European Council for Small Business and Entrepreneurship
Engaged entrepreneurship research in Europe

Update 24 March 2020: The webinar on causal mapping with Professor Mauri Laukkanen originally scheduled to 31 March 2020 has been postponed to the future.

Causal (aka cognitive) mapping methods provide an accessible approach to exploring social actors’, e.g., entrepreneurs’, knowledge and belief systems (mental models), known to significantly influence respective behaviours. The webinar is an introduction to the conceptual basis and methods of causal mapping, in particular comparative causal mapping (CCM) using CMAP3, a dedicated (free) CCM application. The webinar’s topics are:

  • Conceptual underpinnings and methodological issues in causal mapping.
  • Main variants of causal mapping.
  • CCM in practice: data elicitation, processing and analysis using CMAP3.
  • Using CCM: revealing micro entrepreneurs’ and small business advisors’ core beliefs.
  • Potential research topic/types for CCM.

Speaker:
Mauri Laukkanen
is Professor emeritus at the University of Eastern Finland’s Business School, Kuopio Campus. He received his PhD (DBA) at the Helsinki School of Economics in 1989. He served at the HSE (now Aalto University Business School) and the Universities of Vaasa and Jyväskylä before UEF, where he contributed to founding the Department of Business/Business School and headed it in 1995-2002. His research and publications focus on entrepreneurship education and counselling, local economic development, managerial cognition and causal mapping methods, which he is currently using to understand the evolution of nascent micro entrepreneurs’ belief systems. He lives in Lahti, Finland.

The webinar is open for ECSB and ISBE members.