Journal of Business Venturing Insights最新文献

Crowdfunding has emerged as a pivotal mechanism for entrepreneurs and innovators to source capital directly from a diverse audience of backers. Our study analyzes the nuanced impact of projected certainty signaling on the success of crowdfunding campaigns. We argue that the degree of certainty conveyed in project descriptions has a curvilinear influence on project success. We underscore the importance of the consensus on this projected certainty being shaped by interactions between founders and backers. Our study has several implications for founders, backers, and platforms by offering valuable insights for enhancing crowdfunding strategies and interactions toward positive outcomes.

Empirical understanding of why individuals become former entrepreneurs is not well-established. This investigation draws upon Identity Theory and Role Exit Theory to explore patterns in Entrepreneurship in the Population (EPOP) Survey Project dataset. The key finding is a theory-consistent tension between commitment and obstacles encountered in predicting exit from the entrepreneur role. The likelihood of being a former entrepreneur is decreased by surrogate indicators of commitment such as having a business as primary personal income source. The likelihood is increased by proximal obstacles such as low levels of familial support. These patterns persist after statistical control for a wide swath of demographic and business characteristics. Based on these observed patterns, avenues for future research and implications for entrepreneurs, educators, and policymakers are considered.

The characterization of entrepreneurs as scientists (EaS) has become increasingly popular among management scholars because it fits neatly with existing theories of entrepreneurial action grounded in the assumption that entrepreneurs form and test beliefs in an intendedly rational fashion, under conditions of uncertainty, while continually seeking to obtain and process new information. Recent scholarship breathes new life into the EaS paradigm by proposing a framework that builds upon pragmatism in developing a microfoundational perspective concerning causally inferential action and rationality-based heuristics. Yet, the drift towards EaS is not without controversy. Business venturing is rarely analyzable through the lens of natural laws and orderly structures. Moreover, uncertainty is not the only knowledge problem (KP) that entrepreneurs confront. As such, EaS may be ineffective in bringing resolution to these other challenging KPs – ambiguity, complexity, and equivocality – especially when entrepreneurs are entertaining decisions to pivot or persist. In this sense, our work underscores the importance of EaS while also asserting the need for clear boundary conditions.

Entrepreneurial ecosystems (EEs) are complex social systems dependent on connectivity and shared understanding between diverse actors. An often used, albeit oversimplified view, implies that diverse actors connect, collaborate and contribute to the EE in an almost frictionless way. However, this perspective overlooks the need for deeper forms of communication that can shift actors' perceptions, goals and motivations to trigger meaningful change. Recent research has highlighted the role of conversations, narratives and stories in developing (informal) institutions and shared understandings. What is missing from this discussion, however, are non-verbal forms of communication, which enable interpretation, support meaning-making and help implementation. This paper draws on communicative institutionalism theory and empirical observations from a larger participatory action research project. We discuss how visuals support richer interpretation of ambiguities, different perspectives and collaborative sensemaking. Images act as boundary objects enabling creative associations, revealing assumptions and catalysing explorative dialogue through inherent ambiguity. Representing complex concepts visually facilitates participant engagement over time. The co-creative process of iterative illustration also captures shared meaning as it emerges. Implications highlight visuals’ potential for fostering future-oriented dialogue, reflective practice and embodied institutions fundamental for EEs. From this, we outline suggestions for further research and practice.

Family business successions are commonly considered as one of the most critical events of any family business. Yet, despite extensive research, current evidence on the actual extent to which family business owners accomplish, adapt, or even abandon their initial succession plans is astonishingly still lacking. This paper addresses this issue by overcoming some methodological limitations of previous research on family business successions. The results provide robust insights into a wide mismatch between desire and reality regarding family business succession planning. Thus, transgenerational continuation of family businesses should not be taken for granted. A considerable proportion of business owners abandon their initial succession plans, do not realize the succession in the intended timeframe, or close their business ultimately. There is also a remarkable number of unintended business transfers which have received little attention in research to date.

Advice abounds on how to implement large-scale social change, much of which emphasizes a simplistic linear process, led by a heroic central actor. Rigorous case studies have shown that social change is far more complex: it is a reciprocal, iterative, and adaptive process, with multiple stakeholders who work backstage in networked, committed teams. Despite this, the myth of the social entrepreneur as a transformative change maker capable of scaling innovations to a societal level, still holds sway over social innovation support programmes and business school curricula. Using illustrative examples of successful efforts of large-scale social change across three of the most pressing international social challenges: access to medicines, the integration of migrant populations, and reorganizing social care models, we illustrate how conceptualizing social change as driven by iconic individuals is often counter-productive in terms of achieving impact at a societal level. Based on these analyses, we present five insights which illustrate how the mythology of social entrepreneurship and simplistic scaling concepts are often contrary to the practices employed within successful efforts to bring about social impact. Three counteracting principles for those leading, evaluating and funding innovative change efforts within complex systems are discussed and contrasted with the pervasive mythology of social entrepreneurship and linear scaling processes.

An increasing number of popularly frequented, but lightly studied, entrepreneurial events such as farmer's markets, festivals, art walks, night markets, and other seasonal gatherings occur regularly as forms of community meetups worldwide. At these events, individuals strive to create and enhance their communities through a series of often loosely organized gatherings that combine art, entertainment, and entrepreneurial promise. These events are associated with small business owners or hobbyists that sell their wares to a location-based market often searching for goods and services viewed as at least somewhat unique from other mainstream offerings. These events are critical for entrepreneurs as they serve as a vehicle to expand their customer base, build awareness for their products and brands, and even test out new product offerings in their local markets. Building knowledge of these events and the entrepreneurs that fuel such gatherings provides an opportunity to bridge the gap between ‘what we know’ and ‘what we aspire to know’ about these common entrepreneurial activities. Inspired by the notion of ‘thick descriptions’ in the qualitative tradition, we hope to inspire such grounded thinking and detail several community events taking place in the culturally vibrant community of Denton, Texas.

The idea of The Entrepreneurial State, a state that acts as an entrepreneur, creating and shaping markets to solve certain missions, has captured the eye of the public and of scholars. Yet, a number of scholars have voiced critique of The Entrepreneurial State Paradigm, arguing that it leads to policy failure. But simultaneously, other scholars argue that policy failures stem from interpretation and poor implementation, rather than core ideas in The Entrepreneurial State, such as mission-oriented policies. In this paper, I seek to clarify this debate. I argue that the growing reports of mission-oriented policy failures are due to three factors nested in The Entrepreneurial State Paradigm. They are 1) Disregard of the role of private entrepreneurship; 2) Encouraging policy makers to disregard limits to government action, and 3) Extrapolating grand policies from limited results. Thus, I argue that registered policy failures do not stem merely from bad policy making or incorrect interpretations of The Entrepreneurial State Paradigm. They stem directly from this paradigm. Consequently, I argue that scholars and policy makers should move away from The Entrepreneurial State and instead focus on the enabling role of the state.

It is well-known that the need for both social and financial missions creates tension within social enterprises. Less well-known are the specifics around how and why social entrepreneurs themselves construct and experience their situation. Given people vary in their psychological representations of their goals from concrete (i.e., tasks) to more abstract (i.e., values), we anticipated that goal conflict with engaging in financial activities could vary along these lines, leading to potentially different solutions for support. Through collecting interviews and focus group data using goal hierarchies from 37 social entrepreneurs, we find six constructed realities with different salient goals at different levels of cognitive abstraction which either dictate, conflict with, or are dissociated from financial activities. These can explain why social entrepreneurs perceive their financial activities differently – financial activities as out of sight out of mind, aversive, a ball to juggle, a necessary evil, part and parcel, and as king - which are associated with four experiences of goal conflict (i.e., goal conflict as continual questioning, inevitable, manageable, and irrelevant).

Extending the growing amount of literature on poverty and entrepreneurship, we draw on stereotype threat theory to test whether labels of regional poverty categories, controlling for regional GDP, influence engagement in self-employment. In using the county designations of at-risk, attainment, competitive, distress, or transitional provided by the Appalachian Regional Commission, the County Business Patterns, Business Dynamics Statistics, and Startup Cartography Project, we find no significant differences in regional entrepreneurial activity among labels. However, in the individual-level analysis using CPS-ASEC two-wave longitudinal data, the findings show that those residing in counties labeled as at-risk counties, relative to attainment counties, had lower odds of being self-employed. These findings at regional and individual levels show stereotype threat may not aggregate to the regional level, but may manifest at the individual level. The findings have implications for stereotype threat based on government-identified regional labels of relative economic standing.