Entrepreneurial traits and open innovation. The case of agri-food sector

The aim of the paper is to verify the relationship between entrepreneurs’ personality traits and the firm performance. While the up to now developed literature explains the connection between the entrepreneurs’ traits and firm performance, this paper goes deeply into this process, focusing on the links between entrepreneurial traits, capabilities of catching/creating opportunities and the involved risks, and their overall impact on performance. In investigating this relationship, we illustrate the entrepreneurship literature on the topic, clarifying the concepts of entrepreneur and entrepreneurship and pinpointing the related gaps. In order to reach this objective, we carried out a Likert based questionnaire among Italian agro-food entrepreneurs. Furthermore, to better explain the connection between entrepreneurial traits and firms performance we used a multiple regression analysis. Our findings reveal that conscientiousness and agreeableness significantly influence firm performance.