ABSTRACT
A step-by-step process involving technology and human expertise provides persons with disabilities an opportunity to independently develop their own ideas as entrepreneurs. Many persons with disabilities have a propensity to become entrepreneurs but often times have difficulty accessing and participating in traditional entrepreneurial activities . An online environment that allows persons with disabilities to participate more fully in the process of becoming and being an entrepreneur is the aim of this research. In addition to providing these individuals with a tool set to improve and enhance entrepreneurship among them, the collaborative environment will be a very powerful research tool to test hypotheses about the cognitive, affective, and inter-personal constructs and mechanisms involved in entrepreneurship and among persons with disabilities . For example, the environment would allow both formal and informal firsthand inquiry of entrepreneurial and teelmology questions . Additionally, the environment would allow research on entrepreneurship and on cognitions of persons with disabilities in non-laboratory and non-classroom situations . Authentic fIeld and informal learning
experiences are regarded by educators as important for advancing learning and motivation to pursue career paths in entrepreneurship . Unlike other laboratory-based research on these topics, the environment would be able to obtain relatively large and potentially quite representative samples of individuals engaging in real-life problem solving and assessment. Thus, in addition to allowing the testing of new mechanisms/hypotheses, the environment also allows for generalized studics from prior laboratory-based research into the "real world" applications.
