It’s 107 years since Max Planck first theorised quantum mechanics, but it’s only lately that people appear to be applying it to all sorts of non-physical fields. I recently wrote about research where it was hypothesised that causation could run both forward and backwards drawing on quantum mechanical understandings.
Today a press release comes across my desk suggesting that entrepreneurs can know the result of something in advance of when the result can be calculated, which is what makes them good entrepreneurs. Sounds whacky, and I wouldn’t put much faith in it, but here is the press release – someone with academic tenure thinks it’s a good idea.

Do successful entrepreneurs think differently? This was the question posed by Professor Murray Gillin, Australian Graduate School of Entrepreneurship, and his colleagues in a recent scientific study.
“We really wanted to know whether successful entrepreneurs respond to and assimilate information differently to managers,” says Gillin. “We also wanted to know whether this contributes to how entrepreneurs make decisions? In short, we wanted to know if entrepreneurs have that special something called ‘intuition’.”
Professor Gillin will speak on the topic of entrepreneurial intuition at the 4th Australian Graduate School of Entrepreneurship Research Exchange Conference in Queensland on 6-9 February. This will include looking at results[1] from the study, which are published in a paper by Gillin, Lapira, Maccraty, Bradley, Atkinson, Simpson and Scicluna.
“The results from the study are promising,” says Gillin. “They suggest that ‘intuition’ really does exist and that it is prevalent in entrepreneurs,” says Gillin.
Gillin and his colleagues studied a total of eight serial entrepreneurs to determine the presence of intuition by measuring their physiological response to certain stimuli or information. In the study, ‘intuition’ was defined as that part of entrepreneurial decision and action that is not based on reason or memory, but on an awareness of energetically encoded information of the future.
The results indicated that information was received by the entrepreneurs autonomic nervous system some six to seven seconds before the outcome of an investment choice was known. Also, physiological measures were able to detect intuitive perception of a future outcome in a majority of the entrepreneurs.
“With this new understanding,” says Gillin, “now plan to develop learning tools in a master class context for repeat entrepreneurs.”

Love that phrase “serial entrepreneur” – it’s another term that’s taking over after spending years only twinned with “killer”.