Entrepreneurial personalities in political leadership Martin Obschonka & Christian Fisch Accepted: 19 June 2017 # Springer Science+Business Media, LLC 2017 Abstract Societies around the globe respond to the contemporary technological and economic change by defining entrepreneurship and innovation as core prin- ciples for future competitive advantage. Does this rise of the Bentrepreneurial society^ also imply that entrepre- neurial personalities are becoming increasingly wide- spread and powerful in political leadership? Joseph A. Schumpeter already argued that highly influential entre- preneurs are unique and show a certain personality pattern that can be described as being not only high in creativity and change orientation but also high in com- petitiveness and rule-breaking. It is interesting to ask whether such Schumpeterian personalities indeed play an increasingly important role in political leadership, given that daily routines of policy leaders, at least at first glance, usually require rather non-entrepreneurial strategies such as careful, risk-averse diplomacy. To address this question, we first survey the existing liter- ature on personality and political leadership. We further present a novel personality analysis of an influential business leader that recently made a transition to political leadership: Donald J. Trump, the incumbent US president. Employing a language-based, computer- ized method of analyzing Twitter statements, we com- pare his online personality to the online personality of other influential entrepreneurs and business managers, who do not engage in political leadership. The results indicate that Trump is indeed distinct in that he shows stronger features of a Schumpeterian personality. How- ever, he is also comparatively high in Neuroticism. We discuss these findings focusing on the potential impli- cations of a concentration of entrepreneurial mindsets in political leadership. Keywords Personality . Big Five . Political leadership . Donald J. Trump . Entrepreneurship JEL classification L20 . L26 BPolitics is a strong and slow boring of hard boards. It takes both passion and perspective.^ Max Weber (1919) 1 The entrepreneurial society and political leadership In 2007, David B. Audretsch published a book entitled BThe entrepreneurial society^ (Audretsch 2007). In this book, he describes and champions the idea of a societal, political, and economic trajectory leading away from a DOI 10.1007/s11187-017-9901-7 M. Obschonka (*) QUT Business School (Australian Centre for Entrepreneurship Research, School of Management), Queensland University of Technology, Brisbane, Australia e-mail: martin.obschonka@qut.edu.au C. Fisch Faculty of Management, Trier University, Trier, Germany C. Fisch Erasmus Institute of Management (ERIM), Erasmus University Rotterdam, Rotterdam, The Netherlands Small Bus Econ (2018) 50: – /Published online: 2 uly 2017 5J 851 869