Journal of Business Venturing Insights最新文献

A fundamental discovery in entrepreneurship is that firm outcomes do not follow a symmetrical Gaussian curve. Instead, most are heavily right-skewed distributions in which a few extreme outliers (e.g., rock star firms like Airbnb, Tesla, and Uber) account for a disproportionate amount of the output. Although past research usually described outcome distributions as shaped following the power law, our study asks the following question: What other less extreme distributions of generalizable firm outcomes exist in entrepreneurship? Our investigation leverages four representative datasets from the U.S., Europe, and Australia, comprising 32 samples with about 22,000 ventures. We implemented a precise data-analytic approach that compares each sample (i.e., empirical distribution) against multiple theoretical distribution shapes to identify the best fit. Results showed that, across nearly all samples, the pure power law was not the dominant distribution. Instead, the annual revenue distribution is shaped as a power law with an exponential cutoff, and the number of employees distribution is shaped lognormally. Combined, these suggest the existence of top-down limitations on the highest performing firms. Accordingly, we offer an agenda for future research focused on (a) identifying and releasing systemic constraints, (b) examining and falsifying the underlying generative mechanisms that cause the emergence of heavy-tailed distributions and the outliers therein, and (c) conducting multi-level, mixed-method studies to investigate how micro-level interactions aggregate into macro-level heavy-tailed distributions. Our paper makes significant contributions to the power law perspective and future efforts to explain and predict the emergence of rock star firms in entrepreneurship.

We analyse the effect of entrepreneurship on subjective wellbeing in China. To do so, we use four waves of the nationally representative China Family Panel Studies (CFPS) longitudinal survey data. Employing a suite of quasi-experimental analytical procedures, we find that being an entrepreneur increases subjective wellbeing in China. Our estimates suggest that being an entrepreneur results in a 0.46 standard deviation higher subjective wellbeing than not being an entrepreneur. This finding is robust to different quasi-experimental methods. We also find that entrepreneurship enhances subjective wellbeing more among males and rural residents. Results on mediation analysis suggests that social and economic status are important channels through which entrepreneurship influences subjective wellbeing.

Effective governance plays a pivotal role in aligning the interests of diverse stakeholders and shaping the strategic directions of organizations. However, the dominant model of corporate governance often concentrates power among a limited group of directors, leading to concerns about potential power imbalances that may distort fair representation and compromise decision-making integrity. Decentralized autonomous organizations (DAOs) present an alternative model that distributes power among a broader base of stakeholders, fostering a more democratic approach to collective decision making and governance. However, the openness and fluidity inherent in DAOs can expose them to coordination challenges, governance complexities, and potential exploitation by malicious entities. In response to possible governance challenges, we consider DAOs as digital commons and adapt Ostrom's eight principles for governing the commons to propose a new governance framework for DAOs. This governance framework is designed to foster the collective stewardship of shared digital assets and the equitable distribution of decision-making authority in the Web3 era. As DAOs emerge as a novel organizational structure, our governance framework aims to maintain their resilience, inclusiveness, and decentralization, reinforcing their crucial role in the evolving Web3 landscape.

The underlying intents and long-lasting impacts of economic policies are not only significant drivers of the quantity and productiveness of entrepreneurial action but also its diversity, equitability, and breadth. Calibrating policies to achieve these varied aims is a persistent challenge, due in no small part to the complex role uncertainty plays in entrepreneurship. While extant research has shown that both too much and too little uncertainty stifles entrepreneurial action, other studies have revealed that policy remedies and interventions themselves are often an important cause of uncertainty by reshaping and redefining the ‘rules of the game’ in unexpected ways. As such, the general importance of economic policy uncertainty (EPU) is well established, yet little work has been undertaken to identify and explicate its heterogenous impacts on entrepreneurial action. This gap constitutes a material hindrance to the field's ongoing efforts to better align entrepreneurship research with grand social challenges. One of these challenges relates to the long-standing impediments to gender-based fairness and equity. By investigating the differential impacts of EPU on entrepreneurial action among men and women, our findings bring to light the extent to which EPU heterogeneously shapes the experiences and outcomes of female and male entrepreneurs.

Illiteracy, the lack of ability to read and write, affects how people engage with entrepreneurship and the possible outcomes of entrepreneurial actions. Yet entrepreneurship as a discipline has paid little direct attention to illiterate entrepreneurs. We offer a glimpse of what recognition of illiteracy in entrepreneurship research might enable, and how it can challenge researchers to reach beyond our existing knowledge horizons to develop a future of impactful, integrative, and inclusive entrepreneurship scholarship.

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.