A situated metacognitive model of the entrepreneurial mindset

We develop a framework to investigate the foundations of an ‘entrepreneurial mindset’ — described by scholars as the ability to sense, act, and mobilize under uncertain conditions. We focus on metacognitive processes that enable the entrepreneur to think beyond or re-organize existing knowledge structures and heuristics, promoting adaptable cognitions in the face of novel and uncertain decision contexts. We integrate disparate streams of literature from social and cognitive psychology toward a model that specifies entrepreneurial metacognition as situated in the entrepreneurial environment. We posit that foundations of an entrepreneurial mindset are metacognitive in nature, and subsequently detail how, and with what consequence, entrepreneurs formulate and inform “higher-order” cognitive strategies in the pursuit of entrepreneurial ends.     

Practice makes perfect: Entrepreneurial-experience curves and venture performance

This study tackles the puzzle of why increasing entrepreneurial experience does not always lead to improved financial performance of new ventures. We propose an alternate framework demonstrating how experience translates into expertise by arguing that the positive experience–performance relationship only appears to expert entrepreneurs, while novice entrepreneurs may actually perform increasingly worse because of their inability to generalize their experiential knowledge accurately into new ventures. These negative performance implications can be alleviated if the level of contextual similarity between prior and current ventures is high. Using matched employee–employer data of an entire population of Swedish founder-managers between 1990 and 2007, we find a non-linear relationship between entrepreneurial experience and financial performance consistent with our framework. Moreover, the level of industry, geographic, and temporal similarities between prior and current ventures positively moderates this relationship. Our work provides both theoretical and practical implications for entrepreneurial experience—people can learn entrepreneurship and pursue it with greater success as long as they have multiple opportunities to gain experience, overcome barriers to learning, and build an entrepreneurial-experience curve.     

How should we divide the pie? Equity distribution and its impact on entrepreneurial teams

Drawing on a multiple case study approach and data on eight entrepreneurial teams observed over six months this article develops a dynamic model of the consequences of equity distribution among team members. Perceived justice of equity distribution emerged as a key variable influencing entrepreneurial team interactions and important entrepreneurial outcomes. High perceived justice triggered positive team interaction spirals, whereas low perceived justice triggered negative interaction spirals. Teams exposed to external threats drifted from a positive spiral to a negative spiral despite high perceived justice. We discuss the implications of our study for research on entrepreneurial imprints, justice, and exit.     

So,you want to be an entrepreneur? Lessons from the Entrepreneurship Bootcamp for Veterans with Disabilities

Based on helping dozens of military veterans refine their ideas for starting a business, we identify and discuss a series of potential pitfalls that aspiring entrepreneurs—veterans and civilians alike—must avoid in order to be successful. Potential entrepreneurs must not confuse the pursuit of hobbies and self-employment with the act of creating a business. People who wish to build a business around public speaking or consulting need to firmly establish why customers should be willing to pay for their advice. Individuals that seek to develop a new non-profit organization must have a viable value proposition even though they are not pursing a profit motive. Overall, the entrepreneurial ventures that are most likely to succeed are those that (1) are based on a sustainable business model, (2) leverage the entrepreneur's unique experiences and attributes, and (3) are built around a process or system that enables the venture to prosper even if the entrepreneur leaves the venture.     

Can entrepreneurial firms benefit from product piracy?

We examine the potential benefits of product piracy to entrepreneurial firms. Specifically, we use a resource-based perspective to show that a decrease in the inimitability of an entrepreneurial firm's intellectual property does not necessarily diminish performance when piracy increases the value of this resource, and an information economics perspective to explain why and when imitation can increase the value of an intellectual property resource. This explanation reconciles empirical studies that indicate mixed results. It also expands the resource-based view by suggesting that reducing the value of one resource can directly increase the value of another.     

Escaping the green prison: Entrepreneurship and the creation of opportunities for sustainable development

While entrepreneurial activity has been an important force for social and ecological sustainability; its efficacy is dependent upon the nature of market incentives. This limitation is sometimes explained by the metaphor of the prisoner's dilemma, which we term the green prison. In this prison, entrepreneurs are compelled to environmentally degrading behavior due to the divergence between individual rewards and collective goals for sustainable development. Entrepreneurs, however, can escape from the green prison by altering or creating the institutions—norms, property rights, and legislation—that establish the incentives of competitive games. We provide a variety of evidence of such entrepreneurial action and discuss its implications for theory and practice.     

Entrepreneurship through a qualitative lens: Insights on the construction and/or discovery of entrepreneurial opportunity

This article applies inductive analytic techniques to identify and elaborate on two recurring themes that underpin the core puzzle of entrepreneurship research — where entrepreneurial opportunities come from. The first theme is the unique role of imprinting, or the profound influence of social and historical context in constraining the perceptual apparatus of entrepreneurs and delimiting the range of opportunities for innovation available to them. Second, our analysis offers insight into the counterbalancing role of reflexivity, operating at both individual and collective levels of analysis, in generating the ability of entrepreneurs to overcome the constraints of imprinting. These insights are based on a thematic review of the nine studies that comprise this special issue on qualitative research. The nine studies, individually and each in their own way, offer key insights into how we might better understand the emergence of entrepreneurial opportunity.     

Assessing the effectiveness of guided preparation for new venture creation and performance: Theory and practice

Governments in virtually all developed countries subsidise “guided preparation” for entrepreneurial activity. Despite being so widespread, the evidence that this assistance enhances venture performance remains in dispute, primarily because of a lack of consensus over statistical approaches. This paper provides a new — to entrepreneurship scholars-approach, applying it to a programme guiding nascent and new entrepreneurs in Denmark. It concludes that the programme contributes to the survival and size of new ventures, but its impact on growth is less clear. It also finds that impact is sensitive to changing the eligibility criteria of the programme — such as requiring a modest payment from participants or selecting participants according to observable entrepreneurial characteristics.     

Align or perish: Social enterprise network orchestration in Sub-Saharan Africa

Previous research has shown that networks are vital for scaling the impact of social enterprises. However, at present, insight into how and why social enterprises successfully orchestrate networks over time as they scale, particularly in the Sub-Saharan African emerging economy context, is scant. Theoretically sensitized by social network theory, our inductive study of six Kenyan social enterprises analyzed their phase-contingent network orchestration. Our findings show how and why entrepreneurial contextual bridging and circumventing social liability are important for initial scaling, whereas aligned capacity building as well as aligning incentives with political actors become necessary to develop and navigate social business ecosystems. In sum, we contribute a deeper understanding of how and why agentic network actions help social entrepreneurs achieve success as they scale in an emerging economy context.     

Towards a schematic theory of entrepreneurial alertness

This article is an investigation into Kirzner's concept of entrepreneurial alertness — its mechanism and its antecedents. By drawing from decision theory and schema theory, a model is developed to show how changes in the environment are mediated by entrepreneurial alertness and brought to the situated attention of entrepreneurs for evaluation. Entrepreneurial alertness is seen to be the application of unique schemata that allow the entrepreneur to impute meaning to environmental change that would not be imputed by other managers. It is argued that the alertness that allows entrepreneurs to see opportunity where others do not arises from differences in schematic richness, schematic association, and schematic priming. These three antecedents may therefore form a basis on which enhanced entrepreneurial alertness can be developed.     

The death of an innovative project: How grief recovery enhances learning

Given the increase in corporate innovative activity, entrepreneurial projects that are created to pursue new and unique opportunities often fail—or “die”—due to the uncertain environment within which they develop. Although failure can be an important source of information for learning, this learning is not automatic or instantaneous. The emotions generated by failure (e.g., grief) can interfere with the learning process. This article highlights explanations of the grief process and how it can be managed by individuals and organizations to enhance learning. Specifically, by using a dual process model for recovering from grief, innovators can learn more from their project failures and remain committed to future innovative endeavors.     

Participating convertible preferred stock in venture capital exits

This paper develops a theory of the participating convertible preferred (PCP) stock commonly used in venture capital settings. I show that the participation and convertibility features of PCP stock can be used to reduce information asymmetry between the venture and potential investors at the time of exit. Further, the convertibility feature of PCP helps in alleviating the problem of insufficient entrepreneurial effort. I then derive implications for the two most common types of exits in venture capital—initial public offerings and trade sales—and explain how US venture capital markets differ from other VC markets.     

You don’t have to be an entrepreneur to be entrepreneurial: The unique role of imaginativeness in new venture ideation

Bestsellers like The Lean Startup and Business Model Generation have suggested that ideation—the generation and selection of ideas—is important to new venture creation; yet, little empirical research on the topic has been conducted. Using a creative problem-solving approach, we developed and tested a new scale that found imaginativeness predicts new venture ideation over and above the effects of the usual suspects of attitude, knowledge, and evaluation. Imaginativeness is an ideational skill that combines task-relevant knowledge in three distinct domains—creative, social, and practical—with the latent ability of imagination. In this article, we explain why a new scale was needed, why imaginativeness appears to be especially useful to individuals who lack entrepreneurial experience, and how imaginativeness enables just about anyone to generate and select new venture ideas with the proficiency of a habitual entrepreneur.     

Entrepreneurial intentions: The influence of organizational and individual factors

An individual's intent to pursue an entrepreneurial career can result from the work environment and from personal factors. Drawing on the entrepreneurial intentions and the person-environment (P-E) fit literatures, and applying a multilevel perspective, we examine why individuals intend to leave their jobs to start business ventures. Findings, using a sample of 4192 IT professionals in Singapore, suggest that work environments with an unfavorable innovation climate and/or lack of technical excellence incentives influence entrepreneurial intentions, through low job satisfaction. Moderating effects suggest that an individual's innovation orientation strengthens the work-environment to job-satisfaction relationship; self-efficacy strengthens the job-satisfaction to entrepreneurial intentions relationship.     

Entrepreneurial Error Does Not Equal Market Failure

Barnett and Block (2015) claim that Bagus and Howden (2012b) support indirectly the concept of market failure. In this paper, we show that maturity mismatching in an unhampered market may imply entrepreneurial error but cannot be considered a market failure. We demonstrate why fractional-reserve banking leads to business cycles even if there is no central bank and why maturity mismatching does not per se lead to clusters of errors in a free market. Finally, in contrast to the examples provided by Barnett and Block, we assure that maturity mismatching does not imply the creation of two incompatible contracts due to the fungible nature of money.     

Does home market size matter for the pattern of trade?

Does home market size matter for the pattern of trade? Krugman started the literature, showing it does matter. Davis overturned his result, arguing that an assumption of convenience—transport costs only for the differentiated goods—conveniently obtained the result. Here we relax another persistent assumption of convenience—two industry types differentiated only by the degree of scale economies—and find that market size reemerges as a relevant force in determining industrial structure.     

Early-stage business model experimentation and pivoting

Recent literature suggests entrepreneurs struggle to pivot—or fundamentally change aspects of their venture—due to identity-based resistance to change. Yet, when entrepreneurs receive negative feedback, overcoming this resistance may be important to pivoting their business model. We adopt a convergent, mixed methods research design to explore when and why some entrepreneurs overcome resistance to change in response to negative feedback during early-stage business model experimentation. Building upon qualitative data that we gathered and analyzed, we theorize entrepreneurs may resist pivoting their value proposition relative to other business model components despite receiving negative feedback on this aspect of their business model. However, we find three factors – entrepreneurial experience, startup mentoring, and team size – may enable entrepreneurs to pivot in response to negative feedback. We theorize that these factors broaden a startup team's perspective, enabling value proposition pivoting during early-stage business model experimentation. We test these relationships with quantitative data from 80 startups engaged in business model experimentation and find support across hypotheses. We contribute to understanding when and why entrepreneurs pivot aspects of their business models in response to negative feedback during early-stage business model experimentation.Executive summaryThe entrepreneurship literature suggests startups may benefit from experimentation and pivoting different parts of their business model in response to negative feedback from stakeholders (Andries et al., 2021; Camuffo et al., 2020; Shepherd and Gruber, 2021). In early stages of starting a new venture, a business model refers to a cognitive schema or belief about an activity system that could potentially create and capture value (Massa et al., 2017; Shepherd and Gruber, 2021). Business model experimentation is the process of testing assumptions underlying this potential business model and pivoting business model assumptions in response to negative feedback (Andries et al., 2013; McDonald and Eisenhardt, 2020; Leatherbee and Katila, 2020). Building upon prior literature, we define business model pivoting as a fundamental change to parts of the business model (Berends et al., 2021; Snihur and Clarysse, 2022; Shepherd and Gruber, 2021). Yet, literature also suggests founders often struggle to pivot assumptions despite negative feedback. Motives to preserve and protect certain assumptions relevant to founders' identities can interfere with pivoting (Grimes, 2018; Kirtley and O'Mahony, 2023; Zuzul and Tripsas, 2020). Despite the general understanding that founders struggle to change their ideas, however, the entrepreneurship literature currently lacks precise insight into when and why founders can overcome resistance to pivoting.In this research, we explore when and why startups pivot different parts of their business model. We do so within the context of early-stage business model experimentation, where founders explicitly state assumptions about different parts of their potential business model, test those assumptions against stakeholder feedback, and are encouraged to pivot business model components in response to negative feedback. Through a mixed methods research design, we find (1) founders tend to resist pivoting their value propositions relative to other parts of a business model in response to negative feedback; and (2) entrepreneurial experience, startup mentoring, and team size enables startups to overcome this resistance to pivoting in response to negative feedback. We theorize these factors broaden founders' perspectives (Warshay, 1962), contributing to a greater willingness to pivot during experimentation.We contribute to the literature on entrepreneurial pivoting by explaining nuanced variation in pivoting distinct business model components during experimentation. This contribution is important because it reveals that resistance to pivoting the business model may be more complex than previously thought. We also contribute to the literature at the nexus of business model experimentation and entrepreneurial cognition by finding that entrepreneurial experience, startup mentoring, and team size enable startups to pivot despite psychological resistance to pivoting in response to negative feedback because it broadens founders' perspectives. This insight is important theoretically because it advances what we know about enabling experimenting with business models under conditions of uncertainty. The research presented here has clear and important implications for practice. This research suggests founders often resist changing the value proposition versus other components of their business models in early stages of venture development. This resistance can impede experimentation and pivoting in response to negative feedback. To the extent founders want to broaden their perspective to enable pivoting their value propositions in response to negative feedback during early stages of venture development, our data suggest they may be able to do so by recruiting members with entrepreneurial experience on their team (or gain entrepreneurial experience themselves), engage frequently with startup mentors, and increase the size of their team. Overall, we view the breath of perspective that comes from experience and interactions with others as an advantage for entrepreneurs when experimenting with their business models during early stages of venture development.     

Are entrepreneurs influenced by risk attitude,regulatory focus or both? An experiment on entrepreneurs' time allocation

“Hybrid entrepreneurs” — those who maintain a wage job while starting a new enterprise — outnumber pure entrepreneurs in many countries. Yet, how hybrid entrepreneurs allocate their working hours between these two activities is not well understood. To better understand the relationship between hybrid entrepreneurs' division of time between their wage jobs and new enterprises we develop a model that captures hybrid entrepreneurs' decisions on the tradeoffs between financial risk and return as it relates to time allocation. We test two hypotheses based on utility theory, and challenge them with two hypotheses based on regulatory focus theory in a controlled experiment with 25 early stage entrepreneurs and 29 undergraduate students. In the computer-based experiment, entrepreneurs' and students' time allocation decisions (tied to monetary incentives) are used to test what would motivate them to work more or less hours in their entrepreneurial startups. We find that the actual time allocation decisions of the student group are somewhat in tune with utility theory, but that the entrepreneurs' time allocation decisions are better explained by regulatory focus theory.     

Making decision with an alternative mind-set: Predicting entrepreneurial intention toward f-commerce in a cross-country context

Facebook commerce (f-commerce) is a relatively new online entrepreneurial initiative that employs Facebook as an electronic space to promote and implement commercial trades. Available empirical research on f-commerce indicates that research on factors affecting entrepreneurial intention toward f-commerce is sparse. Grounded on the theory of bounded rationality, this paper investigates the drivers of f-commerce entrepreneurial intention of young generation on a cross-nationality basis. Data were gathered from the young pool of senior university students from three countries through self-administered questionnaire. The data were analyzed utilizing PLS-SEM. Findings indicate that all of the predictors appear to be robust in predicting f-commerce entrepreneurial intention of the young adults of all three countries. These outcomes will help potential young entrepreneurs in selecting f-commerce entrepreneurship as an option for their future career.     

Progress without a venture? Individual benefits of post-disruption entrepreneuring

Entrepreneurial action only rarely results in the full transition to venture creation. Yet, extant research has focused almost exclusively on explaining how entrepreneurial action influences venture performance outcomes such as emergence and growth. Therefore, to advance theory, there is a need to uncover other outcomes of entrepreneurial action by decoupling it from venture creation. In this study, we begin such decoupling by exploring how entrepreneurial action can create individual benefits irrespective of venture emergence and financial success. We collected longitudinal data from a group of individuals who, due to forced migration, experienced significant disruption and then engaged in entrepreneurial action with the general goal of adapting to a new (to them) context. From this data, we integrated theory on entrepreneuring to develop a grounded model of post-disruption entrepreneuring. This model has three main components: (a) disruption assessment impact—interpretation of how the disruption will influence one's ability to pursue tasks and goals that provide meaning in life; (b) use of entrepreneuring—function and application of entrepreneuring activities in addressing opportunities or threats; and (c) projected goals—anticipated outcomes that provide meaning, motivation, and purpose. These attempts at assessing the contextual conditions provide individuals with an objective way of framing their situation. Thus, entrepreneuring can serve as an accessible mental structure that facilitates adaptation. In elaborating on post-disruption entrepreneuring, this study contributes to the literature by demonstrating the generative capacity of entrepreneurial action even in the absence of venture creation.