The role of individuals' belief in entrepreneurial ideas pursuing process

The desire to pursue entrepreneurial ideas and persisting in the idea development path is considered a motivational-cognitive issue. A person's beliefs have a significant impact on his motivation and are the reason for some of his behaviors and actions. Despite the importance of cognitive and emotional factors in idea development and their role in entrepreneurs' energy, thoughts and decisions; sadly, no research has looked at the process of pursuing entrepreneurial ideas through the lens of entrepreneurs' beliefs. Therefore, the current research was conducted with the aim of explaining the role of entrepreneurs' beliefs in the process of pursuing entrepreneurial ideas. This research is exploratory in terms of the purpose, and due to its exploratory nature, it has utilized a thematic analysis method. In order to explore the entrepreneurial beliefs’ role when pursuing an idea, in-depth and semi-structured interviews were carried out with 16 entrepreneurs in six accelerators at Tehran and then the findings were analyzed through three stages of coding. Based on the results, entrepreneurs' beliefs affect their motivation and decisions about pursuing or abandoning the idea, so the entrepreneur's rational beliefs strengthen the advancement of the idea and his irrational beliefs reduce the motivation to pursue an idea. Findings show that during the pursuit of ideas, the social and contextual conditions are interpreted by rational and irrational belief systems and finally lead to the emergence of three categories of behavior including constructive, confrontational and threatening.