Small Business Economics最新文献

This paper explores how entrepreneurs engage in prototyping as part of the venture development process. We conduct a qualitative field study of 156 instances of prototyping across eight venture development processes. From a theoretical perspective, we build on alternative and complementary views of entrepreneurial action and their implicit modes of prototyping, emphasizing experimentation and transformation. Our findings identify three important themes in the prototyping process. These include purposes where the entrepreneurs use prototyping for either flexible experimentation or directed transformation. Further, the entrepreneurs predominantly engage in prototype recycling and skills bricolage when prototyping. Accordingly, the studied entrepreneurs carefully navigate purpose and resource investments in prototyping, making extensive use of their existing resource base of skills and prototypes. After noting the positive aspects of prototyping, we also discuss the potentially destructive outcomes of misapplied prototyping in the form of prototyping myopia and problematic path dependencies of the different ways of prototyping.

Spouses are known to play a critical supportive role for the self-employed, yet very little evidence is available concerning how entrepreneurial pursuits affect the spouse. The present analysis offers a contribution by evaluating short-term psychological well-being dynamics among spouses of individuals entering self-employment, using panel survey data from Australia. We construct matched control samples based on a range of relevant characteristics to mitigate selection bias and find that spouses of self-employed individuals report substantially higher levels of well-being before entry into self-employment and experience a modest but statistically significant decrease in well-being following entry. This is consistent with the hypothesis that self-employment demands substantial psychological capital from spouses. These patterns hold for both genders, with only moderate gender differences identified. In contrast, spouses of those entering self-employment from unemployment report improvements in well-being.

Does improved access to financial sources increase entrepreneurship across gender? We explore this question in the Indian context, by constructing a novel measure of financial access defined as the distance of each unbanked village to the nearest banked centre. Using economic census data at the village level, we find that the proximity of an unbanked village to a banked centre within 5 km increases entrepreneurship in the non-agricultural sector. While exploring the mechanisms, we find that the impact on women is driven by the uptake of institutional credit. The prevailing norms around gender influence the gains from bank proximity as the impact on women enterprises occurs mainly in villages which have liberal social norms. Results hold when we use the number of branches within 5 km as an alternate measure of financial access. Results are robust to several additional tests. Our results show that the lack of nearby banking facilities represents a key constraint for women, and hence, widespread banking outreach can boost female entrepreneurship in rural areas.

Using both regression analysis and an unsupervised graphical model approach (never applied before to this issue), we confirm the rejection of Gibrat’s Law (stating that a firm’s growth is independent of that firm’s initial size) when our firm-level data are considered over the entire investigated period, while the opposite is true when we allow for market selection; indeed, the growth behavior of the surviving most efficient firms is in line with Gibrat’s Law. This evidence reconciles early and current literature and may have interesting implications in terms of both theoretical research and policy suggestions regarding subsidies to small firms, which do not necessarily grow faster than their larger counterparts.

This paper examines the causal impact of immigration on entrepreneurship among US-born non-Hispanic whites in non-agricultural private sectors from 1980 to 2018. Using self-employment as a proxy for entrepreneurship and distinguishing between incorporated individuals and unincorporated self-employed workers, I find a sizable negative impact of immigration on native self-employment. Importantly, this effect is consistent across incorporated and unincorporated self-employment and remains robust across demographic groups based on gender, age, and education. Results are robust to the choice of controls and estimation methods.

Entrepreneurs should navigate through different stages from the conception of an idea until the business is operational. According to these stages, we expected that the context has a different impact on an individual’s decisions. This paper analyses the role of institutional dimensions (regulative, normative, and cultural-cognitive) in the entrepreneurial process (potential, nascent, and new entrepreneurship), using data from the Global Entrepreneurship Monitor and Heritage Foundation, with a sample of 99 countries for the period 2001–2017. Through panel data, the main findings show that (a) regulations regarding new business creation have a stronger influence on new entrepreneurship, (b) social norms have more influence on potential entrepreneurs and individual perceptions regarding their self-capacity and experience to start a new business, and (c) the cultural-cognitive dimension has a stronger influence on nascent entrepreneurship. Policymakers could consider these results to promote and generate target group policies that effectively encourage entrepreneurial activity, which is also distinguished by the level of development among countries.

While the role of cognitive legitimacy in new organizational forms’ development has been extensively studied, the cognitive legitimacy of social entrepreneurship (SE) has so far received limited attention. Drawing from legitimacy theory and organizational ecology literature, we theorize and explore how SE obtains cognitive legitimacy via its prevalence and the legitimacy spillovers of the two categories it encapsulates: new business and nonprofit organizations. Using data from the Global Entrepreneurship Monitor, we find evidence for the existence of legitimacy spillovers from both new business and nonprofit organizations to SE activity. Second, the perceived density of social enterprises is significantly related to individuals’ engagement in SE. Third, we find the effect of legitimacy spillover effects is more significant when individuals perceive a lower density of social enterprises. Our study contributes to the research on SE, organizational ecology, and hybrid organizations by exploring the multiple sources for increasing SE’s legitimacy, particularly highlighting the existence of cross-categories legitimacy spillover effect within hybrid organizations.

Much of the existing research on PhD entrepreneurship is focused on Academic Spin-Offs (ASOs) within the parent institution’s formal intellectual property (IP) structure. Cross-level analysis of a survey administered to 23,500 PhD students in Italy shows the heterogeneity of PhD students’ entrepreneurial activities, which, in addition to ASOs, include start-ups, corporate spin-offs and other types of businesses. We examine the types of drivers that matter most for different forms of PhD entrepreneurial ventures. Our findings reveal two forces at play: a technology-push model where PhD students rely on IP and support from the parent university, and a demand-led model that involves support from industry and sources of external finance. This study highlights the strategic alignment among the determinants of PhD entrepreneurship at the micro, meso and macro levels. These determinants include the individual PhD student’s choices, the interactions with different stakeholders and reconciliation of the tensions represented by the organizational and institutional resources and infrastructures.

Abstract

We focus on the role of racial identity in the entrepreneurial journey, its antecedents and expected outcomes. Building on entrepreneurial identity and racial identity literatures, we analyze 21 reflective interviews featuring African American and Black entrepreneurs leading successful businesses to develop a racial identity approach to entrepreneurship. Findings uncover that the relevance of racial identity, often perceived as a liability before embarking on entrepreneurial endeavors, triggers entrepreneurial action to escape racial segregation and discrimination. Within the context of the venture, racial identity manifests in two distinct ways: (a) through a value proposition and target market defined by racial centrality and ideology, showing how racial identity may be an asset; and conversely, (b) through racial salience when accessing resources, reflecting racial identity as liability. Creating a venture with a strong racial identity is an essential aspect of its racialized meaningfulness. The entrepreneur aims to provide a racial role model from the African American community to empower future generations and reinforce the perception of racial identity as a valuable asset. Our study challenges the notion of race-neutral entrepreneurship and supports that entrepreneurship is an emancipation mechanism for racial minorities.