Pub Date : 2025-01-10DOI: 10.1016/j.jbusvent.2024.106471
David Bendig , Colin Schulz , Maximilian Möhwald , Patrick Pollok
This study draws on the behavioral agency model to investigate how stock options incentivize CEO risk-taking related to investments in external clean technology (cleantech) ventures. Using longitudinal data from 540 publicly traded firms, we find that current option wealth is negatively associated with corporate cleantech investments while prospective option wealth is positively associated. The results show that founder CEOs, who exhibit different endowment and risk-bearing patterns than hired CEOs, do not perceive cleantech investments as mixed gambles. These findings advance understanding of the interplay between equity-based incentives, CEO characteristics, and incumbents' pursuit of sustainable business practices.
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Pub Date : 2025-01-04DOI: 10.1016/j.jbusvent.2024.106470
Yasmin O. Schwegler , Jeffrey S. Petty
Environmental awareness and concern are implicit in virtually the entire environmental-entrepreneurship literature but typically not explicitly analyzed. To better understand what makes environmental entrepreneurs start their ventures, we need to understand those omnipresent variables. We therefore deconstruct environmental awareness and concern into different aspects, which we manipulate separately in two experimental studies. Our main finding is that key stakeholders' environmental awareness and concern are drivers of environmental entrepreneurship, as they signal to entrepreneurs that stakeholders are ready to support it. We thus identify a way of increasing environmental entrepreneurial intent in order to transform environmental problems into economic opportunities.
Executive summary
There is a growing belief among scholars and practitioners that environmental entrepreneurs can play a crucial role in addressing global environmental degradation by developing and providing innovative solutions that lead the way toward a more sustainable business world (Dean and McMullen, 2007; Hockerts and Wüstenhagen, 2010; Johnson and Schaltegger, 2019). A growing literature is investigating the drivers of such entrepreneurship (e.g., Muñoz and Cohen, 2018; Schaltegger, 2002; Shepherd et al., 2013; York et al., 2016), but two drivers — environmental awareness and concern — are typically only implicit in this literature, even though they are underlying most drivers that are investigated explicitly (e.g., Cohen and Winn, 2007; Dean and McMullen, 2007; Markman et al., 2019). Explicitly analyzing the role of environmental awareness and concern is crucial to better understand what makes environmental entrepreneurs start their ventures.
In this paper, we deconstruct environmental awareness and concern. The experimental method is ideally suited for that aim (Grégoire et al., 2019; Stevenson et al., 2020; Williams et al., 2019), as it allows us to manipulate several forms of awareness and concern in different experimental groups with slightly different pre-tested articles about an environmental problem. We then measure participants' intent to start a venture that addresses that problem, relative to their intent to start similar ventures that do not address the problem. In this way, we test the effect of the following types of environmental awareness and concern on environmental entrepreneurial intent (EEI): entrepreneurs' personal awareness, awareness of a solution to the problem, and awareness of other entrepreneurs addressing the problem; public awareness; entrepreneurs' own concern; public concern; customers' concern; and investors' concern.
The results indicate that especially customers' and investors' awareness of and concern about environmental problems increase entrepreneurs' intent to start environmental ventures. One explanation is that information about stakeholder concern, customers' willingness to
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{"title":"","authors":"","doi":"","DOIUrl":"","url":null,"abstract":"","PeriodicalId":51348,"journal":{"name":"Journal of Business Venturing","volume":"40 4","pages":"Article 106502"},"PeriodicalIF":8.9,"publicationDate":"2025-01-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"146242550","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":1,"RegionCategory":"管理学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
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