Not so silent partners: Exploring the interconnected roles of entrepreneurs and their spouses

When launching their ventures, the majority of entrepreneurs are married. Yet, our understanding of the spousal influence on the entrepreneurial process remains limited. This is surprising considering the spouse represents one of the most influential figures in an individual's life. Through an inductive qualitative analysis of 18 spouse-entrepreneur pairs, we explore the interactive nature of venture-related roles between the spousal couple and how these spousal roles evolve over the course of the venture. Our study shows that the dynamic alignment between entrepreneurial roles and spousal roles allows the venture to progress through various stages of firm innovation, creation, and growth. Thus, our paper extends the broader literature on roles during the venturing process as we illuminate the “not-so-silent role” of spouses in entrepreneurship.     

Habitual entrepreneurs: Possible cases of entrepreneurship addiction?

We examine the underlying psychological processes that may motivate habitual entrepreneurs to engage in entrepreneurship repeatedly. By drawing on the psychology literature on behavioral addictions, such as workaholism and Internet use, we develop a framework that defines the symptomatology of what we identify as a “behavioral addiction to entrepreneurship.” Through interviews with two habitual entrepreneurs, we demonstrate how these addiction symptoms manifest in the entrepreneurial context. We also demonstrate how psychological, emotional, and physiological aspects of the entrepreneurial experience reinforce a behavioral addiction to entrepreneurship. Our theorizing offers insights into the psychological origins of repeated engagement in venture creation activities and yields insights into possible “dark side” of entrepreneurship outcomes.     

Stimulating innovation through corporate venture bases

A common shortcoming, both in the literature on corporate venturing and in practice, is insufficient or no attention to the ability and responsibility of firms to stimulate and influence the creation of innovative ideas that can lead to new ventures. This paper focuses on the initial process of corporate venturing and explores how corporate venture management can stimulate the generation of genuinely original and dynamic ideas by establishing and maintaining a venture base. The following concrete actions are proposed in order to promote and improve the functionality of the venture base: take responsibility, secure access, acquire network capabilities, gain competencies in how to influence the vision and agendas in knowledge-creating networks, contextualize, and invite to discussion at an early stage. The paper is mainly conceptual in nature but draws on 22 semistructured interviews conducted between 2000 and 2002 with managers of corporate venturing departments at six multinational Danish firms in knowledge-intensive industries. The interviews are used to illustrate the main arguments of the paper.     

Hidden ties in international new venturing: The case of portfolio entrepreneurship

A hitherto neglected phenomenon in international new venturing is portfolio entrepreneurship, which occurs when entrepreneurs found, own, manage and control more than one business at a time, with ownership of the new venture being distinct from that of the existing business ventures. This study introduces the phenomenon of portfolio entrepreneurship in international new venturing through a longitudinal study of a cluster of small and medium enterprises (SMEs) in Tasmania, Australia, where 6 of 11 firms in the cluster were international new ventures (INVs). The pattern of international portfolio entrepreneurship pursued by the Tasmanian entrepreneurs and coupling between firms is described. Key findings include the ability of portfolio entrepreneurs to leverage high-discretion slack resources, positive legitimacy spillovers, and learning effects and experimentation across loosely coupled INVs in the portfolio. The findings also identify dysfunctional elements of portfolio entrepreneurship, and cast doubt over the conventional use of ‘the firm’ as the focal unit of analysis in INV studies. A particular contribution of this study is to remind us of the richness and pluralism inherent in international new venturing.     

Toward a Contingency Framework of Export Entrepreneurship: Conceptualisations and Empirical Evidence

This paper reports the findings of a study, which employed a contingency, export-entrepreneurial approach to investigate the critical influences on export venture creation among a sample of Nigerian small firms. Responding to the repeated calls in the literature for multi-disciplinary research frameworks, the paper draws on perspectives from entrepreneurship, exporting, and contingency literatures to examine the antecedent and moderating influences on the export behavior of small firms. It explores, in particular, the effect of entrepreneurial orientation and external environmental moderators in the export venture creation process of small firms. The findings suggest that an entrepreneurial orientation is associated with better export venturing, and is the appropriate strategic posture for small firms operating in hostile environments. It would appear, also, that this orientation is associated with certain decision-maker characteristics (including international orientation and contacts and previous business experience) and firm-level competencies. By thus highlighting the entrepreneurial dimensions of export venturing, this paper makes the case for greater policy focus on strengthening the entrepreneurial foundations/capacities of small firms.     

Goal achievement and satisfaction of joint venture partners

Joint venturing is recommended to avoid some of the obstacles to successful business venturing, such as capability limitations and organizational resistance. However, the high dissolution rates for joint ventures suggest a need to learn how to utilize this cooperative strategy more effectively. Two frequently reported problem areas in joint venturing are unrealistic corporate expectations and inadequate planning. Thus, this study sought to examine the impact of strategic intent on joint venture success as measured by partner goal achievement and satisfaction.A review of the literature on strategic goals and goal consensus suggested that two variables are likely to affect joint venture performance: the number of partner goals pursued and the overlap in partners' goals. The type of goals pursued may also affect performance; that is, some goals may be more achievable through joint venturing than are other goals.The purpose of this research was two-fold: (1) to empirically explore the relative importance of a variety of partner goals for their joint ventures, and (2) to determine if goal disparity, and the number and type of goals pursued affected joint venture success. This approach draws attention to the expectations of partners rather than to the venture itself, the traditional focus in entrepreneurship.The hypotheses and exploratory propositions were tested using data from U.S. firms involved in manufacturing joint ventures. A categorization of partner goals was developed through factor analysis, in which five categories of goals emerged: knowledge transfer, market power, financial performance, efficiency, and financial structure. Partners were found to have pursued multiple goals simultaneously, with knowledge transfer and market goals being most frequently rated as critically important. These findings suggest the need to expand traditional performance measures to account for the diverse and nonfinancial nature of partner goals.When examined separately, it was found that a large goal set facilitated partner goal achievement and satisfaction, and that an overlap in partners' goals promoted partner satisfaction. The large goal set was argued to be necessary in the volatile environments that are often attractive for joint venturing. A large goal set reflects adaptation to environmental change and facilitates prudent strategy selection by subjecting alternatives to multiple goal hurdles. The overlap in partners' goals reflects a meshing of individual partner goals and helps to minimize conflict, which could stall strategy development and drain resources. However, when an integrated model was developed from multiple regression findings, the overlap in partners' goals became a moderator variable. This model exposed the negative as well as the positive effects of the overlap in partners' goals.Analysis further suggested that the joint venture strategy may be better suited to achieving efficiency goals than financial goals. Possible explanations for the difficulty in achieving financial goals include: insufficient time (or short lifespan of the joint venture), the complex structure inherent in joint ventures, and the possibility of disagreement between the partners about how the financial goals should be achieved. On the other hand, efficiency goals, such as vertical integration and economies of scale, require expansion or extension of operations and thus fit well with the pooling of skills and resources that are characteristic of joint venturing. Further, both partners contribute to and gain from efficiency goals, unlike with market access or knowledge transfer goals where one firm contributes more than it gains or vice versa for that particular goal.Additional analysis revealed that the goal types explained more variance in partner goal achievement and satisfaction than did the size of goal sets or the extent of overlap in partners' goals. Taken in combination, the various aspects of partners' goals explained 26% of the variance in partner goal achievement and 38% of the variance in partner satisfaction. When partner goal achievement was included in the multiple regression model for partner satisfaction, the amount of explained variance increased to 69%. The results suggest that a partner firm may be able to significantly enhance its chances of judging a joint venture to be successful if its goals focus on efficiency rather than revenues and profits, if it has a relatively large goal set, and if it concentrates on achieving the set of stated goals.     

Venture capital and high technology entrepreneurship

Venture capital clearly plays an important role in high technology entrepreneurship. The purpose of this article is to explain the differences among various venture capital complexes focusing on where venture capital is important to innovation and entrepreneurship and conversely where it is not. We do so through an empirical and historical examination of the seven most important venture capital complexes: California (San Francisco/ Silicon Valley), Massachusetts (Boston), New York, Illinois (Chicago), Texas, Connecticut, and Minnesota (Minneapolis).We establish a three-part tripartite typology for explaining the differences between these venture capital complexes: 1) technology-oriented complexes are located close to concentrations of high technology intensive businesses, invest most of their funds locally, and are net attractors of capital; 2) finance-oriented complexes are located around financial institutions and export their capital; and 3) hybrid complexes mix characteristics of both technology and finance-oriented venturing.Our findings have a series of important practical implications. Although venture capital is not absolutely necessary to facilitate high technology entepreneurship, well-developed venture capital networks provide tremendous incentives for entrepreneurship by lowering the difficulties of entering an industry. Venture capitalists use both their experience and their contacts to reduce many of the information and opportunity costs associated with new business formation. The importance of contact networks and information to both deal flow and investment monitoring goes a low way toward explaining why venture capitalists cluster tightly together. The availability of venture capital also attracts entrepreneurs and high quality personnel to a region creating a virtuous circle of new enterprise formation, innovation, and economic development.Private, nonprofit, and subsidized public efforts aimed at providing venture capital and stimulating high technology entrepreneurship must confront the fact that venture capital alone will not magically generate entrepreneurship and economic development. It is important that such efforts recognize the nonfinancial side of venture investing and attract experienced personnel who can tap into established entrepreneurial networks and secure coinvestors. More significantly, establishing public venture funding in an area lacking the requisite entrepreneurial climate or technology infrastructure may create a “catch 22” situation where locally oriented funds invest in bad deals or where venture capital is simply exported to established high technology regions.     

Corporate venturing: alternatives,obstacles encountered,and experience effects

In this study of a relatively small number of corporate executives with line experience in corporate venturing, some clues are uncovered that could help those corporations contemplating the initiation of acquisition, joint venturing, or corporate start-up activities to avoid or overcome the obstacles that our sample of managers encountered.The preliminary indications are;

• 1.1. Joint ventures appear to be a highly useful way of starting off in venturing activity while at the same time reducing the initial risk.
• 2.2. The excutives in this sample indicated that experience at venturing resulted in improvement in venturing performance, but only after several venture attempts. From this observation, two suggestions appear reasonable: 1) Start venturing with few relatively small ventures and keep ventures relatively small until experience is gained. Start perhaps with joint ventures to learn your way in and “graduate” to grass-roots start ups once significant learning has taken place; and 2) The experience gained will reside in people who may have been part of an unsuccessful venture, perhaps several unsuccessful ventures. If this experience is to be useful, the people who have gained it need to be retained and recycled to other new ventures.
• 3.3. Although some of the obstacles perceived by the executives diminish with experience, others do not. Regardless of experience, inability to plan for new ventures is a recurrently cited obstacle, as is the inability of the corporation to provide adequate support to the venture.

The last point may be the most significant observation in this study. Prevailing corporate values call for the ability to plan and to meet the plan as one of the primary measures of managerial competence. New ventures, however, rarely conform to plan, especially the quantitative projections. As a result, corporate support either dwindles when plans are not achieved or desperate spending efforts are made to achiev unachievable planned results, which often results in large losses. Very different planning methods are needed for ventures, methods that, in the highly uncertain surroundings of venturing activity, address what realistic corporate expectations should be, how progress should be measured and venture managers evaluated, and in what ways and at what times support will be provided by the parent corporation. These are discussed in the main body of the article.     

Environment,corporate entrepreneurship,and financial performance: A taxonomic approach

This study examined the association between a firm's external environment, corporate entrepreneurship, and financial performance. The study emphasized three propositions: (1) perceived—rather than objective-characteristics of the environment significantly influenced entrepreneurship activities; (2) a multidimensional definition of a firm's environment was essential to unravel the interplay between the environment, orporate entrepreneurship activities, and financial performance; and (3) a taxonomic approach had the advantage of accounting for the interrelationships among the dimensions of the environment in classifying firms.Using data from 102 companies in six4-digit industrial classification codes (SIC),cluster analysis was used to distinguish four environmental settings: “dynamic growth,” “hostile and rivalrous but technologically rich,” “hospitable, product-driven growth,” and “static and impoverished” environments. These four environments varied in their characteristics.The four empirically derived environment clusters were then used to examine variations in corporate entrepreneurship—operationalized as corporate innovation and venturing, and corporate renewal activities. The first dimension—corporate innovation and venturing—had four components: new business creation, new product introduction, percent of revenue from new products, and technological entrepreneurship. The renewal dimension had three components: mission reformulation, reorganization, and system-wide change. The data were used to test six hypotheses:

• 1.H1: In dynamic or growth environments, companies will emphasize new business creation and innovation.
• 2.H2: Environmental hostility is positively associated with the redefinition of business through venturing activities.
• 3.H3: Hospitable business environments are positively associated with business venturing and renewal activities.
• 4.H4: Static environments are inversely associated with corporate venturing and renewal activities.
• 5.H5: Corporate entrepreneurship activities are positively associated with company financial performance.
• 6.H6: Corporate entrepreneurship activities emphasised in HI through H4 will be significantly and positively associated with company financial performance in their respective environmental clusters.

The results provided general support for the six hypotheses. They showed that: (1) each environmental cluster had a distinct combination of activities relating to corporate innovation and venturing, and renewal; (2) corporate entrepreneurship activities varied in their associations with measures of company growth and profitability; and (3) the associations between corporate entrepreneurship and company financial performance varied among the four environment clusters. The results from this study can help executives in selecting specific entrepreneurial activities that match the demands of success in their business environment to improve their company's performance.     

Youth entrepreneurship in emerging economies: can family support help navigate institutional voids?

Abstract

Institutional voids plague entrepreneurship in emerging economies. In this paper, we investigate how the social structure of the family can enable young entrepreneurs to navigate the institutional voids and progress through the venturing process. Findings suggest that both institutional voids and family support have a significant effect on startup activities, and that family financial support helps absorb the negative influence of capital market voids. Our study begins to explain the relationship between institutional voids and family support, thereby contributing to the ongoing development of institutional theory in an emerging economy context and to the literature on family influences on entrepreneurship.     

Competing models of entrepreneurial intentions

Why are intentions interesting to those who care about new venture formation? Entrepreneurship is a way of thinking, a way of thinking that emphasizes opportunities over threats. The opportunity identification process is clearly an intentional process, and, therefore, entrepreneurial intentions clearly merit our attention. Equally important, they offer a means to better explain—and predict—entrepreneurship.We don't start a business as a reflex, do we? We may respond to the conditions around us, such as an intriguing market niche, by starting a new venture. Yet, we think about it first; we process the cues from the environment around us and set about constructing the perceived opportunity into a viable business proposition.In the psychological literature, intentions have proven the best predictor of planned behavior, particularly when that behavior is rare, hard to observe, or involves unpredictable time lags. New businesses emerge over time and involve considerable planning. Thus, entrepreneurship is exactly the type of planned behavior Bird 1988, Katz and Gartner 1988 for which intention models are ideally suited. If intention models prove useful in understanding business venture formation intentions, they offer a coherent, parsimonious, highly-generalizable, and robust theoretical framework for understanding and prediction.Empirically, we have learned that situational (for example, employment status or informational cues) or individual (for example, demographic characteristics or personality traits) variables are poor predictors. That is, predicting entrepreneurial activities by modeling only situational or personal factors usually resulted in disappointingly small explanatory power and even smaller predictive validity. Intentions models offer us a significant opportunity to increase our ability to understand and predict entrepreneurial activity.The current study compares two intention-based models in terms of their ability to predict entrepreneurial intentions: Ajzen's theory of planned behavior (TPB) and Shapero's model of the entrepreneurial event (SEE). Ajzen argues that intentions in general depend on perceptions of personal attractiveness, social norms, and feasibility. Shapero argues that entrepreneurial intentions depend on perceptions of personal desirability, feasibility, and propensity to act. We employed a competing models approach, comparing regression analyses results for the two models. We tested for overall statistical fit and how well the results supported each component of the models. The sample consisted of student subjects facing imminent career decisions. Results offered strong statistical support for both models.(1) Intentions are the single best predictor of any planned behavior, including entrepreneurship. Understanding the antecedents of intentions increases our understanding of the intended behavior. Attitudes influence behavior by their impact on intentions. Intentions and attitudes depend on the situation and person. Accordingly, intentions models will predict behavior better than either individual (for example, personality) or situational (for example, employment status) variables. Predictive power is critical to better post hoc explanations of entrepreneurial behavior; intentions models provide superior predictive validity. (2) Personal and situational variables typically have an indirect influence on entrepreneurship through influencing key attitudes and general motivation to act. For instance, role models will affect entrepreneurial intentions only if they change attitudes and beliefs such as perceived self-efficacy. Intention-based models describe how exogenous influences (for eample, perceptions of resource availability) change intentions and, ultimately, venture creation. (3) The versatility and robustness of intention models support the broader use of comprehensive, theory-driven, testable process models in entrepreneurship research (MacMillan and Katz 1992). Intentional behavior helps explain and model why many entrepreneurs decide to start a business long before they scan for opportunities.Understanding intentions helps researchers and theoreticians to understand related phenomena. These include: what triggers opportunity scanning, the sources of ideas for a business venture, and how the venture ultimately becomes a reality. Intention models can describe how entrepreneurial training molds intentions in subsequent venture creation (for example, how does training in business plan writing change attitudes and intentions?). Past research has extensively explored aspects of new venture plans once written. Intentionality argues instead that we study the planning process itself for determinants of venturing behavior. We can apply intentions models to other strategic decisions such as the decision to grow or exit a business. Researchers can model the intentions of critical stakeholders in the venture, such as venture capitalists' intentions toward investing in a given company. Finally, management researchers can explore the overlaps between venture formation intentions and venture opportunity identification.Entrepreneurs themselves (and those who teach and train them) should benefit from a better understanding of their own motives. The lens provided by intentions affords them the opportunity to understand why they made certain choices in their vision of the new venture.Intentions-based models provide practical insight to any planned behavior. This allows us to better encourage the identification of personally-viable, personally-credible opportunities. Teachers, consultants, advisors, and entrepreneurs should benefit from a better general understanding of how intentions are formed, as well as a specific understanding of how founders' beliefs, perceptions, and motives coalesce into the intent to start a business. This understanding offers sizable diagnostic power, thus entrepreneurship educators can use this model to better understand the motivations and intentions of students and trainees and to help students and trainees understand their own motivations and intentions.Carefully targeted training becomes possible. For example, ethnic and gender differences in career choice are largely explained by self-efficacy differences. Applied work in psychology and sociology tells us that we already know how to remediate self-efficacy differences. Raising entrepreneurial efficacies will raise perceptions of venture feasibility, thus increasing the perception of opportunity.Economic and community development hinges not on chasing smokestacks, but on growing new businesses. To encourage economic development in the form of new enterprises we must first increase perceptions of feasibility and desirability. Policy initiatives will increase business formations if those initiatives positively influence attitudes and thus influence intentions. The growing trends of downsizing and outsourcing make this more than a sterile academic exercise. Even if we successfully increase the quantity and quality of potential entrepreneurs, we must also promote such perceptions among critical stakeholders including suppliers, financiers, neighbors, government officials, and the larger community.The findings of this study argue that promoting entrepreneurial intentions by promoting public perceptions of feasibility and desirability is not just desirable; promoting entrepreneurial intentions is also thoroughly feasible.     

Climate Change and Preparations for the Tide of Traumatic Stress: Implications for Asia-Pacific Human Resources

Although attention to the business risks posed by natural disasters fueled by climate change has grown, the toll that disasters have on human resources in the form of traumatic stress is comparatively neglected. It is common for more than 20% of people exposed to natural disasters to develop traumatic stress disorders that can last for years. In the workplace, traumatic stress hurts attendance, the quantity and quality of output, and relationships. Fortunately, businesses can promote employee resilience and recovery. Given the Asia-Pacific region’s high risk of natural disasters, businesses operating there should include employees’ traumatic stress in their disaster preparedness.     

‘Toy Story’: The narrative world of entrepreneurship and the creation of interpretive communities

Anyone involved in entrepreneurial learning, teaching and research will be aware of the power of a good story about business venturing. The continuous supply of personal stories and accounts of business venturing in bookshops, airport lounges, the business press, television dramas or documentary programmes is evidence of the popular readership of entrepreneurial topics sometimes inspiring people to ‘have a go’ for themselves. But narrative accounts are often maligned in entrepreneurship studies for their anecdotal character and inability to say anything significant beyond the person telling their personal story. In this article, the benefits of a narrative style of inquiry for entrepreneurship studies are considered. This is done with reference to the Marvel Mustang account of business venturing. By relating to narrative and reader response theory, consideration is given to the function that the (Marvel Mustang) text has for the reader and how the reader (and not the text) is the key source of meaning about the practices we associate with entrepreneurship. In taking this emphasis, it is possible to understand the processes that facilitate the ‘stretching away’ of little entrepreneurial stories into transforming relations that go beyond the producer of the story and which ‘pull in’ or connect other people that are unrelated to the story. Narrative analysis helps inquirers to move beyond the ‘what’ and the ‘how’ of entrepreneurship and to be able to answer theoretically ‘why’ such processes migrate and stretch across different cultures and contexts.     

The Improvisational Entrepreneur: Improvisation Training in Entrepreneurship Education

Entrepreneurs constantly face unexpected and unanticipated situations; those that thrive are ones that are identified by the literature as “improvisational.” Yet extant entrepreneurship research has not distinguished what improvisation is from how to do it. I propose training in the principles developed from the theory of performing improvisation promotes the entrepreneurship mindset through pedagogy. Qualitative studies reveal entrepreneurial self‐efficacy themes related to interpersonal/team considerations for entrepreneurs, and introduce “improvisational alertness” as a critical entrepreneurship consideration. Entrepreneurs can learn to keenly pay attention to interpersonal conditions of the present and the future in order to adapt potential limitations for venture success.     

The relationship between prior and subsequent new venture creation in the United States: A county level analysis

Minniti [Minniti, M., 2004. Entrepreneurial alertness and asymmetric information in a spin-glass model. Journal of Business Venturing 19 (5), 637-658; Minniti, M., 2005. Entrepreneurship and network externalities. Journal of Economic Behavior & Organization 57 (1), 1-27] argues that new venture creation decisions are interdependent and that the non-pecuniary network externalities and path dependencies of such decisions influence the geographic concentration of venturing activities. We apply her framework at the county level to study the association between prior and subsequent new venture creation in the U.S. Our findings indicate that there is a non-linear relationship between prior new venture creation and subsequent new venture creation, with venturing activities increasing at an increasing rate based on the amount of prior new venture creation.     

Surviving the emotional rollercoaster called entrepreneurship: The role of emotion regulation

The entrepreneurial journey is often experienced as an emotional rollercoaster, but we know very little about how entrepreneurs can ride it most effectively to increase their ventures' chances of survival. We investigate how entrepreneurs' habitual use of cognitive reappraisal and expressive suppression – two well-established types of emotion regulation – impact on the likelihood of their venture surviving. Drawing on a sample of 183 technology ventures, we find that both regulation types are generally associated with a lower survival likelihood, but that these effects depend on the venture's performance. Our study contributes to the literatures on emotions and new venture survival in entrepreneurship and to the emotion regulation literature.     

Social capital of venture capitalists and start-up funding

How does the social capital of venture capitalists (VCs) affect the funding of start-ups? By building on the rich social capital literature, we hypothesize a positive effect of VCs?? social capital, derived from past syndication, on the amount of money that start-ups receive. Specifically, we argue that both structural and relational aspects of VCs?? social networks provide VCs with superior access to information about current investment objects and opportunities to leverage them in the future, increasing their willingness to invest in these firms. Our empirical results, derived from a novel dataset containing more than 1,500 first funding rounds in the Internet and IT sector, strongly confirm our hypotheses. We discuss the implications of our findings for theories of venture capital and entrepreneurship, showing that the role and effect of VCs?? social capital on start-up firms may be more complex than previously argued in the literature.     

A temporal analysis of how entrepreneurial goal intentions,positive fantasies,and action planning affect starting a new venture and when the effects wear off

The road from intentions to actions and new venture creation is long. So far, the literature has provided insights into action-regulatory factors that contribute to new venture creation. However, the literature has neglected to take into account the temporal dynamics underlying these relationships. We contribute to action-regulation theories in entrepreneurship by theorizing about and investigating how the effects of action-regulatory factors hold over time. We hypothesize that the action-regulatory factors of entrepreneurial goal intentions, positive fantasies, and action planning have combined effects on new venture creation. Furthermore, we hypothesize that these effects become weaker over time. To test our hypotheses, we studied 96 Ugandan entrepreneurs over 30 months. Our results supported our hypotheses. Action planning moderated the effects of entrepreneurial goal intentions and positive fantasies on new venture creation. Furthermore, the effects were significant in the beginning and wore off over time. Our study shows that including a time frame in theoretical models is important to derive valid conclusions from empirical results and to develop more precise theories.     

Will the startup succeed in your eyes? Venture evaluation of resource providers during entrepreneurs' informational signaling

Experienced founders and investors are arguably the venture community members most likely to possess needed financial and social resources for startups. We present a model of venture evaluation where entrepreneurs solicit these resource providers for needed financial and social resources. Our model addresses how resource providers' venture investment propensity influences their evaluation of entrepreneurs' informational signals and how their venture evaluation predicts their willingness to provide financial and social resources. We test our model using real-time decisions and find resource providers with founding experience (both non-investor founders and investors with founding experience) leverage their investment propensity more than non-founder investors when evaluating new ventures. In addition, our post-hoc analysis reveals that resource providers' founding experience is associated with their willingness to confer social resources. Overall, this paper focuses on the perspective of resource providers and addresses how their investment propensity, types of venturing experience, and venture evaluation influence their willingness to render resource support to new ventures.     

Strategic and Operational Determinants of Relationship Outcomes With New Venture Suppliers

While the vast majority of the supplier selection and development literature has focused on relationships between mature, established firms, significantly less attention has been paid to relationships between established firms and new, entrepreneurial ventures. This study addresses this important topic and, using an interdisciplinary lens, investigates the question of how established buying firms can work with new ventures to achieve desired relationship outcomes. Drawing on the literature from the disciplines of entrepreneurship and supply chain management, we propose a theoretical model that links buying firms' strategic orientation in supplier selection (innovation and cost in strategic supplier selection) and operational approach in supplier development (direct and indirect development of new venture suppliers) with new venture‐specific relationship outcomes (purchasing volume and realized innovations). The model's predictions are tested on cross‐sectional survey data from 136 buying firms. Our results contribute to the emerging research stream at the supply chain management–entrepreneurship interface and enhance the understanding of relationships between established firms and new ventures.