Can implementation intention help to bridge the intention–behaviour gap in the entrepreneurial process? An experimental approach.

Summary In order to understand what triggers action, researchers have studied intention and its determinants for decades. Specifically, entrepreneurship has been widely studied using the intention models. However, only few intended entrepreneurs enact their intentions in the end. As a proof, the variance explained by entrepreneurial intention in actual behaviour is estimated at 37%. So the entrepreneurial intention–behaviour link still has a lot to reveal, leaving a gap in the literature. This article first reminds the difference between goal intention and implementation intention and posits that intention models actually refer to goal intention only. As it has been proven in different contexts that by automatizing individuals’ responses to anticipated cues, implementation intention increases the probability to act, we propose to observe what could be the role of implementation intention in the entrepreneurial intention–behaviour link. The originality and main contribution of this experimental study is that it is the first attempt to operationalize implementation intention on such a complex behaviour. Even if the experiment enables us to make observations more than statistically valid findings, it paves the way for more empirical research on the subject, and it still allows to suggest what could be the benefit of using implementation intention in that field. It should now be tested on a larger scale to be statistically reliable.