Gallup has long been probing a question of great significance to the future of the U.S. and global economies: Is there hidden entrepreneurial potential out there just waiting to be uncovered and tapped?
To answer this question, we’ve studied thousands of successful entrepreneurs for more than three decades. Through this research, Gallup has created an assessment that identifies behaviors that separate the best from the rest. These behaviors are consistently exhibited by extraordinarily talented entrepreneurs and lead to new venture formation and rapid business growth.
Talents are a composite of our basic personality traits and intellectual abilities. Since personality traits are enduring dispositions that are highly stable over time and across situations, they can be used to predict individual behaviors reasonably well.
Talents facilitate accelerated learning and performance in a particular domain. Trying to succeed in an area in which we have less talent takes a great deal of work and might still result in only average performance. For instance, an entrepreneur with high sales talent will quickly master sales techniques and reach a high level of expertise in this domain with much less effort compared with an entrepreneur with less sales talent.
