Journal of Business Venturing Insights最新文献

While users may be an important source of innovation, and even of entrepreneurship, we know little about the exact psychological mechanism that underpins user innovators' transition to user entrepreneurship (UE). In this study, we focus on user innovators' communitarian identity, which is a stable mindset that values the personalized bonds with a user community. Based on the theory of planned behavior, we hypothesize how this identity affects user innovators' intention regarding UE. We use survey data from 139 user innovators to show that user innovators' communitarian identity strengthens their subsequent attitudes, subjective norms, and perceived behavior control (PBC) regarding UE, and that the attitudes and PBC in turn strengthen their intentions to pursue UE. The findings highlight the direct effect of the communitarian identity on user innovators’ evaluation of UE and its indirect effect on their intention. They also provide insights into the individual factor that alleviates the lack of commercialization of user innovation.

This study explores the complexities of causes of success mentioned in entrepreneurs' narratives in a broadcasted context. Building on strategic self-presentation and attribution theories, we employed inductive methods to map the configurations of public narratives explaining entrepreneurial success. The data analyzed were gathered from 173 reflective interviews featuring entrepreneurs on the United States' National Public Radio, using machine learning techniques for semantic content analysis. The results show that entrepreneurs can adopt three strategic presentation narratives to explain success in entrepreneurship. Significantly different patterns emerge in the three strategic narrative configurations. First, “lucky charming” narratives reflect an ingratiation strategy, mentioning external and uncontrollable causes of success to increase the entrepreneurs’ likability for the audience. Second, “work striving” narratives use self-promotion strategies to push for recognition of accomplishments, efforts, and intellectual abilities. Third, “social connecting” narratives simultaneously make use of ingratiation and exemplification strategies, including capitalizing on the positive signals given by the social support attracted during their entrepreneurial journey. These three discourse patterns have implications for influencing reputation and driving business- and personal-related outcomes. The findings provide a better understanding of deliberate appearances by entrepreneurs in broadcast contexts and tools for nascent entrepreneurs to leverage their role models among those with acclaimed entrepreneurial success.

Problem-oriented research enables scholars to directly explore increasingly complex societal challenges, yet we still lack in-depth insight into the process of problem formulation. In this paper, we offer insight into this process by examining our 10-year engaged research study of Shorefast, a social enterprise based on Fogo Island, Canada, whose mission was to revitalize the community. We show how our research-practice collaboration evolved as a recursive process which we label as rapid problem formulation - a quickly shifting recursive process between problem definition and problem solution. By iterating quickly between problem and solution, researchers and practitioners can create greater impact as their understanding of the problem, and their search for solutions, deepens.

Within the entrepreneurship literature, there is a growing interest in understanding collective entrepreneurial approaches to tackling societal challenges. In this study, we examine the orchestration of collective action in an open social innovation project bringing together public administrations, citizens and organized civil society to collaboratively address several societal challenges. Analyzing data generated in-situ and in real-time over the entire duration of the project we show how social impact orchestration can generate impact through four pathways: lead user focus, solution focus, problem focus, and ecosystem focus. For each pathway, we show how orchestration enhanced the impact potential of stakeholders involved by enabling learning and scaling. Our study contributes to the literature on impact entrepreneurship and advances knowledge on orchestrating innovation for social impact.

Persistence typifies the behavior of most successful entrepreneurs. Yet systematic theory about entrepreneurial persistence is lacking. This paper theorizes about psychological differences that lead some entrepreneurs to persist appropriately while others quit too soon or persist excessively. Building on self-regulation literature, we develop a theory of entrepreneurial persistence, called entrepreneurial psychological resource approach. Our paper makes two primary contributions to guide future research: a research model expanding upon the resource-based perspective in entrepreneurship research, and an evaluative component relating psychological resources to entrepreneurial persistence.

Triggered by the Russo–Ukrainian war starting early in 2022 and the subsequent movement of refugees toward various European countries, this rapid response paper provides five reflections on the role of social entrepreneurship in light of humanitarian crises. We validate two problems with the help of a problem owner from social entrepreneurial practice and suggest answers to them grounded in existing evidence documented in the academic literature (translational research approach). First, we show how social entrepreneurs can focus on solving the right problems in chaotic and fast-paced crises, and second, we illustrate measures to scale appropriately. Finally, on a meta-level, hope emerges as an additional answer. Even if social entrepreneurs should not address the “right” problems and even if they scale inappropriately, in light of any humanitarian crises, they still contribute value by creating hope for their societies, their stakeholders, and for themselves.

How do venture capitalists select startups? Most research to date has focused on the attributes of either the founders (the jockey) or the business idea (the horse) as the determinants of selection. Connecting information from VentureXpert to the Danish registry data allows us to extend this analysis to include information on all employees of startups (the team). To assess the importance of these factors to access to venture capital, our analysis compares startups that received funding to other startups founded at the same time and in the same industry. Consistent with the jockey hypothesis and prior research, we find that firms with more and better educated founders have a higher probability of receiving venture capital. However, high-quality employees appear to matter even more than founders to the probability of being funded.

Eventually, all founders leave their social ventures either on their own accord or because they are compelled to do so. However, there is a high level of uncertainty over how founder exit decisions are made in these firms. In this thick problem description of founder exit in social ventures, we identify the factors that distinguish the social entrepreneurship context through the founder, firm, and ecosystem perspectives. The influence of these factors on founder exit is elaborated. Based on the insights developed, we propose research questions that future studies could pursue to expand our understanding of founder exit, exit routes, and succession in social ventures.

We extend to the context of entrepreneurship Paulo Freire's concepts including “limit-situation” representing constraints to be surpassed, such as inequalities or crises, “untested feasibility” representing a new vision based on awareness that a given reality can be altered, and “limit-acts” representing actions to change reality. In our abductive analysis, we focus on Brazilian women technology entrepreneurs as individuals transcending barriers such as gender inequality. Our entrepreneurial autonomy perspective represents a process in which individuals (1) identify economic, social, and/or environmental issues that they can improve via entrepreneurship, (2) develop a new vision that articulates better economic, social, and/or environmental conditions, and (3) take actions to enhance these conditions and benefit diverse stakeholders by creating a nonprofit or for-profit enterprise. We provide future directions for the integration of Freire's concepts and the entrepreneurial autonomy perspective in research, and offer our entrepreneurial autonomy worksheet for educators to empower individuals to develop ideas of socially responsible new ventures that create value for diverse stakeholders.

We ask whether the prevalence of self-employment is higher among individuals voting right and facing automation vulnerability? Under growing automation vulnerability, those with right-leaning political orientations may be influenced by their stronger beliefs towards free markets, individualism, autonomy, and self-reliance, and may therefore, be more likely to prevail in self-employment. Counter to our expectation, we find those vulnerable to automation and voting mainstream left were less likely to be self-employed. Automation vulnerability was associated with no systematic differences in wage or self-employment prevalence among those voting mainstream right, radical-right or radical left. The findings have implications for research on political values influencing the prevalence of self-employment under growing automation vulnerability.