Journal of Business Venturing最新文献

Research on social media influencers and entrepreneurship tends to adopt an influencer-as-entrepreneur perspective by examining how influencers leverage social media as entrepreneurial opportunities. However, it remains unclear how entrepreneurs in the audience interpret and leverage influencer content in their entrepreneurial endeavors. Using a two-study approach, Study 1 inductively uncovers that entrepreneurs interpret entrepreneurship influencers' content as para-social mentoring—a one-to-many, mostly unreciprocated mentor-protégé relationship in which media users envision themselves as protégés and perceive media figures as providing individualized career-related and psychosocial support despite knowing that the media figures do not know intimate details about themselves or their circumstances. Our model posits that para-social mentoring between entrepreneurs and entrepreneurship influencers relates to critical entrepreneurship-related outcomes. Using data from 613 entrepreneurs, Study 2 deductively finds general support for the model derived from Study 1. Our study highlights how para-social mentoring operates like a double-edged sword that can benefit entrepreneurs while also exposing them to specific hazards not common in traditional mentoring.

Entrepreneurs seeking legitimacy for their stigmatized products with mainstream audiences must deploy strategies to redefine their products' cultural significance. This paper investigates how the body, often a focal point of stigma, serves as the foundation for these strategies. Through an analysis of exemplary cases in the sex toy industry, we identify three strategies—visibilizing, obfuscating, and transforming—used by entrepreneurs to deal with different sources of stigma, including tribal stigma, blemishes, and abominations associated with the products. Our findings provide novel insights into the role of the body in entrepreneurial strategies to tackle stigma and gain legitimacy for their products, thereby contributing to the literatures on entrepreneurship in stigmatized settings and cultural entrepreneurship.

This paper examines how entrepreneurs manage temporal commitments associated with hyped audience expectations. We examine hype in the crowdfunding context, conducting an inductive study of 155 entrepreneur project updates from five new ventures that mobilized significant funding on Kickstarter. Entrepreneur updates were matched with 17,807 backer comments, creating call and response pairs. Using LIWC sentiment analysis, we tracked changes in backer negative tone over time and observed spikes and dips corresponding with temporal events. The pattern suggested that entrepreneurs have techniques to tamp down negative sentiment from backers as they delay product shipments. Through inductive examination of entrepreneur and backer interactions, we uncover entrepreneurs' use of four narrative practices to manage the temporal constraints of hyped audience expectations: frequent communication, evidence of progress, proximal temporal reach, and time-quality trade-off. While initially effective, these practices have diminishing returns over time, eventually triggering backer outrage as continual delays frustrate backers. We additionally find that the effectiveness of the narrative practices is influenced by external temporal pacers, with entrepreneurs using pacers to amplify narrative practice effectiveness, while backers use them as reasons to reject delays.

There is a growing interest in exploring the practice-based foundations of entrepreneurship education. Despite significant advancement in scholarship regarding entrepreneurship education, our understanding of the ‘educator’, especially how they develop and sustain their abilities to enable learning in practice-based entrepreneurship education, remains sorely understudied. In contrast to existing cognitive learning approaches, we suggest practice-based knowing as an alternative pathway to develop entrepreneurial practice expertise. We build on Heidegger's existential ontology and use the ideas of entwinement and breakdown to build—quasipractice—a process of developing entrepreneurial practice expertise through proximal engagement in the actions, emotions, and cognitive experiences of an entrepreneur, including the experience of temporary breakdowns, and reflection on the breakdowns experienced. Quasipractice helps advance the literature on both the professional development of the entrepreneurship educator and the larger area of practice-based entrepreneurship education.

This study investigates which local conditions enable community-based enterprises (CBEs) to create impact. Advancing our limited understanding of the various contexts that enable CBEs to tackle societal issues locally, we investigate supportive conditions across 77 CBEs driving the energy transition in their geographic community. Through qualitative comparative analysis, we identify four condition configurations for CBE impact creation. Across these configurations, we reveal transferable mechanisms helping CBEs to engage community members (Opportunity- and Community-anchoring) and handle the absence of a supportive condition (Circumventing and Compensating). Our study suggests how CBEs can combine these mechanisms to create impact in varied local contexts.

Prior studies of craft-based categories have emphasized member ventures' prototypical features of smallness and innovativeness, collaboration and cohesiveness norms, and a perception of shared fate forging their strong oppositional identity vis-a-vis industrialized producers. However, our study of craft breweries reveals the potential pitfalls of rigidly adhering to these features and norms during market disruptions. As consumer behaviors changed during the COVID-19 crisis, smallness and innovativeness became liabilities while scale and familiarity became indispensable, favoring larger breweries over prototypical members. This shift exposed hidden divisions within the category, challenging long-held beliefs in shared fate and entrenching heterogeneity among members. The consequent realignment within the category demonstrates how market disruptions can reshape craft-based ventures and categories. Our study advances a theoretical understanding of the dynamic nature of prototypical features and norms: An adherence to category prototypes can become a source of vulnerability during times of significant upheaval.

This editorial reflects on a strong recurring theme noticed when evaluating the JBV publications of 2023 (Volume 38, Issues 1–6) for the annual best paper award. We refer to this theme as “whole-person entrepreneurship”, i.e., how does the who of entrepreneurship shape the what of entrepreneurship. It consists of articles that sought an understanding of entrepreneurs as children, mothers, spouses, religious believers, political beings, hobbyists, victims, and community-members. These articles revealed how an understanding of who “else” entrepreneurs are (other than some role or function) had much to teach about what entrepreneurs do as well as how, why, where, and when they do it. In the following editorial, we offer some evidence for this observation, provide explanation for how the field may have arrived at this “humanistic turn”, and articulate some ways in which it this humanistic turn might shape scholarship in entrepreneurship going forward.

We investigate the impact of friction-reducing labor market reforms on regional high-growth entrepreneurship (HGE) through the effects of reduced legal enforceability of noncompete agreements (NCAs). We draw on new institutional economic theory and the external enablement framework, with insights from the theory of market-preserving federalism, to explore how these reforms enable (disable) HGE within the context of other, concurrent institutional changes at different governance levels. We assemble a novel multi-level longitudinal dataset and employ staggered difference-in-differences estimation to assess causal effects. Our findings suggest that while reducing the enforceability of NCAs can foster regional HGE, the effectiveness of such reforms is heavily influenced by concurrent federal and local institutional changes. In sectors facing significant federal regulatory expansion, the benefits brought by the reduction of NCA enforceability are negated. However, local pro-market institutional changes can counteract the disabling effects of federal regulatory expansion. This highlights the need to consider how the evolving institutional environment influences potential enablers of HGE, cautioning against claims that these labor market reforms (or other exogenous environmental changes) universally yield positive entrepreneurship outcomes.

We investigate a strategy entrepreneurs can use to manage their emotions prior to pitching: linking anxiety to passion. We theorize that internally acknowledging anxiety and interpreting it as a reflection of one's passion for the venture can make passionate feelings salient, facilitate expressions of passion during pitches, and increase judges' evaluations of pitch performance. A field study and a randomized experiment support the theory, offering insights for how entrepreneurs can mentally reframe their seemingly detrimental emotional experiences for beneficial outcomes. More broadly, this work demonstrates the utility of fostering beneficial emotions rather than just alleviating negative ones.