Self-made billionaire entrepreneurs are seen as either super cool geniuses or ruthless opportunists. Do they share common traits? 

But you don’t have to be like that to be successful,” says Tomas Chamorro-Premuzic, an Argentine academic who is professor of business psychology at University College London and Goldsmiths College, who has made the study of entrepreneurialism his business. Self-made billionaire entrepreneurs, he acknowledges, are “by definition unrepresentative. There is very little to be learnt about entrepreneurship from them.”

So he went on to designing a test that would help identify and measure the entrepreneur in you. Disneyland Paris and even the Royal Ballet in London are using this test. (It’s not easy to find a job when you’re a dancer because your career ends when you’re very young.)

“Meta is the next generation of psychometric testing,” he says. After years of research, the developers have come up with a new way of spotting and measuring skills linked to entrepreneurialism that are increasingly important in the modern working environment, he adds.

The Meta test has four broad headings – opportunism, proactivity, creativity and vision. Within that, it looks at what drives an individual – for example, their ambition, sense of curiosity, how innovative they are and how they see themselves working in a structured environment. Proponents claim it has any number of applications.

A fascinating enterprise.