When Angelique Slade Shantz and her team at the University of Alberta interviewed people who'd lost their jobs during the COVID-19 pandemic, they discovered something unexpected: for many, unemployment became a springboard rather than a setback. Among the 47 job-losers they studied between 2020 and 2021, those with financial safety nets—savings, government support, or family backing—often responded to the shock of "occupational disorientation" by turning to entrepreneurship. But these weren't desperate gamblers. They were something more interesting: people who had, for the first time, genuinely asked themselves permission to try something new.
This distinction matters profoundly. A new study published in the Journal of Business Venturing reveals that when crisis strips away the conventional path, some people don't panic into action—they pause, reflect, and consciously choose to explore. The research found that survival or wealth generation wasn't the main driver for most participants. Instead, they were motivated by something harder to quantify: the chance to reclaim control, to test a long-dormant passion, or to simply see where an untried idea might lead. Entrepreneurship, in this context, became a way of reimagining themselves in a world suddenly rearranged.
The researchers, including co-author Madeline Toubiana of the University of Ottawa, noticed a recurring psychological pattern. Rather than impulsively launching ventures, most participants moved through what the authors call a "permission-play cycle"—a tentative, cautious process of justifying their choice to themselves. Some framed it as a now-or-never moment. Others saw it as a temporary pause, a deliberate time-out for experimentation without commitment. This mental rehearsal wasn't hesitation; it was permission-granting, a way of telling themselves they were allowed to try.
The outcomes varied, and that variation tells its own story. Some participants went on to build lasting entrepreneurial identities and stuck with their ventures. Others, having tested the waters, returned to traditional employment—but with something crucial restored: a clearer sense of their own capabilities, a renewed sense of professional worth, and a reclaimed sense of agency over their own lives. Even when businesses failed, participants reported that the venture itself had been worthwhile. Entrepreneurship had functioned as what the researchers call "scaffolding," a temporary structure that helped people rebuild identity and navigate trauma during the disorientation of career loss.
This finding arrives at a moment when crises feel less like rare exceptions and more like recurring features of modern life. "Be they economic, social, environmental or technological, crises are becoming ever more frequent and disruptive," the authors note. Their research suggests a counter-intuitive response: rather than viewing job loss as pure devastation, it can be reframed as an opening, a permission slip to try the thing you've been thinking about but never quite dared.
The research expands our understanding of who becomes an entrepreneur and why. It's not always the hungry hustler chasing fortune. Sometimes it's the person who lost their job, had a financial cushion to lean on, and found in crisis the psychological permission they'd been waiting for all along. That permission—fragile and tentative though it may be—can reshape a life.