Journal of Business Venturing Insights最新文献

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.

Described as the presence of significance, meaning, and goal-directedness in one's life, purpose in life has received much attention in psychology and well-being research due to its association with psychological well-being. However, research on the relationship between entrepreneurship and purpose in life remains nascent. In this study, we explore differences in purpose in life between social entrepreneurs and commercial entrepreneurs. We find that social entrepreneurs, on average, exhibit higher levels of purpose in life than commercial entrepreneurs. We further find that social entrepreneurs are more likely to retain purpose in life in the face of hindrance stressors than their commercial entrepreneur counterparts. We discuss theoretical implications for social entrepreneurship and entrepreneurial well-being literatures.

While many studies on the social venture funding gap have focused on venture-level factors to explain why social ventures receive less funding, the role of investors and their characteristics has received less attention. In this study, we propose that the reason for much of the funding gap is that many angel investors lack the analytical capabilities required to assess double bottom lines. Drawing on the literature on human capital in angel investing, we use data on 19,757 investment decisions by 1,428 angel investors from a large angel investment network to investigate the relationship between venture type, angel investor analytical capability, and investment likelihood. We find that the reluctance to invest into social ventures disappears for analytically capable angel investors (those who are relatively educated, experienced, and connected). These findings demonstrate the importance of investor human capital in social venture funding and closing the funding gap.

In this paper, we present an exploratory study to investigate why those who are self-employed in the United States may make more personal health-related trade-offs than adults working in traditional wage-employment jobs. A random sample of 10,663 working adults in the United States indicate that the self-employed engage in higher amounts of health-related resourcefulness behaviors than wage employees (e.g., skipping medication to save money). We find that concerns over healthcare access and affordability serve as antecedents to health resourcefulness behaviors among all working adults, but that age moderates these relationships differently for the self-employed. Specifically, younger self-employed adults engage in health resourcefulness behaviors due to healthcare affordability concerns while older self-employed adults engage in such behaviors due to healthcare access concerns. In sum, we contribute to the entrepreneurial resourcefulness literature and well-being literature by highlighting data on how the self-employed make trade-offs with their personal health resources. We offer multiple directions for theory development, future research, and implications for healthcare policy.