholar Jacqueline Csonka-Peeren, describes how attitude to ambiguity can be considered a risk assessment, and proposes how risk management can be applied to this assessment to provide insight to an entrepreneur as they assess, or judge, an opportunity. Csonka-Peeren also proposes a relationship between an entrepreneur’s risk assessment of an opportunity and their decision whether to act on the opportunity. Since 2021, the notions of probabilistic ambiguity and the “unknowable” have quickly coalesced researchers and practitioners and they meet regularly to discuss this topic (www.saloninconu.org). Consequently, there is a greenfield of entrepreneurial decision making research that is large and growing.

Author:  Jacqueline Csonka-Peeren, University of Waterloo

About the Author

Jacqueline Csonka-Peeren is a professor at the University of Waterloo.