Attitude, Expertise, and Normative Cues in Early Opportunity Evaluation for Emerging Technologies

Nelson A. Andrade-Valbuena^1,2*Felipe Muñoz Medina^3*Benjamin Cid-Escares¹

• ¹Faculty of Economic and Administrative Sciences, Universidad Católica de la Santisima Concepcion, 4070129, concepcion, Chile
• ²Universidad Catolica de la Santisima Concepcion, Concepción, Chile
• ³Universidad de Santiago de Chile, Santiago, Chile

This study examines how entrepreneurs cognitively evaluate emerging technological opportunities before intention formation, addressing a theoretical gap in early-stage entrepreneurial cognition. While the Theory of Planned Behavior (TPB) has primarily been used to explain intention and behavior, the belief formation stage that precedes intention remains underexplored. We investigate how attitudes toward a technology, domain-specific technological expertise, and perceived social influence shape opportunity beliefs in high-uncertainty innovation contexts. Rather than extending TPB or defending its boundaries, this study adopts its evaluative, normative, and control-related belief structure as a positive conceptual scaffold for examining pre-intentional cognitive appraisal. Consistent with Ajzen's distinction between background factors and perceived behavioral control, technological expertise is treated as a domain-specific background factor that informs feasibility-related judgments, not as a reconceptualization of PBC. We conducted a vignette-based survey of 404 entrepreneurs and owner-managers and analyzed the model using partial least squares structural equation modeling with confirmatory robustness checks. Attitude toward the technology (β = 0.538, p < 0.001) and technological expertise (β = 0.151, p = 0.009) significantly predicted opportunity beliefs, whereas the direct effect of social influence was not significant. However, social influence indirectly shaped opportunity beliefs through attitude (β = 0.083, p = 0.019), indicating that normative cues operate as evaluative inputs rather than direct belief drivers in pre-intentional contexts. The model explains 58.2% of the variance in opportunity beliefs and demonstrates high predictive relevance. These findings advance understanding of entrepreneurial judgment by identifying attitude as the dominant cognitive gateway, technological expertise as a feasibility-oriented background resource, and social endorsement as an indirect legitimacy cue during early-stage evaluations. Overall, this study conceptualizes opportunity beliefs as a pre-intentional cognitive outcome informed by TPB-consistent antecedent classes, without proposing theoretical extensions to TPB and while articulating its relevance under high-uncertainty conditions where intentions cannot yet form.