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.     

Analysis of franchisors' expansion strategies and competition

Franchising provides a channel for small businesses to grow successfully into nationwide or even worldwide chains. Franchising is considered to be common among chain stores, of which the convenience store is a typical example. This study aims to examine the expansion strategy of each individual convenience store franchisor and the competition to expand among the franchisors. Taiwan is considered to have the highest convenience store density in the world. This study performs empirical analyses of four major convenience store franchisors in Taiwan, namely, 7-Eleven, Family Mart, Hi-Life, and OK. The evidence shows that the franchisors tend to be slow to expand when facing a highly dense competitive environment. There exists a strong first-mover advantage in convenience store franchising. The first mover (7-Eleven) has played a dominating role throughout the years. As a result, the franchisors' outlet shares have remained relatively stable.     

Brand and performance signals in the choice of franchise opportunities

When choosing a franchise chain, potential franchisees must incorporate into their decision process the signals of franchise chain quality being sent to the market by the franchisor. Some of these signals along with potential franchisees' choices of franchise chain are analyzed. The results show that brand value and franchisee performance were the key signals used by Spanish franchisees during the period 2002 through 2008, when deciding to open a franchise outlet. The aim of this study was to contribute to strengthening the relationship between entrepreneurship and franchising in Spain from an empirical viewpoint.     

大学知识生产、创业活动与大学技术转移的关系——基于地区层面数据的实证分析

从创业活动角度对中国地区之间大学技术转移绩效不平衡现象进行解释。使用主成分分析法对中国各地区大学技术转移综合绩效进行测度,利用中国省级地区层面数据检验大学知识生产、创业活动以及大学技术转移之间的关系。研究发现：大学知识生产较多的地区大学技术转移综合绩效也较高,大学知识生产促进了大学所在地区的机会型创业包括大学科技园知识型创业和正规组织创业,但是不能促进必需型创业;机会型创业在大学知识生产和大学本地技术转移之间扮演部分中介作用。最后基于实证研究的结论提出相应政策建议。     

金融中介发展、企业家精神与区域经济增长——基于省级面板数据的实证研究

本文利用1999--2010年我国30个省市的面板数据,对金融中介、企业家精神和区域经济增长之间的关系进行了实证研究。实证结果显示：金融中介发展尤其是效率的提高,对经济增长有直接的推动作用,但其增长效应存在地区差异;企业家精神能够促进经济增长,但企业家创新精神的经济增长效应远低于创业精神的经济增长效应;金融中介发展主要通过支持企业家创业活动促进经济增长。     

青年创业环境及其优化研究--基于陕西青年创业环境的实证研究

优良的创业环境是促进创业成功、发展壮大,进而推动地区经济发展的重要外部因素。文章以陕西青年创业环境为例,通过应用GEM 模型专家问卷调查和陕西青年成功创业典型问卷调查,对陕西青年创业环境的现状评价和面临的制约因素进行深入剖析,据此提出具有针对性的对策建议。优化陕西青年创业环境的主要抓手有：一是创新金融支持,拓宽创业融资渠道;二是完善政策体系,降低创业交易成本;三是加强教育培训,培养创新创业精神;四是围绕创业需求,搭建各类服务平台。     

协同创新引领下高职院校公益创业教育体系的构建

创业在本质上是一种创新行为。公益创业因其低风险和高成功率,逐渐成为大学生创业的首选。在协同创新的大背景引领下,高职院校构建公益创业教育体系,应贯彻主体多元化、打破壁垒、注重顶层设计和实践教学为主的原则,在创建多元化教师队伍、构建公益创业人才培养体系、进行创业教育支撑体系建设以及对外交流与合作方面做出努力。     

再论企业家活动:生产性、非生产性和破坏性

1990年鲍莫尔发表了《企业家活动:生产性、非生产性和破坏性》一文,这引起了国内外学者对企业家理论的广泛关注和后续研究。文章在鲍莫尔的分析框架下,继续探讨破坏性企业家活动的性质及其对增长的影响,阐述文化、习俗、观念等非正式制度对企业家活动配置的影响,丰富企业家活动配置理论,并给出了进一步研究的方向。     

Mobilizing crisis management networks — Entrepreneurial behavior in turbulent contexts

Severe socio-economic issues that threaten peace, life or wellbeing of humans in specific regions of the world cannot be solved by any single actor. Wide networks of political, business, governmental, non-profit and humanitarian organizations are to be involved to change existing practices. Despite conflicting interests and competing behavior, involved organizations need to act collectively to initiate the change of commonly accepted practices, i.e. institutions. This is the space in the present study for examining network mobilization as a collective means to change institutions. Our aim is to answer the question: How are networks mobilized in crisis management to initiate institutional change processes in socio-economically turbulent contexts? We provide a framework of network mobilization for institutional change built on the IMP rooted network mobilization research and institutional entrepreneurship discussion. The framework is reflected upon by means of insights from an interview-based case study with representatives of governmental and non-governmental organizations involved in worldwide humanitarian peace-building. We identify, firstly, incentivizing, reticent and adaptational behaviors of network mobilizers to utilize legitimacy and relationship sediments as mobilization enablers. Secondly, these behaviors help network mobilizers to overcome actor visibility and unpredictability as mobilization obstacles in turbulent contexts.     

The Herning-Ikast textile industry: an industrial district in West Jutland

Notions of social inclusion and the need to combat social exclusion have become popular areas of attention in academic and policy circles. The importance of small firms and entrepreneurship as a means to raising inclusion has been emphasized in these new agendas. A priori, there are a number of reasons why small businesses may be regarded as providing opportunities for social inclusion. However, in this paper we argue that the recent expectations of the role of small firms and entrepreneurship in combating social exclusion are over optimistic. Some of the assumptions on which these expectations are based are questioned. Instead, we suggest that attention should start by a clearer understanding of the concept of social exclusion. Individual economic strategies, in the form of small business activity, can make some contribution but because of the complex multidimensional nature of social exclusion, over-inflated claims should be avoided. When these claims are not achieved there may be a danger of a policy backlash against the promotion of business ownership and disaffection amongst those who fail to realize their goals. This paper draws on secondary evidence and concludes with implications for policy and suggestions for further research.