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Entrepreneurs are action takers. This paper presents an agent-based model illustrating entrepreneurial action choices between rhetoric and action during the very early stages (pre-formal alliance) of an entrepreneur's journey. Environmental factors, inertia, entrepreneurial conation preferences, the context-for-learning, and identified opportunities are all factors that will influence action choices both separately and in configurations. In virtual experiments, we examine the length of time it takes entrepreneurs to reach the stage for opportunity commitment, based on their skills and conation profiles. From the computer simulation, we determined that certain entrepreneurial profiles do make a difference in the overall effectiveness and efficiency of reaching an opportunity commitment. In general, an entrepreneur is more effective in reaching opportunity commitment if the entrepreneur has either a high skills profile, or a high conation profile, while the combination of high-level skills and conation profiles do not provide any real advantage. A high skills profile proves to create the greatest advantage of reaching opportunity commitment in the shortest length of time.

Behavioral ethics research in the field of management is burgeoning. While many advancements have been made, applying an organizational neuroscience approach to this area of research has the possibility of creating significant new theoretical, empirical, and practical contributions. We overview the major areas of behavioral ethics research concerning moral cognition and conation, and then we concentrate on existing neuroscience applications to moral cognition (moral awareness, moral judgment/reasoning, effects of moral emotions on moral reasoning, and ethical ideology). We also demonstrate the usefulness of neuroscience applications to organizational behavioral ethics research by summarizing a recent study on the neuroscience of ethical leadership. We close by recommending future research that applies neuroscience to topics such as moral development, group ethical judgments and group moral approbation, and moral conation (e.g., moral courage and moral identity). Our overall purpose is to encourage future neuroscience research on organizational behavioral ethics to supplement and/or complement existing psychological approaches.

The reported inquiry-based learning (IBL) study was designed in 2012–2013 for the highest achieving undergraduate students at a research-intensive university in the United Kingdom (U.K.). In 2005, the University received national funding from the U.K. Higher Education Academy (HEA) to develop an innovative model of IBL to be used in a multidisciplinary context (Tosey, 2006). As a consequence, IBL was an obvious tool when, in 2012, the authors set out to design learning interventions to improve the teamwork and leadership skills of high-attaining students. In the process of exploring the application of IBL to this task, the need to ensure the intervention allowed for development in the conative domain was considered important. Historically, IBL practice at the University had catered well for cognitive and affective learning but had not been focussed to develop conation. A conative-heavy element was therefore purposefully designed into the latest IBL intervention.

Higher education has struggled to find, implement, and adopt technology that is transformative to the learning experience. Most systems are disparate, old, data-poor, and heavily nuanced platforms with few champions and many detractors. At the same time, the process of learning, which is the ultimate goal of the institution’s students, does not leverage what we know about the brain, learning science, and more. However, all of these problems can be overcome if leaders and champions create learning technologies that are holistic to the student experience while assuring deep integration with other systems. This is how student success initiatives can be improved, at scale, and see technology assisting leaders.

Leveraging case studies of exemplar teaching, learning, technological, and data strategies by which to empower people and connect analytics, this chapter seeks to provide tangible ways by which to deliver “best” learning from a holistic perspective. The problems facing higher education and consistently presented in the media can be overcome with smarter, more connected solutions, such as the ones described in this chapter.

As more destinations jump on the bandwagon of branding, their marketing organizations increasingly employ the Internet as a convenient medium for promotion. This chapter argues that instead of extending their brand communications to the Web by simply digitizing the logos, taglines, and other elements, destinations can build brands virtually in an internet-mediated environment where virtual experience takes place. The study examines how branding can be achieved through building virtualized destination image. It adopts the concepts of telepresence, virtual experience, and integrated informational response and explains how online and offline communication stimuli can affect various components of virtualized image. This expands and modifies the conventional image constructs by specifying information sources as antecedents through telepresence and integrated behavioral responses as consequences. The relationships between the image, its antecedents, and consequences, and among the image constructs are illustrated through 14 propositions. The chapter concludes with a discussion of the net community in which residents and other stakeholders of communities actively participate in virtually building a strong destination brand.

This chapter focusses on ‘emotions’ as one of the most crucial elements of customer experience. Emotions form the basis of experience as well as the basis for assessing, interpreting, understanding and responding to situations, brands, events and organisations as a customer interacts with the organisation or any of the touchpoints throughout their purchase journey. We discuss the psychological context of emotions, the role emotions play in judgement and decision-making in general and more specifically consumer decision-making. In this chapter, we review the extensive literature and theory in psychology and customer experience to explain how customers perceive bundles of cues, selectively perceive and retain information, and how memories keep reinforcing experiences. We discuss the practical implications for business leaders focussing on understanding customers' emotions and utilising the knowledge to create and capture value through customer experience.

For organizational neuroscience to progress, it requires an overarching theoretical framework that locates neural processes appropriately within the wider context of organizational cognitive activities. In this chapter, we argue the case for building such a framework on two foundations: (1) critical realism, and (2) socially situated cognition. Critical realism holds to the importance of identifying biophysical roots for organizational activity (including neurophysiological processes) while acknowledging the top-down influence of higher-level, emergent organizational phenomena such as routines and structures, thereby avoiding the trap of reductionism. Socially situated cognition connects the brain, body, and mind to social, cultural, and environmental forces, as significant components of complex organizational systems. By focusing on adaptive action as the primary explanandum, socially situated cognition posits that, although the brain plays a driving role in adaptive organizational activity, this activity also relies on the body, situational context, and cognitive processes that are distributed across organizational agents and artifacts. The value of the framework that we sketch out is twofold. First, it promises to help organizational neuroscience become more than an arena for validating basic neuroscience concepts, enabling organizational researchers to backfill into social neuroscience, by identifying unique relations between the brain and social organization. Second, it promises to build deeper connections between neuroscience and mainstream theories of organizational behavior, by advancing models of managerial and organizational cognition that are biologically informed and socially situated.