Journal of Business Venturing Insights最新文献

Most variables in entrepreneurship are not distributed normally. Instead, they are characterized by positive skew and heavy tails featuring influential outliers. Yet, this fundamental asymmetry in entrepreneurial endeavors is rarely discussed in entrepreneurship education, which often oscillates between highlighting everyday entrepreneurs and high-growth ‘unicorn’ startups while overlooking the distributional context for these extremes. Therefore, this paper explores whether students accurately comprehend the non-normality that pervades entrepreneurship. We conducted two studies wherein undergraduate business students at a large, public university in the Midwest US estimated entrepreneurial performance. We elicited students' estimates of the range of performance exhibited by entrepreneurs using a real-world vignette and performance data for an online learning platform. By providing empirical evidence that students may carry largely inaccurate assumptions of performance distributions, this paper highlights the paradoxical risks of excess entrepreneurial entry on the one hand and missed opportunity on the other.

Entrepreneurs eventually face the inevitable in which they must exit their firms. Some choose the entrepreneurial exit path of selling to an unaffiliated individual or company. This type of exit can arise due to a variety of reasons, including life situations, strategic reasons, or other interests. The process of selling a small, privately held company, oftentimes facilitated by business intermediaries, typically begins with introducing the company to potential acquirers through confidential marketing that provides just enough information to pique interest while also preserving the anonymity of the entrepreneur or business. One important element included in the marketing of a business is the entrepreneur's reason to sell. Due to the potential information asymmetry present in the sale of privately-held businesses, this study proposes that the reason for sale, referred to in this study as the communicated exit purpose, sends varying signals to potential acquirers impacting the perception of the business opportunity and acquisition price at exit. Utilizing an archival dataset from a popular business-for-sale website, our analysis shows support that the price at exit is affected by the communicated entrepreneur's reason for exit. A separate experiment and qualitative study provide further insight into the acquirer perceptions of the business opportunity based on the stated reason of entrepreneurial exit. Our paper concludes with strategies to assist entrepreneurs regarding the disclosure of reasons for exiting.

In many academic circles, promotion and tenure decisions are often driven by the quality of the candidate's research portfolio. In entrepreneurship, as in other disciplines, we tend to judge the quality and impact of our research based on publication in a select few top journals. In our paper, we investigate the incorrect inferences that result from using Journal Impact Factor (JIF) and other rankings as proxies to assess an article's scholarly quality and impact. In doing so, we hope to better understand any discrepancies between journal quality as measured by these proxies and individual article citation rates within both top and non-top entrepreneurship journals. Our results, based upon the average number of citations, show roughly 61% of the top four journals being misidentified as high quality (Type 2 error) and 22% of the remaining journal articles being misidentified as not high quality (Type 1 error). We illustrate the variability within the top entrepreneurship journals that further reinforces the importance of evaluating each article based on its individual merits rather than relying solely on proxies of quality. As such, we avoid neglecting the potential impact and value of articles that may not conform to traditional measures of quality.

Spiritual capital serves as a unique resource that can contribute to entrepreneurial action. This paper develops the concept of religious social capital, as a distinct component of spiritual capital, and theorizes its role in motivating and supporting entrepreneurial action. This is important because individuals with religious affiliations are often deeply embedded within a religious community yielding strong and unique forms of social capital; and social capital in general is well established as a key driver of entrepreneurial action. The paper then elaborates the distinctive structural, cognitive and relational dimensions of religious social capital, and theorizes distinctive mechanisms by which these enable effective entrepreneurial action through community attention and community spanning.

We examine how Chief Executive Officer (CEO) industry-specific experience influences firm performance in small and medium enterprises (SMEs) in emerging markets. Drawing on the upper echelons perspective and learning theory, we propose an inverted U-shaped relationship between an SME CEO's industry-specific experience and firm performance. We also argue that country corruption and political instability moderate this relationship, resulting in lower performance for SME CEOs with little industry experience or many years of industry experience in countries with high corruption or political instability. We test our hypotheses using data from the World Bank's Enterprise Survey of firms in emerging economies from 2006 to 2019. The results support our hypotheses that corruption and political instability primarily hurt the performance of SMEs with CEOs having very long industry experience. We discuss implications of this research for scholars studying SMEs in lesser-developed institutional environments and how leaders may influence SME performance.

This study contributes to new debates about how hybrid entrepreneurship is related to specific psychological well-being dimensions (job, life, and leisure time satisfaction). To address this issue, Ardianti, Obschonka, and Davidsson (2022; AOD) published first empirical results in JBVInsights. They provide evidence for different effects on well-being, depending on how individuals have switched from or into hybrid entrepreneurship. By drawing on panel data from Germany, two studies are conducted. While study 1 replicates the original methodological approach, study 2 provides an extension by applying cross-model coefficient comparison tests. In study 1 we were able to replicate some of the original results presented by AOD. In contrast to the original study, we find that the switch from wage employment to hybrid entrepreneurship is negatively related to job and life satisfaction. Also, while AOD show that a switch from hybrid entrepreneurship to full-time entrepreneurship relates significantly to job and life satisfaction, we find no such effects. Finally, in study 2, we provide novel evidence that the effects induced by a job switch to hybrid and full-time entrepreneurship are significantly stronger for job satisfaction when compared to life and leisure time satisfaction.

Entrepreneurial persistence is crucial for venture success and entrepreneurs’ personal growth. Yet, the extant research on entrepreneurial persistence has largely remained disconnected. The current disjointed profusion of constructs and theories which we believe has made progress on understanding this important construct slower than is ideal. To address those issues, we conducted a systematic review and made explicit the nomological network of antecedents and consequences of entrepreneurial persistence and the related constructs of perseverance and tenacity. Our review identified potential theoretical and empirical issues of the current entrepreneurial persistence research and outlined areas and opportunities for future research.

Previous research has predominantly focused on cognitive antecedents related to the quality of new venture ideas (NVIs), resulting in a notable gap in understanding the influence of structural elements on NVIs. Drawing upon activation theory, we examine how the structure of the idea-generation framework, a dimension of routinization, influences NVI outcomes. To investigate this relationship, we conduct two separate studies: the first involving a student sample and the second involving practicing entrepreneurs. Our findings demonstrate an inverse U-shaped relationship between the structure in the idea-generation framework and the quality/quantity of NVIs. These findings contribute to the understanding of the antecedents that shape NVIs.

Entrepreneurial identity plays a crucial role in the entrepreneurial process. Although cross-cultural experience likely shapes entrepreneurial identity in enduring ways, we are not clear on how and why. Returnee entrepreneurs, who move between distinct sociocultural contexts, offer a valuable lens to explore how aspects of cross-cultural experience interact with entrepreneurial identity. Incorporating the concept identity play, we aim to explore how returnees process their cross-cultural experience in ways that shape their entrepreneurial identity when venturing back home. Adopting a qualitative design with 12 cases of returnee entrepreneurs, we develop a three-stage process model of identity play through which returnees navigate the differences between the host and home country to construct their entrepreneurial identity: envisioning, enacting, and refining. We suggest that it is the nexus of cross-cultural experience and entrepreneurial activities that this identity play manifests. We make contributions to the literatures on entrepreneurial identity and cross-cultural experience in entrepreneurship. In addition, we contribute to the meaningful heterodoxies section's call for a better understanding of how entrepreneurs moving between distinct cultures select cultural elements to generate valuable heterodoxies.