The motivation of international entrepreneurship: The case of Chinese transnational entrepreneurs

The ventures of transnational entrepreneurs (TEs) are a new business phenomenon, representing a fluid context in which established arrangements may be expected to change. In terms of one particular relationship, motivation has been found to be a key construct in international entrepreneurship (IE) research, with two established features of motivation comprising entrepreneurial vision and its implementation. At the same time, nationality has been found to be a consistent influence on entrepreneurial orientation through the impact of culture. Employing qualitative case study methods, this paper investigates these relationships in the new context of the internationalization of Chinese TEs socially embedded in their host and home countries. Subtle changes in established patterns of IE motivation are detected, and Chinese cultural influence may also be weakening to meet the environment of host countries.     

Social networks and the geography of entrepreneurship

Social relationships play at least three important roles in entrepreneurship. They help to determine who sees entrepreneurship as an available and desirable career path. Entrepreneurs use their contacts to raise funds for and to recruit employees and partners to their ventures. Social relationships also influence where and when entrepreneurs want to spend their leisure time. Because of these factors, entrepreneurs tend to found their firms in the places that they live (and in the industries in which they have been employed). That, in turn, implies that industries will tend to become and remain concentrated in a small number of places, even when firms do not benefit from this clustering.     

Conceptualizing knowledge-based entrepreneurship networks: perspectives from the literature

Efforts to promote and support knowledge-based entrepreneurship as a vehicle for economic development are increasingly focused on the importance of networks to entrepreneurial success. This article reviews the extant empirical literature and finds a striking consensus among multiple disciplinary perspectives: not only are networks important, network characteristics also mediate resources important to entrepreneurial performance. Unfortunately, current conceptual frameworks do not adequately account for the unique nature of knowledge spillovers and their role in innovation and economic dynamism. The article suggests that scholars embrace the nascent knowledge spillover theory of entrepreneurship to guide future empirical research on entrepreneurship networks and focus intently on their impact on entrepreneurial performance—and therefore economic growth.     

The microstructures of rhetorical strategy in social entrepreneurship: Building legitimacy through heroes and villains

For social entrepreneurs who seek to change existing community practices, the difficulties in building legitimacy may pose a challenge that compromises their ability to create sustainable institutional change. Case studies of 10 social enterprises reveal that rhetorical strategy aims to overcome this barrier. The findings suggest that the rhetorical strategy used by these enterprises casts the organization as protagonist and those that challenge the change as antagonists. The microstructures underlying this strategy include vocabulary sets that invoke socially accepted meta-narratives, and rhetorical devices that heighten the positive of the protagonist meta-narratives and the negative of the antagonist meta-narratives. The rhetorical strategy weaves together these protagonist and antagonist themes to create tension and persuade the audience of the organization's legitimacy.     

Building new roads for entrepreneurship research to travel by: on the work of William B. Gartner

This article takes the awarding of William B. Gartner as a winner of the FSF-Nutek Award (in 2005) as a reason to engage more thoroughly with his production. From the perspective of a European School of Entrepreneurship, we focus in particular on the hermeneutic/phenomenological side of Gartner’s research output and seek to operate as inspired readers of this work as we identify its central tendencies (presence of organization theory and literary inspiration). The aim is thus to situate Gartner’s influence on the entrepreneurship research community based on the lead provided by these tendencies and from there to provide a vision of a future of entrepreneurship research. Bengt Johannisson was a member of the Prize Committee for The International Award for Entrepreneurship and Small Business Research when the prize was awarded to William B. Gartner. The prize is awarded by the Swedish Foundation for Small Business Research (FSF) and the Swedish Board of Industrial and Technical Development (NUTEK). An important aim with this prize is to attract broader attention to this research field. A precondition for choosing the winner of the award is that his/her research is a significant contribution to the theory and empirical understanding of entrepreneurship and the importance of entrepreneurship, new firm formation and small businesses in economic development. Besides the honor, the prize consists of SEK 0.5 million. It has been awarded annually since 1996. More information about the prize and previous winners is available at .     

Partitioned pricing: Can we always divide and prosper?

The widespread use of partitioned pricing by marketers may be the result of perceptions that it enhances the perceived value of the offer. This research identifies boundary conditions for the effectiveness of partitioned pricing by examining the role of the reasonableness of a surcharge and the need for cognition in consumers’ processing of pricing information. Three studies, each consisting of two experiments, examine the effectiveness of partitioned versus combined pricing and show that for high need for cognition persons, partitioned pricing has a more favorable effect than combined pricing when the surcharges are reasonable; these effects reverse when the surcharges are unreasonable. The studies indicate no differences between partitioned and combined pricing across surcharge conditions for low need for cognition consumers. A fourth study incorporating both reasonable and unreasonable surcharges in one experiment substantiates the conclusions of the first three studies. Finally, detailed process measures provide evidence that high versus low need for cognition persons evaluate partitioned pricing information differently in distinct surcharge conditions.     

National culture, networks and ethnic entrepreneurship: A comparison of the Indian and Chinese immigrants in the US

This paper uses a combination of national cultural frameworks and social capital theory to explain the formation and management of entrepreneurial ventures among immigrant communities. The varying rates of venture formation and performance among different ethnic groups points to the role that the different dimensions of culture play in how immigrants use their social networks to start such firms. We use the specific example of the Indian and Chinese communities in the US to demonstrate this effect and explain how businesses created by members of these communities could have potentially different ways of starting and operating that can be directly traced to the differences in cultural orientation of their owners. What emerges can be summarized as: (a) different immigrant communities have different ways of accumulating and using social capital in starting and managing their ethnic ventures; (b) these dissimilarities manifest themselves in variations in the motives for forming these ventures, human resource practices and termination rates; and (c) that these variations can partly be explained by the differences in their respective national cultures.     

Building international entrepreneurial virtual networks in cyberspace

We examine how software international entrepreneurs in Iceland use online social network sites to develop and harness their network relationships. To study these relationships, we use a combination of participant observation on LinkedIn and open ended face-to-face interviews. The framework for this study is based on resource-based view, networks and international entrepreneurship theories. We found that entrepreneurs with the largest networks use the online social network to demonstrate their network strength and to identify opportunities to bridge relationships. Our contribution illustrates how entrepreneurs acquire resources to internationalize through online social capital formation.     

Formal entrepreneurship theory in economics: Existence and bounds

Theoretical analysis often can penetrate difficult economic problems in circumstances where common sense is an unreliable guide to decision making. This paper provides some new theoretical problems related to entrepreneurial decisions and behavior. For example, it investigates the optimal timing of the introduction of an innovation. Typically, in practice, innovation is a continuous process. The longer the delay in the transfer of a new product from the R&D facilities to manufacturing and marketing, the more the product is likely to be improved.But that delay also gives competitors an enhanced opportunity to get there first. This paper shows how this trade-off can be analyzed systematically, and yields some surprising results about the optimal decision on the timing of the introduction of the new product.     

Small and medium-sized transnational corporations: Salient features

This second half of a series on small and medium-sized transnational corporations (TNCs) describes their main features in terms of such variables as the markets and industries in which they operate, ownership, forms of investment, performance and competitive advantages. It also deals with strategies that small and medium-sized enterprises (SMEs) tend to take in their foreign operations.An appreciable share of small and medium-sized TNCs produces highly-specialized or niche products that give them relatively high market power in those market segments. Their principle source of advantages emanate from proprietary technology, flexible management, organization and market ability, reputation and supplier/customer relations. Small and medium-sized TNCs, unlike their larger counterparts, are more likely to enter developing countries through joint ventures and other collaborative arrangements with local firms. SMEs from some developed countries, mainly Europe, are particularly willing to enter joint ventures.Transnational Corporations Affairs Officer United Nations Conference on Trade and DevelopmentThe aurthor is grateful for advice and comments by Hafiz Mirza. This paper is based on the chapter IV of the UNCTAD Programme on Transnational Corporations,Small and Medium-sized Transnational Corporations: Role, Impact and Policy Implications, New York: United Nations publication, Sales no. E.93.II.A.15, 1993.     

Theoretical milestones in international business: The journey to international entrepreneurship theory

For many decades global business was considered the preserve of large multinationals and traditional international business theory was developed to explain the behaviour of these firms. However, increasingly there is a realization that the small entrepreneurial firm has an important role to play in international business especially given that there are strong globalization pressures that both pull and push the small firm into international markets to ensure its very survival. On the questions of how and why international business takes place, several theoretical approaches have been developed that appear to run parallel to each other. However, this paper posits that the point of convergence is international entrepreneurship.     

Examining the formation of human capital in entrepreneurship: A meta-analysis of entrepreneurship education outcomes

Effective human capital formation through the medium of entrepreneurship education and training (EET) is of increasing concern for governments, as EET is growing rapidly across the world. Unfortunately, there is a lack of consistent evidence showing that EET helps to create more or better entrepreneurs. We undertake the first quantitative review of the literature and, in the context of human capital theory, find that there is indeed support for the value of EET. Based on 42 independent samples (N = 16,657), we find a significant relationship between EET and entrepreneurship-related human capital assets (r_w = .217) and entrepreneurship outcomes (r_w = .159). The relationship between EET and entrepreneurship outcomes is stronger for academic-focused EET interventions (r_w = .238) than for training-focused EET interventions (r_w = .151). We find evidence of heterogeneity in many of our correlations, and recommend that future studies examine potential moderators to more clearly delineate EET effect sizes. We also find a number of methodological weaknesses among the studies analyzed and that those studies with lower methodological rigor are overstating the effect of EET. Recommendations to improve the quality of future work in the field are provided.     

Early international entrepreneurship in China: Extent and determinants

We use data on 3,948 Chinese firms obtained from the World Bank’s Investment Climate Private Enterprise Survey to investigate early international entrepreneurship (international new ventures) in China. The extent of early international entrepreneurship in China is significant: 62% of the exporting firms start export operations within 3 years. Foreign shareholders within the firm and an entrepreneur with previous exporting experience are noted to significantly increase the probability that a firm internationalizes early. We find marked differences in the behaviour of indigenous and foreign-invested firms, and between direct and indirect exporters. For example, for an indigenous firm the more foreign experience its entrepreneur has, the less likely it is to start exporting early. As far as indirect exporting is concerned, business networks are significant determinants of the extent of such exporting, but delays the internationalization process of indigenous firms. The more firms in China export, the more time their managers need to spend on government regulations, although perhaps counter-intuitively, this was not found to discourage exporting. Overall, the findings suggest that exporting by indigenous Chinese firms is often due to challenging or adverse domestic conditions.     

Serial entrepreneurship: impact of human capital on time to re-entry

This study uses a longitudinal matched employer–employee database to examine how ex-entrepreneurs’ levels of general and specific human capital influence their likelihood of re-entering entrepreneurship over time, in a different firm, thereby becoming serial entrepreneurs. The results reveal a negative effect of general human capital on the hazard of becoming a serial entrepreneur; the impact of entrepreneurial-specific human capital on the hazard of re-entering entrepreneurship is in general positive. This research provides a dynamic approach to serial entrepreneurship revealing that specific types of human capital play distinct roles on individuals’ entrepreneurial behavior.     

Institutions and entrepreneurship development in Russia: A comparative perspective

In this paper we use a comparative perspective to explore the ways in which institutions and networks have influenced entrepreneurial development in Russia. We utilize Global Entrepreneurship Monitor (GEM) data to study the effects of the weak institutional environment in Russia on entrepreneurship, comparing it first with all available GEM country samples and second, in more detail, with Brazil and Poland. Our results suggest that Russia's institutional environment is important in explaining its relatively low levels of entrepreneurship development, where the latter is measured in terms of both number of start-ups and of existing business owners. In addition, Russia's business environment and its consequences for the role of business networks contribute to the relative advantage of entrepreneurial insiders (those already in business) to entrepreneurial outsiders (newcomers) in terms of new business start-ups.