Journal of Business Venturing Insights最新文献

Entrepreneurial ecosystem (EE) leadership is the orchestration of multiple groups to influence the effectiveness of an EE. Although singular leaders can influence ecosystems, EE leadership rarely works alone. EE leaders often function in interconnected groups from different organizations and are in the unique position of simultaneously leading their organizations (leadership within EEs) while providing leadership to the ecosystem itself (leadership of EEs). However, it is not clear how EE leadership groups work independently on their respective goals and interdependently on the superordinate goal of coordinating effective EEs. To address the lack of theory to explain this inherent characteristic of ecosystems, we adapt insights from group dynamics to develop a multi-level model of EEs as multiteam systems. We explain how EE teams devote attention to organizational and ecosystem leadership, identify four EE archetypes produced by different attentional configurations, and discuss how our main insight—effective EEs are multiteam systems—can change how scholars and practitioners view EEs.

Withdrawn IPOs remain an empirically underexplored topic. Between 1997 and 2021, approximately 1 in 6 IPOs attempted on the NASDAQ and NYSE were withdrawn, collectively amounting to hundreds of billions of dollars in unrealized growth capital. For entrepreneurial ventures, the strategic consequences of the withdrawal decision are severe. My findings indicate that withdrawn IPOs face a considerable delay in subsequent attempts to enter public markets, alongside a substantial reduction in total offer proceeds. Crucially, the JOBS Act in 2012 marks a pivotal inflection in the public markets, significantly reducing the incidence of IPO withdrawals and altering the course of financing strategies for emerging growth companies. I argue that an integrated recognition of both withdrawal activity and the regulatory dynamics of the JOBS Act is crucial for a complete understanding of the evolving IPO landscape. Moreover, I examine firm and CEO attributes that correlate with the withdrawal decision and discuss how withdrawal activity presents a fertile ground for future research.

Small businesses in the food and beverage service industry are particularly vulnerable to crises such as the COVID-19 pandemic. One of the most salient vulnerabilities was the drastic decline in consumer spending at eating and drinking places, generating unprecedented swings in employment in this service-intensive sector. Governments across the globe implemented rapid response fiscal policies to mitigate these economic damages and improve small business crisis management. One such policy was the Paycheck Protection Program (PPP) in the United States. This study links restricted microdata from the Colorado Quarterly Census of Employment and Wages to microdata on PPP loan recipients to assess whether the loan program effectively reduced unemployment rates in Colorado's craft beer industry. The results of a staggered difference-in-differences framework indicate immediate and longer-term positive and statistically significant effects of the loan program on employment outcomes, with employment effects ranging from 16.8 to 19.5%. These results emphasize the importance of understanding the loan program’s effectiveness among hard-hit industries comprised of small businesses.

Outliers in entrepreneurship are founders who are markedly different—both quantitatively and qualitatively—relative to the “normal” population. We use a power law perspective to hypothesize that, in order for new ventures to persist, founders with outlier endowments are more likely to have novel expectations about the opportunities they pursue and greater variation in the execution methods they employ, while normal founders are more likely to have much lower expectations and engage in a manner that is confined to fit within the smaller scope of explicit market demand. We leverage data from the Panel Study of Entrepreneurial Dynamics II, a longitudinal representative sample of 1214 nascent entrepreneurs organizing resources in preparation for startup, and employ fuzzy set qualitative comparative analysis to investigate our hypothesized relationships. In support, the results suggest that founders need to stay in their lane for their ventures to persist: whereas outlier founders have the option to successfully pursue more ambitious opportunities—those that are innovative, growth-oriented, and international focused—normal founders are primarily resigned to niche opportunities. Even more interesting, ventures are much less likely to persist when there is a misalignment between endowments, expectations, and engagement (i.e., when outlier founders pursue niche opportunities and normal founders pursue aspirational opportunities). This study makes meaningful contributions to the power law perspective, to the growing interest in outliers and exceptionality in entrepreneurship, and to the domain’s aggregated knowledge of new venture persistence.

A topic of growing interest in entrepreneurship research is how entrepreneurial ventures address grand challenges. This literature, we argue, tends to produce a panacea myth by suggesting that entrepreneurship is the universal remedy for existing social and environmental ills. Starting from the claim that the persuasive power or ‘stickiness’ of the panacea myth depends not only on what it explicitly says (in terms of ideas and beliefs) but also on what it leaves out, we suggest that the exclusion of explicitly political and holistic explanations of grand challenges such as Iris Marion Young's theory of structural injustice, which we use as an illustrative example, precipitates a ‘constitutive absence’ whose mythic function is to sanitize the image of entrepreneurship as the preferred solution to grand challenges. In an effort to denaturalize the panacea myth, we first identify three ‘figures of thought’ – coined ‘extrapolation fallacy,’ ‘political agnosticism,’ and ‘positive acculturation’ – that define the content of the panacea myth while simultaneously excluding theoretical concepts and frameworks, such as structural injustice, that conceptualize grand challenges as structural, multidetermined, and inherently political problems that are not necessarily amenable to stand-alone entrepreneurial approaches and solutions. Second, to loosen the grip of the panacea myth, we suggest rethinking entrepreneurship research in terms of who is involved, what methods are used, and how we talk about it. Taken together, these tactics create an opening in entrepreneurship research for a more complexity-sensitive and political understanding of grand challenges that cultivates a more humble and realistic depiction of entrepreneurship's problem-solving capacity.

Initial coin offering (ICO) is a Web-3 based financing method for ventures, which allows them to use digital assets (e.g., tokens) to raise capital. During an ICO, the entrepreneur has control on ownership; they can choose to issue a very small number of tokens which would allow them to keep “their skin in the game” and retain ownership, or issue all the tokens they hold, which would distribute ownership to investors and have a community-decentralized orientation. While previous literature has identified several factors of ICO success, they have not delved into the role of ownership in ICO success. In this study, we explore whether retaining or distributing ownership during an ICO is more beneficial for raising capital. We find a two-pronged explanation. When looking at ICOs maintaining a higher level of ownership, entrepreneurs are catering to corporate-market logic investors, and we see a U relationship where the optimal percentage in which the entrepreneurs show they have skin in the game at the same time as giving enough to investors. But then, there are ICOs distributing most of its ownership in which entrepreneurs are attracting community-oriented investors, and as such, the higher the distribution the higher the investment. We propose that this is related to how there are different investors audiences’ that will value different practices and ideals and choose differently on what types of projects to invest in. Our research elucidates this new funding source. Nonetheless, future research should investigate these exploratory findings.

In this study, we investigate the effects of reward options and their prices on crowdfunding success. Rational economics predicts that the more choice potential contributors have, the more likely it is that they find a reward option that stimulates participation. However, experiments in behavioral economics and marketing show that providing someone with excessive choice (overchoice) might adversely affect participation. Using data collected from Kickstarter, a well-known crowdfunding website, we demonstrate the existence of the overchoice phenomenon in the context of crowdfunding, i.e., an inverted U-shaped relationship between reward options and crowdfunding performance.

One of the ways to understand the success of impact investing firms is to examine how they add value to the social enterprises they invest. Did their investment boost social and/or environmental change? And what type of support, beyond financial capital, can they provide to enhance impact? Drawing on a design-based methodology, we seek to address some of these questions by developing a tool called the Impact Oriented Value Framework. Putting impact at the centre of the funds' purpose, the framework provides actionable solutions to infuse impact into investors’ non-financial support strategies and activities, enhancing their additionality to portfolio companies as well as their contribution to the impact ecosystem.