Entrepreneurial alertness: the sleep history of the SME leader.

Summary The concept of entrepreneurial vigilance introduced by Kirzner (1973) plays a key role in the process of detecting business opportunities. Since the work conducted by the Austrian school, this concept has been widely developed and has raised a number of questions among researchers. The cognitive approach has made it possible to provide some answers by refining the concept. Building on Kirzner's (1973, 1989) initial work and that of the cognitivist approach, Tang et al. (2012) proposed a new, more integrative definition. These authors modeled and operationalized entrepreneurial vigilance around three dimensions: information watch and search, the ability to make associations and connections between information, and the ability to evaluate and judge it. The question of the potential antecedents of entrepreneurial vigilance remained unresolved (Valliere, 2013). In response to Valliere's (2013) observation and the knowledge and statistical needs of the field of entrepreneurial health, we investigated the effects of sleep on this process. To this end, attention theory was used to make connections between the fields of entrepreneurship and sleep. In order to answer the problematic, a positivist posture, associated with a hypothetical-deductive reasoning mode, was adopted. Thirteen research hypotheses were proposed from which the conceptual model was constructed. In order to validate it, a two-month quantitative cross-sectional study was conducted with SME managers. At the end of this survey, 238 questionnaires were collected. These were analyzed by the structural equation method based on partial least squares (PLS). The results underline the importance of sleep in maintaining cognitive, attentional and entrepreneurial capacities for an SME manager.