Entrepreneurship and well-being: Past,present, and future

Entrepreneurship research typically emphasizes firm-level outcomes such as growth and performance. However, people pursue entrepreneurship for deeply personal, idiosyncratic reasons. Therefore, as in other self-organized human pursuits, how entrepreneurship relates to fulfillment and well-being is of utmost importance. In this paper, we provide an overview of the well-being concept, related research, and its connection to entrepreneurship. We define entrepreneurial well-being as the experience of satisfaction, positive affect, infrequent negative affect, and psychological functioning in relation to developing, starting, growing, and running an entrepreneurial venture. We explain this definition of entrepreneurial well-being and review significant developments in our field and the broader field of well-being. Highlights of social, technological and institutional trends illustrate key areas for future research that can enhance our understanding of these phenomena. The eight papers in this special issue focus on entrepreneurial well-being each offering a specific perspective on how scholars can theorize and study the antecedents and consequences of entrepreneurship related to well-being.     

Framing the Corporation: Royal Dutch/Shell and Human Rights Woes in Nigeria

Transnational corporations are often implicated in conflicts over environmental problems and human rights in developing countries. As a result they become targets of both local and transnational campaigns. Given the lack of resources and influence of local activists, campaigning groups often turn to consumer audiences abroad to pressurize a certain company or brand. That requires agenda-setting and “framing” of the issues concerned in order to gain consumers’ attention. Local activists and campaigning groups use the public sphere to call attention to allegedly dubious corporate policies and practices that lie behind the consumer goods offered for sale in the Western world. Based on an analysis of the public discourse about the operations of the oil multinational Royal Dutch/Shell in Nigeria in the year 1995, this paper suggests that once the corporation is framed as a moral actor, it gets difficult for the corporation to deny its responsibility for human rights—even though the actual influence of the corporation may be limited.

Is green the new gold? Venture capital and green entrepreneurship

Small Business Economics - We test whether born-to-be-green represents a signal toward potential venture capital (VC) investors on a sample of Italian, independent, unlisted, high-tech...     

The Sources of Financing Constraints

Which financial frictions drive firms’ financing constraints? We structurally estimate dynamic firm financing models embedding many financial frictions, on panels of public firms and private firms. We focus on limited enforcement, moral hazard, and trade-off models and assess which models rationalize best observed corporate policies across various samples. Our tests, based on empirical policy function benchmarks, favor trade-off models for larger public firms, limited commitment models for smaller public firms, and moral hazard models for Private firms. Our estimates suggest significant financing constraints due to agency frictions and highlight the importance of identifying their sources for firm valuation.     

Determinants of Alliance Portfolio Complexity and Its Effect on Innovative Performance of Companies*

Alliance formation is often described as a mechanism used by firms to increase voluntary knowledge transfers. Access to external knowledge has been increasingly recognized as a main source of a firm's innovativeness. A phenomenon that has recently emerged is alliance portfolio complexity. In line with recent studies this article develops a measure of portfolio complexity in technology partnerships in terms of diversity of elements of the alliance portfolio with which a firm must interact. The analysis considers an alliance portfolio that includes different partnership types (competitor, customer, supplier, and university and research center). So far factors that determine portfolio complexity and its impact on technological performance of firms have remained largely unexplored. This article examines firms' decisions to form alliance portfolios of foreign and domestic partners by two groups of firms: innovators (firms that are successful in introducing new products to the market), and imitators (firms that are successful at introducing products which are not new to the market). This study also assesses a nonlinear impact of the portfolio complexity measure on firms' innovative performance. The empirical models are estimated using data on more than 1800 firms from two consecutive Community Innovation Surveys conducted in 1998 and 2000 in the Netherlands. The results suggest that alliance portfolios of innovators are broader in terms of the different types of alliance partners as compared to those of imitators. This finding underlines the importance of establishing a “radar function” of links to various different partners in accessing novel information. Specifically, the results indicate that foremost innovators have a strong propensity to form portfolios consisting of international alliances. This underlines the importance of this type of partnership in the face of the growing internationalization of R&D and global technology sourcing. Being an innovator or imitator also increases the propensity to form a portfolio of domestic alliances, relative to non‐innovators; but this propensity is not stronger for innovators. Innovators appear to derive benefit from both intensive (exploitative) and broad (explorative) use of external information sources. The former type of sourcing is more important for innovators, while the latter is more important for imitators. Finally, alliance complexity is found to have an inverse U‐shape relationship to innovative performance. On the one hand, complexity facilitates learning and innovativeness; on the other hand, each organization has a certain management capacity to deal with complexity which sets limits on the amount of alliance portfolio complexity that can be managed within the firm. This clearly suggests that firms face a certain cognitive limit in terms of the degree of complexity they can handle. Despite the noted advantages of an increasing level of alliance portfolio complexity firms will at a certain stage reach a specific inflection point after which marginal costs of managing complexity are higher than the expected benefits from this increased complexity.     

Partner Type Diversity in Alliance Portfolios: Multiple Dimensions,Boundary Conditions and Firm Innovation Performance

Our research extends the current knowledge based view on the configuration of alliance portfolios and their deployment in different external knowledge environments. We study these alliance portfolios in a longitudinal sample (1996–2010) for over three thousand firms that operate in a large number of industries in the Netherlands. Our findings indicate that partner type variety and partner type relevance, as different dimensions of partner diversity in alliance portfolios, both have an inverted U‐shaped association with firm innovation performance. However, alliance portfolios characterized by both high partner type variety and high relevance cause inferior innovation performance. Different external knowledge environments, characterized by different levels of industry modularity and scope of knowledge distribution, moderate the inverted U‐shaped associations of partner type variety and relevance in alliance portfolios with firm innovation performance in opposing directions. While for partner type variety, a high level is found to be optimal in environments with greater modularity or broader scope of knowledge distribution, for partner type relevance it turns out that a low level is optimal under more modular industry conditions.     

Technical efficiency measures for dairy farms using panel data: A comparison of alternative model specifications

This article examines the impact of fixed effects production functions vis-à-vis stochastic production frontiers on technical efficiency measures. An unbalanced panel consisting of 96 Vermont dairy farmers for the 1971–1984 period was used in the analysis. The models examined incorporated both time-variant and time-invariant technical efficiency. The major source of variation in efficiency levels across models stemmed from the assumption made concerning the distribution of the one-sided term in the stochastic frontiers. In general, the fixed effects technique was found superior to the stochastic production frontier methodology. Despite the fact that the results of various statistical tests revealed the superiority of some specifications over others, the overall conclusion of the study is that the efficiency analysis was fairly consistent throughout all the models considered.     

The impact of Universal Service Obligations and International Cross-subsidies on the dispersion of telephone services in developing countries

This paper re-evaluates the telecommunication policies often applied to create regional dispersion of services in developing countries. We observe that failure to consider the complexities of the regional telecommunication systems in creating policies and investment strategies has increased the telecom gap between urban and rural regions worldwide. In particular, the teledensities of rural telecommunications in developing countries have remained very low in spite of support through universal service obligation fees and cross-subsidization from international services. As traditional methods for economic analysis and modeling have failed to identify mechanisms that improve telephone dispersion in these countries, we use a system dynamics modeling approach to deal with complexities of the situation in order to evaluate how Universal Service Obligations (USOs) and International Cross-Subsidy (ICS) policies affect telephone densities. We demonstrate that these policies may be counterproductive due to the structure of the telecom system itself. We also show that, when market-clearing pricing is combined with USOs once the urban telephone density reaches a minimum threshold, the dispersion of rural telecommunications can be considerably improved.