Birds of a feather don't always flock together: Identity management in entrepreneurship

The act of entrepreneurship typically confers ‘distinctiveness’. However, in satisfying the psychological need to be distinct, entrepreneurs may at the same time foster a psychological deficit in feelings of belonging, leading to diminished psychological well-being. Investigating this potential trade-off through the lens of Optimal Distinctiveness Theory, we develop and model strategies appropriate for managing multiple identities, offering an explanation for why some entrepreneurs are able to balance distinctiveness and belonging, fostering psychological well-being, while others are unable to do so and experience entrepreneurship's ‘dark-side’.     

Technology commercialization, incubator and venture capital, and new venture performance

This study examines the effects of technology commercialization, incubator and venture capital supports on new venture performance from the resource-based view. This study uses regression analysis to test the hypotheses in a sample of 122 new ventures. The findings highlight the role of technology commercialization as a mediator between organizational resources, innovative capabilities, and new venture performance. Also, the empirical evidence indicates that incubator and venture capital supports moderate the effects of technology commercialization on the performance of new ventures. Finally, this study discusses managerial implications and highlights future research directions.     

Clusters,knowledge spillovers and new venture performance: An empirical examination

Firms in geographic regions with industry clustering have been hypothesized to possess performance advantages due to superior access to knowledge spillovers. Yet, no prior studies have directly examined the relationship between a firm's location within a cluster, knowledge spillovers and firm performance. In this study, we examine whether technological spillovers explain the performance of new ventures in cluster regions. We find that ventures located within geographic clusters absorb more knowledge from the local environment and have higher growth and innovation performance, but contrary to conventional wisdom, technological spillovers are not the contributing cause of higher performance observed for these firms.     

Buddhist entrepreneurs and new venture performance: the mediating role of entrepreneurial risk-taking

Small Business Economics - This study examines how Buddhism as an Eastern religion influences new venture performance. We propose that Buddhist values and associations can bring unique benefits to...     

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.     

Improving new technology venture performance under direct and indirect network externality conditions

This study compares the effectiveness of five responses to external uncertainty in markets with network externalities: avoidance, imitation, control, cooperation, and real options reasoning as a form of strategic flexibility. Our analysis of 385 new technology ventures shows that direct and indirect network externalities have opposite effects on the effectiveness of these strategies. Moreover, under network externalities, attempts to make ventures less dependent upon environmental instabilities perform differently compared to attempts to control the environment. Finally, we show that real options reasoning does not always perform better under conditions of higher uncertainty, such as uncertainty due to direct network externalities.     

National culture,effectuation, and new venture performance: global evidence from student entrepreneurs

Studies examining the relationship between national culture and entrepreneurial activity have largely ignored the influence of culture on individual decision-making. Recent years have witnessed considerable interest in cognitive logics employed by entrepreneurs. A growing body of literature examines factors contributing to the relative reliance on causal and effectual reasoning as entrepreneurs attempt to launch and grow new ventures, with evidence suggesting expert entrepreneurs engage more heavily in effectual reasoning than do novice entrepreneurs. The present study examines the mediating role of cognitive logic in explaining venture performance in differing cultural contexts. A series of hypotheses are tested using a sample of 3411 new ventures started by student entrepreneurs from 24 countries based on the Global University Entrepreneurial Spirit Students’ Survey. The findings indicate that both venture cognitive logics have positive effects on new venture performance and serve as mediators in the culture-performance relationship. Based on these findings, we conclude entrepreneurial reasoning is shaped not only by personal characteristics of entrepreneurs but also by aspects of the cultural context.     

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.     

Toward a theory of international new venture survivability

In this longitudinal study, we explore in-depth how entrepreneurs acquire legitimacy for their new ventures in an attempt to internationalise and survive before and after the dot.com bubble. We adopted a longitudinal multiple-case study methodology for the purpose of theory building. Five firms were selected on the basis of purposeful sampling logic from a homogeneous empirical context: they were small, software firms from Scotland that internationalised and struggled for survival between 1999 and 2001. To explore these companies’ critical events and episodes, the method of critical incident technique was employed. The method of constructing typologies by reduction was employed to advance the typology of hype defined as the overall sentiment of the environmental context, within which the firm is embedded, about the future. Grounded in data, there emerged a middle-range theory of international new venture survivability that postulates that the closer the new venture is to the hype, the higher the likelihood of failure. Several implications to the theory of new venture legitimacy could be singled out. The paper makes an attempt to understand the nature of a legitimacy threshold. The data in the study points to the continuous nature of the legitimacy threshold and suggest that it may be defined by the time when the emergent industry moves away from hype towards risk decision making settings. A set of propositions is put forward to stimulate future research in the area of new venture legitimacy.     

Parent inheritance,founder expertise,and venture strategy: Determinants of new venture knowledge impact

A genealogical theory of new venture creation posits that “parent” firm routines are transferred to “progeny” ventures founded by the former employees of these parents. This study examines how the knowledge available to a venture from its parent firms and individual founders, as well as its initial technological direction, influences its own creation of impactful knowledge. We argue that new knowledge creation involves the recombination of underlying knowledge elements and hypothesize that the degree to which the venture's knowledge domain overlaps with the parents' knowledge has positive, but diminishing effects on the impact of knowledge created by the venture. We also predict that the breadth of founders' personal knowledge has a positive effect, but that the divergence between individual founders' and parent firm's knowledge domains has a negative effect on the creation of impactful knowledge by the venture. We test our predictions using a sample of 219 biotechnology ventures founded over the eleven year period 1990–2000 and tracked through 2010. Our results contribute to the entrepreneurship, knowledge creation, and genealogical literatures.     

A meta-analytic review of effectuation and venture performance

Though much research in entrepreneurship makes the fundamental assumption that opportunities are found, new work is emerging which questions this core tenet. Effectuation, for example, positions the entrepreneur as co-creator of opportunities, together with committed stakeholders. In this study, we conduct a meta-analysis of the articles published in the Journal of Business Venturing, summarizing data on 9897 new ventures to connect three of the principles of effectuation positively with new venture performance. In so doing, we offer both specific insight into precisely measuring effectuation and a general method for extracting variables from prior work to measure new constructs.     

Cross-border venture capital investments in Asia: Selection and exit performance

We investigate the investment behavior and exit performance of VCs that have pursued expansion outside their home locations, specifically, in Asia. Our findings indicate that, in the Asian VC markets, foreign VCs have relative advantages over local VCs in terms of size and experience while they are at a disadvantage in information collection and monitoring due to both geographic and cultural distances. When investing alone, foreign VCs are more likely to invest in more information-transparent ventures. Partnership with local VCs helps alleviate information asymmetry and monitoring problem and has positive implication for the exit performance of local entrepreneurial firms. Specifically, we find that after controlling for the endogeneity of selection, firms with both foreign and local VC partnership are about 5% more likely to successfully exit.     

Reference points for measuring social performance: Case study of a social business venture

We present a longitudinal qualitative case study to elaborate on how a social venture forms reference points for social performance. Although organizations increasingly use various social performance targets to direct their operations, the scholarly knowledge on social performance reference points remains limited. We make use of the prior accounting literature and draw on the idea of compromising accounts to discuss how provisional and performative metrics can have a significant role in how organizations develop new ways to evaluate their social performance. Given that the social performance reference point criteria are ambiguous and the corresponding referents malleable, performative accounts are helpful as they can intervene in the organizational life by making particular things visible, providing space for interpretations, and facilitating discussion, thus creating temporary settlements and enabling opportunities for productive compromises between different organizational groups and evaluative principles. The recursive feedback loops between reference point referents, criteria and accounting artefacts help the organization to make sense of its own social performance and interpret the associated performance feedback, and thereby provide ground for organizational decisions on further action. Moreover, we discuss how imperfect accounts can be useful for social businesses in their pursuit of developing their activities and achieving social impact.     

Panel studies of new venture creation: a methods-focused review and suggestions for future research

Longitudinal panel studies of large, random samples of business start-ups captured at the pre-operational stage allow researchers to address core issues for entrepreneurship research, namely, the processes of creation of new business ventures as well as their antecedents and outcomes. Here, we perform a methods-orientated review of all 83 journal articles that have used this type of data set, our purpose being to assist users of current data sets as well as designers of new projects in making the best use of this innovative research approach. Our review reveals a number of methods issues that are largely particular to this type of research. We conclude that amidst exemplary contributions, much of the reviewed research has not adequately managed these methods challenges, nor has it made use of the full potential of this new research approach. Specifically, we identify and suggest remedies for context-specific and interrelated methods challenges relating to sample definition, choice of level of analysis, operationalization and conceptualization, use of longitudinal data and dealing with various types of problematic heterogeneity. In addition, we note that future research can make further strides towards full utilization of the advantages of the research approach through better matching (from either direction) between theories and the phenomena captured in the data, and by addressing some under-explored research questions for which the approach may be particularly fruitful.     

Financial slack and venture managers' decisions to seek a new alliance

We examine two distinct perspectives to analyze the role of financial slack in the decisions of technology venture managers to seek strategic alliances. According to the capabilities perspective, financial slack provides managers with the ability to maximize the benefits from acquiring missing capabilities through alliance formation, whereas according to the resource dependence perspective, financial slack buffers the managers' motivations to seek alliances as a reaction to external environmental scarcity. Drawing on an experimental design and data on 1632 decisions nested within 51 managers, we find support for a combined perspective demonstrating that managerial discretion in the form of financial slack moderates how internal capabilities and context encourage managers to seek alliances. We discuss implications of our work for the alliance literature.     

风雨六十载老树爆新枝

上海餐饮业发展迅速,市场繁荣,产品品类众多,菜系、流派丰富多样。其中．点心是上海这个“美食天堂”中不可缺少．深受大众喜爱的重要部分。王家沙点心店初创于1945年,迄今已有六十余年的历史。以经营上海点心而闻名沪上,顾客远悦近来。作为上海点心店老字号企业的代表,本文想结合王家沙自身的发展历程来谈谈对发展上海菜的思考。     

The contrasting interaction effects of improvisational behavior with entrepreneurial self-efficacy on new venture performance and entrepreneur work satisfaction

Although improvisation is often considered to be an elemental component of entrepreneurship, little work has been done to evaluate factors that influence the relationship of entrepreneur improvisational behavior with important outcome variables. In an attempt to partly fill this gap, the current study examines the moderating effect of entrepreneurial self-efficacy on the relationship of founders' improvisational behavior with both the performance of their startups and their individual level of work satisfaction using a national (United States) random sample of 159 entrepreneurs. In alignment with our predictions, improvisational behavior was found to have a positive relationship with new venture performance (i.e., sales growth) when exhibited by founders who were high in entrepreneurial self-efficacy, whereas improvisational behavior was found to have a negative relationship with new venture performance when exhibited by founders who were low in entrepreneurial self-efficacy. Contrary to our expectations, entrepreneurial self-efficacy was found to have a negative moderating effect on the relationship between entrepreneur improvisational behavior and work satisfaction.     

The role of top management team human capital in venture capital markets: Evidence from first-time funds

This paper examines whether the human capital of first-time venture capital fund management teams can predict fund performance and finds that it can. I find that fund management teams with more task-specific human capital, as measured by more managers having past experience as venture capitalists and by more managers having past experience as executives at start-up companies, manage funds with greater fractions of portfolio company exits. I also find that fund management teams with more industry-specific human capital in strategy and management consulting and, to a lesser extent, engineering and non-venture finance manage funds with greater fractions of portfolio company exits. Perhaps counter-intuitively, I find that fund management teams that have more general human capital in business administration, as measured by more managers having MBAs, manage funds with lower fractions of portfolio company exits. Overall, measures of task- and industry-specific human capital are stronger predictors of fund performance than are measures of general human capital.     

Earliness of internationalization and performance outcomes: Exploring the moderating effects of venture age and international commitment

This study examines the impact of early foreign market entry on new ventures’ performance outcomes. Venture age and international commitment are theorized as moderators to address the inconsistent findings of previous research surrounding the performance implications of early internationalization. Results from a sample of international new ventures in China found that the earliness of internationalization positively contributes to firm performance in terms of sales growth, but not innovation and profitability. The performance advantage of early internationalization becomes obsolete as young ventures become mature, especially among those with a low level of international commitment. This study highlights the importance of incorporating time-based dimensions of international venturing for a better understanding of the performance implications of early internationalization.