Abstract
The concept of entrepreneurial alertness introduced by Kirzner (1973) plays a critical role in the process of business opportunities detection. Since the work conducted by the Austrian school, this concept has been widely developed and has raised numerous questions by researchers. The cognitive approach has pointed to some answers by refining the concept. Inspired by the initial work of Kirzner (1973, 1989) and those conducted by the cognitive approach, Tang et al. (2012) proposed a more inclusive definition. These authors modeled and operationalized entrepreneurial alertness by three dimensions: alert scanning and search, alert association and connection and evaluation and judgment. The issue of potential antecedents of entrepreneurial alertness remained unresolved (Valliere, 2013). In response to the comments of Valliere (2013) and the entrepreneurial health field’s needs for knowledge and statistics, we proposed to study the effects of sleep on this process. To this end, the theory of attention allowed to make the links between the fields of entrepreneurship and sleep. To meet the problematic, a positivist posture associated with a hypothetical-deductive approach was adopted. Thirteen research hypotheses were proposed from the conceptual model was built. To validate this model, a cross sectional quantitative study of two months was conducted among SME owners/directors. At the end of this survey, we collected 238 questionnaires. These were analyzed by the structural equation method based on Partial Least Squares (PLS). The results highlight the importance of sleep in maintaining cognitive, attentional and entrepreneurial abilities for SME owners/directors.