Token entrepreneurs: a review of gender,capital, and context in technology entrepreneurship

ABSTRACT

This article reviews the literature on gender and entrepreneurship in technology to explore individual and contextual factors maintaining the token status of women in this field. It examines how the intersection of gender and context influences participation rates in entrepreneurship, and suggests that the deeply embedded cultural and cognitive associations that frame both technology and entrepreneurship as masculine concepts create barriers for women when these contexts overlap. It offers a framework for research and practice that aids in the analysis of complex multi-level barriers that control access to the forms of capital necessary for initial and continued participation in technology entrepreneurship. Given calls for women to participate more fully in high-growth technology ventures, it highlights the need for research to incorporate broader analytical perspectives that simultaneously examine both the barriers faced by women in these contexts and the factors that systemically sustain them.     

Hi-tech start-ups: legitimacy challenges and funding dynamics

Studies on the legitimacy challenges faced by hi-tech start-ups are still scarce, leaving room for research, and policymaking debate. Legitimacy issues may become difficult to face for hi-tech firms in comparison with other start-ups, because they work in an extreme environment where the technological challenges are at the edge of the scientific possibility. The paper proposes a conceptual model to grasp the relevance of three legitimacy drivers of the hi-tech start-ups for investment decisions. We investigated the ability of 30 hi-tech start-up firms to obtain financial resources from the US investors, employing a set-theoretic approach and carried out fuzzy-set Qualitative Comparative Analysis. Our findings clarify that the funding decisions of US investors are driven by the location of headquarter and R&D of hi-tech start-ups and by the educational experience of the founders. Our study has significant theoretical, practical, and policymaking implications.     

Endowed chairs in entrepreneurship: deans’ preferences versus chair holders’ expericences

Business school deans’ feelings about the importance of various teaching research and service activities in the roles played by holders of endowed chairs in Entrepreneurship were contrasted with the views of chair holders themselves, based on their experiences. Differences were highlighted and discussed. Results suggest that the chair holder role is negotiated between multiple constituencies, with deans’ influence being strong but limited. Implications for individuals aspiring to hold chairs are discussed.     

Are UK technology-based small firms still finance constrained?

This paper examines funding issues for UK Technology-based Small Firms (TBSFs). TBSFs are the cry of today and UK government like other countries is trying to increase the mass of TBSFs by various means. However, it is reported that TBSFs face many impediments to their successful development. Finance is believed as the main barrier at the early stages of TBSFs development. This paper is attempting to follow up and report if the funding situation for UK TBSFs has improved. The findings reported in this paper suggest that nearly 80% sample firms were finance constrained at the early stages of business development.     

Roles of chairs in entrepreneurship: What deans expect

Major donations, especially for endowed chairs, put Colleges of Business and Universities in the spotlight and create a great deal of excitement, highlighting the important role that educational institutions play in benefiting the students, the community, and society in general. This kind of excitement needs to be sustained over time, signifying the link that the endowed Chair or Professorship in Entrepreneurship creates between the past, the present, and the future. Consequently, there is a need for a long-term personal connection and close relationship between the donor, the faculty holding the endowed chair, and the institution represented by the Dean that should be preserved over time. This study reports findings of a survey of the perceptions of AACSB Deans on what an Endowed Chair in Entrepreneurship is, and what it could, and should mean for their institution.     

New market creation through transformation

Is new market creation a search and selectionprocess within the theoretical space of all possible markets? Or is it the outcome of a process of transformation of extant realities into new possibilities? In this article we consider new market creation as a process involving a new network of stakeholders. The network is initiated through an effectual commitment that sets in motion two concurrent cycles of expanding resources and convergingconstraints that result in the new market. The dynamic model was induced from two empirical investigations, a cognitive science-based investigation of entrepreneurial expertise, and a real time history of the RFID industry. JEL Classification: M13, M31, D4, D52, D71, D72, L1, L2, P42 We would like to thank the Batten Institute at the Darden Graduate School of Business Administration, University of Virginia, for supporting this research. We would also like to thank the following on specific contributions to our thesis: Anil Menon for his relentless insistence on more precise formulations of effectual reasoning; Jim March for his conversation and for inspiring us to dig into Type I and Type II errors; Rob Wiltbank for firming up the section on opportunity costs; and Stuart Read for helping us clarify our writing. Correspondence to: S.D. Sarasvathy     

Does Foreign Direct Investment Crowd Out Domestic Entrepreneurship?

In analyzing firm entry and exit across Belgian manufacturing industries, this paper presents evidence that import competition and foreign direct investment discourage entry and stimulate exit of domestic entrepreneurs. These results are in line with theoretical occupational choice models that predict foreign direct investment would crowd out domestic entrepreneurs through their selections in product and labor markets. However, the empirical results also suggest that this crowding out effect may be moderated or even reversed in the long-run due to the long term positive effects of FDI on domestic entrepreneurship as a result of learning, demonstration, networking and linkage effects between foreign and domestic firms.     

Sharing my way to success: A case study on developing entrepreneurial ventures using social capital in an OSS community

While Open Source Software (OSS) communities provide opportunities for knowledge creation, we have a limited understanding of how entrepreneurs leverage OSS communities for their entrepreneurial ventures. Using social capital theory in a mixed methods case study, we compare entrepreneur and non-entrepreneur behaviors to investigate how entrepreneurs build social capital within an OSS community. This study shows that entrepreneurs differentiate themselves from non-entrepreneurs by focusing on cognitive and relational capital building activities, which in return makes it possible for them to leverage their social capital to influence and shape the environment in which they are operating. Our findings suggest that entrepreneurs strategically select which activities within the community to expend their limited resources on (e.g., developing code over participating in email conversations) and build their social capital more through their actions than through their words (e.g., showing their commitment to the community through code commits, bug fixes, and documentation). Given the liabilities of newness and smallness as well as other challenges faced by entrepreneurs, applying an open innovation strategy in OSS communities could be one approach where entrepreneurs, by developing and freely revealing their intellectual property to the community, share their way to success via OSS-infused entrepreneurial business ventures.     

Innovation in start-ups: Ideas filling the void or ideas devoid of resources and capabilities?

We investigate how access to different types of resources affects the success of entrepreneurial start-up firms at early stages of development in small isolated economies by studying 12 start-ups based in New Zealand. We find that successful commercialization of innovations depends on the availability of complementary assets, and that capability-based resources, especially dynamic capabilities, have a greater impact on competitive advantage of start-ups than other intangible and tangible assets. For the start-ups in our study, alliances with partners are particularly important, and so the ability to form alliances is a key capability. Successful start-ups leverage their available resources to attract alliance partners in order to access necessary complementary resources. The start-ups in our study clearly demonstrated the ability to attract partners locally but struggled to do so internationally, thereby limiting their growth potential.     

创业激情:情绪视角的创业研究综述

认知角度的创业研究已相当成熟,而情绪视角的研究才刚刚起步,创业激情在创业中的作用备受关注。综述了创业激情的内涵、测量、影响结果、作用机制以及创业激情的来源,发现现有研究还存在以下问题:内涵模糊、测量工具不完善、影响和作用机制缺乏系统性、来源不明确。在此基础上构建了创业激情研究的整合模型,提出采用案例分析方法对个体、团队、组织层面的创业激情进行界定,从激情本质出发,开发新量表,对创业激情的负面效应给予关注,未来研究可探讨创业激情对创业结果中介机制间的交互作用,并根据不同创业类型对创业激情进行跨文化分析。