Solving the Entrepreneurial Puzzle: The Role of Entrepreneurial Interpretation in Opportunity Formation and Related Processes

Opportunity formation plays a central role in the entrepreneurship literature. The two dominant perspectives on this topic (discovery view and creation view) tended to consider search and action as the main mechanisms. Drawing on strategic issue interpretation view and managerial cognition perspective, we argue for the inclusion of a third mechanism (entrepreneurial interpretation). Specifically, we develop the boundary assumptions and testable propositions of an entrepreneurial interpretation model. Then, we show how entrepreneurial interpretation informs both discovery and creation processes. Overall, our theory provides an expanded understanding of how individuals form and decide to exploit opportunities.     

Entrepreneurial Leadership as Creative Brokering: The Process and Practice of Co-creating and Advancing Opportunity

How does entrepreneurial leadership drive the process of forming and advancing opportunity? Drawing from an ethnographic field study of Nashville music producers, I develop a model of entrepreneurial leadership as creative brokering – the practices and process by which entrepreneurs lead and mobilize a complex network of actors in co-creating and advancing opportunity. I find that entrepreneurial leaders encounter three tensions as they advance this process: 1) generating novel ideas and fitting them within the competitive landscape; 2) incubating opportunity and seizing the moment in the market; and 3) fostering experimentation and navigating hyper-competition. I show when these tensions arise and identify six creative brokering practices through which leaders leverage their brokerage role to navigate these tensions in order to move opportunity forward. The paper offers a model of entrepreneurial leadership as creative brokering, extends extant creative brokering scholarship to consider more distal market actors, and shows how creative brokering and leadership towards creative outcomes involve iteratively stepping forward to infuse market perspective and exert control, and stepping back to let others shine and co-create ideas.     

On becoming and being an entrepreneurship educator: a personal reflection

Entrepreneurship education has been studied intensively since 1990, yet little attention is given in the literature to the critical role and impact of the individuals that design and deliver it; the entrepreneurship educators. Who are they and what do we understand about them? Professor Alain Fayolle in 2013 challenged us to address this gap. In this article I aim to take on board Fayolle’s challenge and provide a single case of my own experience on the journey to becoming and being an entrepreneurship educator. After exploring the purpose and value of autobiographical methods, I then present the reader with my life story as an emerging entrepreneurship educator in the UK. This provides the basis for self-reflection and self-discovery to highlight key patterns of development that have shaped me as an entrepreneurship educator. Finally I provide personal thoughts on the important role of entrepreneurship educators as entrepreneurial leaders within their institutions. This paper has been produced in the hope that it will encourage other educators to share their journeys so that as a community we can better understand the ‘who’ of entrepreneurship educators.     

社会价值、经济价值与社会企业创业策略的选择 ——基于制度逻辑理论的案例研究

社会企业在创业过程中如何选择市场逻辑与公益逻辑,以平衡社会价值和经济价值之间的冲突,促进企业的可持续发展?其作用机理是怎样的?影响不同逻辑选择背后的因素是什么?基于制度逻辑视角,以三家典型社会企业为研究对象,对上述问题进行了研究,发现:①相对于单一的公益逻辑、单一的市场逻辑,混合逻辑是社会企业最佳的创业策略,可以很好地...     

In Pursuit of Greatness: CEO Narcissism,Entrepreneurial Orientation,and Firm Performance Variance

Building upon the perspective that narcissism is a leadership trait with both ‘bright’ and ‘dark’ sides, the present study examines the question of whether companies led by narcissistic CEOs exhibit higher levels of entrepreneurial orientation (EO). Moreover, this research examines whether EO partially explains why narcissistic CEO‐led firms experience greater variability in firm performance. Using survey data collected from 173 CEOs, and an archival measure of firm performance variance, we find support for our model. These findings offer an improved understanding of how CEO narcissism influences performance variance, and why the firms they lead may even, at times, be viewed as on a path to success. Study implications are discussed.     

The Relationship between Slack Resources and the Performance of Entrepreneurial Firms: The Role of Venture Capital and Angel Investors

In this study, we seek to further delineate factors that condition the relationship between slack resources and firm performance. To do so, we develop and test a model that establishes the role of venture capital (VC) and angel investors as powerful external stakeholders who positively moderate the slack–performance relationship. In addition, we provide more insight into this relationship by examining differences between these two types of private investors and by examining the role of their ownership stakes. We test our hypotheses using a sample of 1215 private firms, including VC‐backed firms, angel‐backed firms, and similar firms without such investors. We find that the presence of VC investors positively moderates the relationship between both financial and human slack resources and firm performance, while angel investors only positively moderate the effect of human resource slack. Further, VC investors are only marginally better at helping entrepreneurs to extract value from human resource slack than angel investors and they are no better when it comes to financial slack. Finally, we find that the impact of financial and human resource slack on firm performance is more positive in VC‐backed firms when investors hold high ownership stakes, an effect which is significantly stronger than when angel investors hold high ownership stakes.     

Entrepreneurship in action: bringing together the individual,organizational and institutional dimensions of entrepreneurial action

There is increasing recognition that entrepreneurship research needs to achieve a better balance between studying to entrepreneurial activities and setting these activities in their wider context. It is important that these good intentions are realized and one way of doing this is to bring together ethnographic research with concepts from sociology and from pragmatist thinking. In this study, field research material is interwoven with a set of key concepts to ensure that balanced attention is paid to issues at the levels of the enterprising individual, the organization and societal institutions. The field research is innovative in combining depth study of several enterprises and their founders with the analysis of broader aspects of ‘entrepreneurship in society’. It achieves this through a process of ‘everyday ethnographic’ observation, reading, conversation and ongoing analysis. In the spirit of a pragmatist conception of social science, the underlying logic of entrepreneurial action is identified. This is a logic which needs to be appreciated by all of those who wish to understand and/or engage with the entrepreneurial dimension of contemporary social and economic life.     

Time and the Entrepreneurial Journey: The Problems and Promise of Studying Entrepreneurship as a Process

We examine the growing disconnect between the process‐oriented conception of entrepreneurship taught in the classroom and theorized about in premier journals and the variance‐oriented conception of entrepreneurship that characterizes empirical studies of the phenomenon. We propose that a shift in inquiry from entrepreneurship as an act to entrepreneurship as a journey could facilitate process‐oriented research by initiating a dialogue about the nature of the entrepreneurial journey, when it has begun and ended, whether it might be productively subdivided into variables or events, and what if anything remains constant throughout the process. Finally, we propose that a clearer understanding of the entrepreneurial journey is necessary to distinguish the field horizontally from research on creativity and strategy, and vertically from research on more practical business functions or more abstract systems‐level concepts.     

Sustainable entrepreneurship and legitimacy building in protected areas: Overcoming distinctive barriers through activism

Sustainable entrepreneurs operating in protected areas face distinctive barriers that place additional emphasis on the need to build legitimacy. To date, how they do this has not been entirely explored. This paper addresses this need through an exploratory study of sustainable entrepreneurs in a transnational protected area. The results indicate that sustainable entrepreneurs in protected areas face barriers that can be broadly classified as cognition spanning, locale and sector-related barriers. The findings highlight that a key way sustainable entrepreneurs overcome these distinctive barriers is by building legitimacy through activism. Activism became instrumental in building legitimacy with varied stakeholders and actors. This is all geared towards overcoming barriers during the sustainable entrepreneurship process. The findings add to existing literature on the role of legitimacy building in sustainable entrepreneurship by detailing the different forms of legitimacy and how they are built through activism. The paper concludes with propositions about the conditions necessary for sustainable entrepreneurs to build legitimacy in fragile socioecological contexts through activism.     

A Small Entrepreneurial City in Action: Policy Mobility,Urban Entrepreneurialism,and Politics of Scale in Jiyuan,China

This research details the mundane practices of policy mobility and entrepreneurial endeavour in Jiyuan in relation to the city's changing administrative position, and is one of the first attempts at understanding how entrepreneurial policies are mobilized, mutated and diffused in a small inland Chinese city. We interpret Jiyuan's evolving development strategies and trajectory through two interrelated conceptual lenses—policy mobility and urban entrepreneurialism—bridged by an analysis of the politics of scale. Over the past three decades, governance strategies in Jiyuan have evolved from policy imitation, during the germination of urban entrepreneurialism, to policy mutation and diffusion, under the amplification of entrepreneurialism, as the city has moved up the administrative levels and urban hierarchy. Policy mobility and urban entrepreneurialism in Jiyuan, involving a multi‐scalar process, are being shaped by the interactions between the city, the region, the central state and global capital under the confluence of globalization and marketization. The ‘successful’ story of a small entrepreneurial city tells a new tale that can inform wider contexts by painting a fuller portrait of the evolution of an entrepreneurial city across different scales and time and bringing cities hitherto ‘off the map’ back into the picture of urban entrepreneurialism against the backdrop of globalization.