Asian Entrepreneurship in the International Business World

This review will focus on the role of Asian entrepreneurship in the international business world. As we are now considered to be in the Asian century, it is important to see how business grows, develops, and changes based on entrepreneurship. Asian entrepreneurship is unique to the geographic area but also encompasses people, business, and government that has a focus on Asia and is part of the global community. The continuing rapid evolution of Asian economies over the next decade will require a focus on entrepreneurship as it incorporates technology and innovation change. More countries in Asia need to focus on entrepreneurship as a way to achieve global best practice and to make breakthroughs in science and technology. A focus on the role of entrepreneurship in Asia in order to meet social and sustainable needs is a particular key concern of many governments and trade organizations around the world. This article will focus on the book Asian Entrepreneurship as a key reference for understanding and improving the social, environmental, and economic conditions for international business. © 2015 Wiley Periodicals, Inc.     

Entrepreneurship Research Today and Beyond: Hidden in Plain Sight!

The field of entrepreneurship and its research has reached an critical and invigorating juncture. Researchers are challenged to be comprehensive, varied, and innovative in their approaches to the study of entrepreneurship. New and emerging future research must met this challenge to impact and sustain our complex world in which entrepreneurship plays such a vital role. The Entrepreneurship Research Journal provides a new and exciting venue for researchers to share and interact among their respective disciplines in new and different ways and to meet the research challenges now and in the future.     

Research Methods in the Leading Small Business–Entrepreneurship Journals: A Critical Review with Recommendations for Future Research*

Small business and entrepreneurship scholars have made significant progress toward advancing the field and gaining recognition as an important domain of scientific inquiry. However, the authors suggest that a strong methodological foundation built on state‐of‐the‐art research technologies is necessary to support further paradigmatic growth and maturation. Using Chandler and Lyon's study as a benchmark for research methods through the 1990s, the study critiques research methodologies used by small business and entrepreneurship researchers over the ensuing years. The analysis includes all 665 papers published between 2001 and February of 2008 in the Journal of Small Business Management, Journal of Business Venturing, and Entrepreneurship Theory and Practice. The research outlines key methodological issues, assesses recent methodological practice, identifies current trends, and offers recommendations for researchers in adopting existing and emerging research technologies.     

Moving on from nascent entrepreneurship: measuring cross-national differences in the transition to new business ownership

Nascent entrepreneurship and new business ownership are subsequent stages in the entrepreneurial process. We illustrate how information from the largest internationally harmonized database on entrepreneurship, the Global Entrepreneurship Monitor project, can be used to approximate the entrepreneurial process. We make a methodological contribution by computing the ratio of new business ownership to nascent entrepreneurship in a way that reflects the transition from nascent to new business ownership and provides cross-nationally comparable information on the efficiency of the entrepreneurial process for 48 countries. We report evidence for the validity of the transition ratio by benchmarking it against transition rates obtained from longitudinal studies and by correlating it with commonly used entrepreneurship indicators and macro-level economic indices. The transition ratio enables future cross-national research on the entrepreneurial process by providing a reliable and valid indicator for one key transition in this process.     

Socio-cognitive traits and entrepreneurship: The moderating role of economic institutions

We examine how country-level institutional context moderates the relationship between three socio-cognitive traits—entrepreneurial self-efficacy, alertness to new business opportunities, and fear of failure—and opportunity entrepreneurship. To do this, we blend social cognitive theory (SCT) with institutional theory to develop a multi-level model of entrepreneurial entry. We merge data from the Global Entrepreneurship Monitor (GEM) surveys and the Economic Freedom of the World (EFW) index for 45 countries from 2002 to 2012. Our results, which are based on a multi-level fixed-effects model, suggest that entrepreneurs' self-efficacy and alertness to new opportunities promote opportunity entrepreneurship while fear of failure discourages it. However, the strength of these relationships depends on the institutional context, with entrepreneurial self-efficacy and alertness substantially more likely to lead to new opportunity-driven ventures in countries with higher levels of economic freedom. These results provide suggestive evidence that economic freedom not only channels individual effort to productive entrepreneurial activities, but also affects the extent to which individuals' socio-cognitive resources are likely to mobilized and lead to high-growth entrepreneurship.     

Kathleen Eisenhardt: recipient of the 2012 Global Award for Entrepreneurship Research

This article reviews the academic contributions of the 2012 receiver of the Global Award for Entrepreneurship Research, Professor Kathleen Eisenhardt, Stanford Warren Ascherman Professor of Management Science and Engineering at Stanford University. The Global Award consists of 100,000 euro and a statuette by the internationally renowned Swedish sculptor Carl Milles. Eisenhardt’s work focuses on strategy, strategic decision making, and innovation in rapidly changing and highly competitive markets. Her work in the entrepreneurship field centers on strategy and organization, especially in technology-based companies, what she refers to as “high-velocity industries”. Her main empirical contribution to the entrepreneurship field is her work on ‘corporate entrepreneurship’—how existing organizations can remain innovative, including through new venture creation. More generally, Kathleen Eisenhardt’s research has bridged the two fields of entrepreneurship research and organization science.     

The socially and spatially bounded relationships of entrepreneurial activity: Olav Sorenson—recipient of the 2018 Global Award for Entrepreneurship Research

This article reviews the academic contributions of Olav Sorenson, recipient of the 2018 Global Award for Entrepreneurship Research. His work has advanced scholarly understanding of how entrepreneurship and innovation are strongly embedded in socially and spatially bounded relationships. Based on meticulous empirical studies using a broad range of methods, he has challenged conventional models of new firms’ location choices, explained patterns of and determinants of knowledge diffusion, and considered how social networks can lead to economic advantages. This article discusses Sorenson’s work specifically focusing on three themes—(i) the geography of entrepreneurial activity, (ii) social capital, and (iii) the evolution of learning and innovation—highlighting scholarly contributions and insights for management practice and public policy.     

International Entrepreneurship as an Admittance-Seeking Educational Field

ABSTRACT

International entrepreneurship (IE) research has gained significant attention over the last 30 years, but IE education has not yet obtained the same recognition. We investigate whether and how IE might gain admittance as a specific educational field. By employing the Delphi method with expert scholars and practitioners from around the world, we identify the key knowledge base and attributes that potential IE graduates should possess. We position our findings relative to extant research on education from IE’s parent disciplines of international business and entrepreneurship. This allows us to discuss whether and how our identified IE curriculum is differentiated and potentially legitimate. We show that while our IE curriculum has these characteristics, it requires contributions from both parent disciplines. From these results, we discuss the pedagogical implications of our study.     

Trends in the market for entrepreneurship faculty, 1989–1998

The last decade has seen a dramatic rise in the number and status of entrepreneurship programs in schools of business and management. The popularity of entrepreneurship courses has increased dramatically among both graduate and undergraduate students. Alumni and external constituencies of schools of business have generally been supportive of the development of entrepreneurship programs, and in fact in many instances it has been the demands of these constituencies that have led to the creation or expansion of entrepreneurship programs within these schools. The growth in entrepreneurship programs has been fostered by an increase in the popularity of entrepreneurship, an increase in the status accorded entrepreneurs, as well as an increase in the recognition by the business press of the importance of entrepreneurship in the larger economy. Despite the increase in popularity within the field, there has also been considerable resistance from within the faculties of many institutions to the expansion of entrepreneurship programs. Faculty outside the field have been, and many remain, very skeptical about the validity of entrepreneurship as an academic field, the quality and rigor of entrepreneurship research and the need to hire academic faculty to teach and research in the field. The last decade has seen the confluence of these opposing forces.This disparity has created the question of whether the external forces supporting entrepreneurship are overcoming the inertia inherent in academic institutions and succeeding in institutionalizing the study of entrepreneurship within schools of business and management. This study hopes to shed some light on which of these forces is winning by addressing the question of whether the field of entrepreneurship is moving toward or has been institutionalized as part of the curriculum and research within schools of business and management. It also examines the institutionalization of the field by analyzing the change in the number and level of entrepreneurship positions, the quality of the recruiting institutions as well as the number, level and training of entrepreneurship candidates during the years 1989–1998. Data was obtained from the Academy of Management Placement Roster and The Chronicle of Higher Education for the years 1989–1998. Previous entrepreneurship education researchers have examined the number of endowed chairs and professorships, conferences, journals, programs and various centers for entrepreneurial education, however sparse research, if any, has been performed on the trends and characteristics of candidates and positions in the field of entrepreneurship.The results of this study are very encouraging. Both the demand for and the supply of entrepreneurship faculty have increased spectacularly during the last nine years. Between 1989/90 and 1997/98 the number of entrepreneurship positions increased 253% while the number of candidates increased by 94%. During this period the number of positions that list entrepreneurship as the primary field has increased ten-fold from 5 to 50 and the number of candidates that list entrepreneurship as their primary field has increased four-fold from 5 to 20. During the same period the number of secondary and tertiary positions have increased 116% and 78%, respectively, and the number of secondary and tertiary candidates have increased by 67% and 53%. The percentage of entrepreneurship positions listing entrepreneurship as the primary field has increased from 19% in 89/90 to 54% in 1997/98. Overall, the growth in the number of primary entrepreneurship positions is very encouraging.In the end, the results of this study are very encouraging. Both the demand and the supply of entrepreneurship faculty have increased spectacularly during the last nine years. The field has clearly made significant progress toward being institutionalized. However, it is still too soon to conclude that the commitment to entrepreneurship by schools of business and management is irreversible. One clear indication of the tenuous status is that, unlike strategy and international business, there has been no mandate from the American Assembly of Collegiate Schools of Business that entrepreneurship be incorporated into the curriculum of all accredited schools. Entrepreneurship remains an elective subject in most schools and therefore depends on student interest. The field has made great strides during the 1990s, but a couple of hurdles remain.     

Characteristics of Immigrant Entrepreneurs and Their Involvement in International New Ventures

We studied 561 young firms in Australia to understand the involvement of immigrant entrepreneurs (IEs) in international new ventures (INVs). We found that IEs are overrepresented in INVs and have many characteristics known to facilitate INV success, including more founders, university degrees, international connections, and technical capability. Our study has implications for immigration policy and economic policy and the efficient use of a nation's human capital. This research challenges a necessity‐based stereotype of immigrant entrepreneurs by identifying areas in which immigrant entrepreneurs have natural competitive advantages over native entrepreneurs (NEs). This research makes a contribution to the theory of immigrant entrepreneurship by identifying the significant role of immigrant entrepreneurs in INVs and the suitability of immigrant entrepreneurs for the development of INVs. We inform diverse streams of research in transnational and immigrant entrepreneurship with broader strategic work on the creation of INVs. © 2013 Wiley Periodicals, Inc. This research was partly funded by an Australian Academy of Social Sciences research grant. A previous version of this paper was presented at Babson College Entrepreneurship Research Conference (BCERC), 2011, Syracuse.     

The benefits of having an entrepreneur-mother: Influence of mother's entrepreneurial status on human capital formation among children

Prior research shows that childcare is a unique driver for female entrepreneurship, as entrepreneurship allows women to increase time allocation on child supervision. Yet, whether female entrepreneurship actually promotes childrearing outcomes remains contentious in extant literature. This study focuses on child human capital formation as a key childrearing outcome. Drawing on the occupational inheritance literature, we suggest that, in addition to supervision, entrepreneur-mothers may foster child human capital formation through value transmission—in particular, transmitting self-direction values to children. Using nationally representative data from China, we find that children with entrepreneur-mothers exhibit better human capital formation outcomes—especially when they are younger and female. We further show that both supervision and value transmission are present, with the latter being a more important mechanism. Reconciling conflicting views in the literature, our study has both theoretical and practical implications.Executive summaryPrior female entrepreneurship research suggests that women often choose to be entrepreneurs out of family, particularly childrearing, considerations. Entrepreneurship offers work autonomy and scheduling flexibility, allowing entrepreneur-mothers to better allocate time to childrearing activities. Given that numerous studies document a positive relationship between maternal time allocation and childrearing outcomes, conceivably entrepreneur-mothers should achieve favorable childrearing outcomes. Entrepreneurial research focusing on the business-family interface, however, suggests female entrepreneurs often face unanticipated pressures that limit their ability to care for family members. In addition, some female entrepreneurs may be motivated more by career than by childcare considerations. As such, the relationship between female entrepreneurship and childrearing outcomes remains conceptually and empirically ambiguous. Given the foregoing situation, we examine this relationship both theoretically and empirically, focusing on child human capital formation as a specific and important childrearing outcome.Examining how female entrepreneurship relates to child human capital formation is of both scholarly and practical importance. First, it brings enhanced clarity to our understanding of the family- and child-related consequences of female entrepreneurship, thus affording reconciliation of the ambiguous predictions found in extant theories. Accordingly, we advance research on female entrepreneurship. Exploring the relationship also adds to the family embeddedness perspective in the broader entrepreneurship literature, because child development is a crucial component within the family domain.Second, our research has practical values and policy implications. Prospective female entrepreneurs may, regardless of their pre-entry intentions, be interested in learning how entering entrepreneurship could affect childrearing outcomes. Policymakers worldwide have been actively promoting entrepreneurship in the past few decades, mainly driven by economic and technological considerations. Because such efforts likely increase female participation in entrepreneurial activities, they should be evaluated to account for their family or childrearing consequences in addition to the economic and technological implications. Therefore, we provide evidence which prospective female entrepreneurs and policymakers can use to make informed decisions.To study the effect of female entrepreneurship on child human capital formation, we note that the ambiguous predictions in extant work arise because it predominantly focuses on whether entrepreneur-mothers can allocate more time to childrearing activities, which we call “supervision”. We suggest that this supervision mechanism is not the only way in which the intergenerational impact occurs. Drawing on sociological research in occupational inheritance, we propose that entrepreneur-mothers could foster child human capital formation through transmitting self-direction values, thus promoting children's aspirations and achievements. To test these theoretical hypotheses, we use data from a nationally representative Chinese household survey, which contains separately surveyed parent and child data.Our empirical analyses reveal that children with entrepreneur-mothers outperform those with non-entrepreneur-mothers in both cognitive and noncognitive skills. The effect is stronger for daughters and younger children. Additional analyses verify the presence of both supervision and value transmission mechanisms, with value transmission being more importantly in explaining the entrepreneur-mother effect.Findings in this study deepen our knowledge on whether and how entrepreneur-mothers foster children's human capital formation. They highlight that—in addition to supervision—value transmission is a crucial channel through which entrepreneur-mothers exert an intergenerational impact on children. Our results also indicate that women running larger businesses—likely those with career motives and targets of policies that promote entrepreneurship—see better child human capital formation outcomes despite having potentially limited supervision capacity. Finally, our findings not only shed light on female entrepreneurship in China, a context with growing relevance in the global economy and rate of entrepreneurial activities, but also offer generalizable insights to other economies.     

Global entrepreneurship and institutions: an introduction

This article is an introduction to the special issue from the 4th Global Entrepreneurship Monitor Research Conference held at Imperial College Business School, London, in 2010. The article has two objectives. The first is to summarize the history of the GEM consortium, some of the contributions that it has delivered, and some challenges and opportunities ahead. The second is to present a summary of the papers in the context of the utility of GEM data in comparative entrepreneurship research.     

The moderating effect of institutional context on the relationship between associational activity and new business activity in emerging economies

Varying institutional environments provide the foundation for a great deal of international business (IB) research yet relatively little empirical work has examined the association between institutional factors and new business development in emerging economies, although the importance of new business development for economic transition and growth is widely acknowledged. Drawing from social network and institutional theories, we address this gap by examining the effect of associational activity on the level of new business activity in emerging economies, and testing the thesis that associational activity becomes more instrumental for new business creation when aspiring entrepreneurs confront higher institutional burdens (i.e., obstacles derived from underdeveloped or absent institutions). On the basis of data from two cross-national research projects—the Global Entrepreneurship Monitor and the World Values Survey—we find a positive relationship between a country's associational activity and new business activity; this relationship is stronger for higher regulatory and normative institutional burdens and lower cognitive institutional burdens. This study is among the first to examine empirically the possible substitution effect between social ties and institutions to predict new business activity; it paints a nuanced picture of how social networks might be more instrumental in contexts characterized by weak institutions. We discuss the implications of these findings for IB theory and practice and offer directions for further research in the area.     

The Diana Project: pioneering women studying pioneering women

The 2007 winner of the International Award for Entrepreneurship and Small Business Research is the Diana Project team (Candida Brush, Nancy Carter, Elizabeth Gatewood, Patricia Greene and Myra Hart). The Diana Project builds on the vast experience of the team in the field of entrepreneurship in general and women entrepreneurship, business growth and venture capital in particular. The Diana Project has investigated the supply and demand side of growth capital for women entrepreneurs. The research contributes to entrepreneurship theory as well as to practice, filling a void in knowledge on growth-oriented women entrepreneurship. In this article we present and discuss the research contribution of the Diana Project, in the areas of entrepreneurship, women entrepreneurship and venture capital. We specifically discuss the value of researching a specific group of women entrepreneurs, those who want to grow their businesses, that very clearly demonstrates the positive potential of female entrepreneurship. The Diana Project has also moved research on women’s entrepreneurship forward since its framework does not treat women entrepreneurs as “other,” i.e., the project does not presuppose that women’s entrepreneurship is similar to or different from men’s entrepreneurship. It assumes that women’s entrepreneurship is entrepreneurship and studies it from that point of view. Carin Holmquist is professor at Stockholm School of Economics and member of the Prize Committee for The International Award for Entrepreneurship and Small Business Research. Sara Carter is professor at University of Strathclyde. Both have written extensively in several of the areas covered by the Diana Project. 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 the research for which the award has been granted 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 (roughly USD 80,000). It has been awarded annually since 1996. More information about the prize and previous winners is available at .     

Using fuzzy-set qualitative comparative analysis for a finer-grained understanding of entrepreneurship

Entrepreneurship theory has largely been developed and tested using symmetrical correlational methods, effectively describing the sample-average respondent and subsuming individual differences. Such methods necessarily limit investigation of asymmetries that are evident in entrepreneurship, and provide only a single explanation that belies the multiple pathways to entrepreneurship observed in practice. This paper employs a case-based approach—fuzzy-set Qualitative Comparative Analysis (fsQCA)—to identify configurations of antecedent attributes of individuals in groups within samples, thereby revealing asymmetries and multiple entrepreneurial pathways that are otherwise hidden in the data. We explain the application of fsQCA to reveal these common issues in entrepreneurship; demonstrate how fsQCA complements correlational methods and offers finer-grained understanding of individual entrepreneurial behavior; and offer a comprehensive research agenda to build new entrepreneurship theory.     

Entrepreneurship in Emerging Markets: New Insights and Directions for Future Research

In recent years, the entrepreneurship and emerging markets research streams have intersected. Emerging markets provide an opportunity to examine entrepreneurship in different contexts and forms. This article discusses the current literature that interconnects both research streams in general, comments on the contributions of the articles published in the special issue on entrepreneurship and emerging markets in particular, and sketches out future avenues for research. These contributions span several theoretical lenses, including institutional theory, internationalization theory, transaction cost economics, and the resource‐based view, as well as multiple geographic regions, including China as the largest emerging economy and other countries in East Asia, Central Asia, South Asia, Eastern Europe, Latin America, the Caribbean, and the Middle East. We weave a discussion of the extant literature and these contributions inside three key themes: Emerging Markets and China's Uniqueness, Entrepreneurship in Emerging Markets, and Future Research on Emerging Markets Entrepreneurship. © 2013 Wiley Periodicals, Inc.     

International opportunity recognition as a critical component for leveraging Internet capabilities and international market performance

Recent research in the field of international entrepreneurship has emphasized the need for a better conceptualization of international opportunity recognition. Further, with advancements in information and communication technologies, such as the Internet, there has been a profound impact on the way in which international business is conducted, for example, enabling entrepreneurial firms to capitalize on the economic opportunities of an Internet environment. In this study, we propose a model, highlighting the importance of international opportunity recognition, as a critical component for leveraging Internet capabilities and international market performance. Through the lens of a resource capabilities approach, a quantitative, online survey was used to collect data from Australian, international entrepreneurial firms. Structural equation modelling results indicate that international opportunity recognition plays a central role in explaining how resources and Internet capabilities combine for the firm’s realization of international opportunities, and subsequent international performance. The findings enrich current understanding of how international entrepreneurial firms realize opportunities in Internet-based environments.     

Towards an Interdisciplinary Theory of Entrepreneurship

Entrepreneurship is one of the least understood topics in economics. The rising significance of small companies and especially of start-ups for the creation of new jobs has been an intensively discussed subject for nearly one decade. But there is still no theory of entrepreneurship.First this paper reviews the role of the entrepreneur in the history of economic thought and concludes that there is no agreed upon definition of what an entrepreneur does or is. The unsolved problem is the non-rational human behavior. Schumpeter and Kirzner have developed economic models of the role of the non-maximizing entrepreneur in the price-mechanism. But they did not develop a theory of entrepreneurship.In the second part of the paper entrepreneurship is understood as the pursuit of opportunites without regard to resources currently controlled (Stevenson, Roberts, and Grousbeck). Based on that definition the contributions of economic decision theory, sociological system theory, psychoanalytical research and behavioral studies are reviewed and an interdisciplinary approach to the development of an entrepreneurship theory is proposed.     

William J. Baumol: An Entrepreneurial Economist on the Economics of Entrepreneurship

William J. Baumol is the 2003 winner of the International Award for Entrepreneurship and Small Business Research. Throughout his career Baumol has urged the profession to pay attention to the instrumental role of entrepreneurship in economic renewal and growth. At the same time he has insisted that economists continue to use their usual tool box when the purview of analysis is extended to entrepreneurship. Hence, Baumol can be characterized as a revolutionary from within. In this article we present and discuss Baumol's research contribution in the areas of entrepreneurship and small business economics, notably from a growth perspective. In addition to placing his work in these areas into the wider context of his full contribution, we emphasize Baumol's findings that growth cannot be explained by the accumulation of various factors of production per se; human creativity and productive entrepreneurship are needed to combine the inputs in profitable ways. As a result, an institutional environment that encourages productive entrepreneurship and human experimentation becomes the ultimate determinant of economic growth.