Journal of Business Venturing最新文献

Why do some entrepreneurs pivot their business models in a crisis, while others are more passive? Integrating Conservation of Resources theory with work on crisis rumination, we developed a micro-level model to explain why entrepreneurs who are under strain due to a crisis, as indicated by experiencing crisis rumination, adopt an active approach – i.e., using active coping and engaging in pivoting. Moreover, prevention-focused entrepreneurs who are habitually more sensitive to losses are especially stimulated by crisis rumination to pivot to prevent (further) resource losses. We tested our model in an experiment and an eight-month longitudinal study with entrepreneurs during an inflation crisis.

This research addresses the impact of the remarkable rise in populism on innovative new ventures. Integrating institutional theory with gender role congruity theory, we reason that the surge of populist discourse by a nation's top political leaders decreases the innovativeness of new ventures, and this negative relationship is more pronounced for women entrepreneurs. We also consider two critical yet overlooked institutions, gender inequality and grammatical gender marking in the dominant languages that entrepreneurs speak, and propose that they reinforce this negative relationship. Data from 69,406 observations of entrepreneurs across 40 countries during the period of 2005–2018, analyzed with a difference-in-differences (DiD) design, support our hypotheses. Theoretical and policy implications are discussed for the challenges of promoting innovation among women entrepreneurs, in countries with greater gender inequality and where the dominant language exhibits greater intensity of grammatical gender marking, with populism on the rise worldwide.

Uncertainty permeates the world of entrepreneurship. Yet, understanding how entrepreneurs perceive and make decisions in the face of uncertainty remains elusive. The value of Bayesian decision models with their probabilistic-based assumptions is only of limited help to entrepreneurs in solving the problem of uncertainty. This research extends the utility of non-probabilistic modes of entrepreneurial cognition as a supplementary epistemology for shedding light into the ‘black box’ of how entrepreneurs navigate unknowable futures. We conceptualize core insights, on how decision-makers make sense of, interpret, and act amidst life's deep uncertainties. Specifically, we introduce four decision heuristics entrepreneurs adopt—grounded in the shared foundations in broader conceptions of uncertainty from the psychology of religious faith—that help systematize why (a) intuitive insight, (b) generative doubt, (c) redemptive choice, and (d) transcendent faith, enhance our understanding of how elements of uncertainty throughout the venture development journey are often addressed. Implications for future research are discussed.

Although political turnover is said to be a healthy component of the business environment, the literature is equivocal about the effects of regime change on early-stage entrepreneurial activity. I present incumbent displacement—the electoral defeat of an incumbent political party's candidate—as a source of regime change, and I analyze how this affects business formation through the lens of real options theory. I test my theory using US gubernatorial elections from 2004 to 2022, leveraging a Regression Discontinuity design to compare changes in business formation trends following elections where a challenger party candidate wins or loses by a close margin. I find that regime change reduces venture creation activity for growth-oriented ventures specifically. I also find evidence of a partial rebound in subsequent months—suggestive that some entrepreneurs delay entry while others permanently abandon their ventures.

We explore the importance of sustaining commitment in inter-firm relationships in the corporate venture capital setting. We find that a corporate investor's past behavior in terms of committing to investment relationships and not abandoning them prematurely confers reputational benefits that increase the likelihood of its participation in future investment opportunities. These reputational effects have a greater impact when the corporate investor has extensive patent stocks and has higher levels of potential slack. Our study highlights the value of sustaining commitment in interfirm relationships, and offers a deeper understanding of an important driver of corporate venture capital program investment opportunities.

We consider the effect of employee stock options on employee mobility and employee entrepreneurship. Employee stock options are firm-specific, long-term, equity-based incentive instruments—attractive properties for affecting employee behaviors and decisions. We argue that employee stock options reduce employee mobility levels. By contrast, we posit that employee stock options increase employee entrepreneurship levels, and even more so when a firm's knowledge scope is narrow. Using the semiconductor industry as the setting, we document not only the negative effect of employee stock options on employee mobility levels but also the positive impact on employee entrepreneurship levels; the positive impact is also more substantial in firms with a narrow knowledge scope. We contribute to the literature that examines the influence of organizational conditions on the origins of entrepreneurship. We also inform research on strategic human capital by explicating the divergent effects of firm-specific incentives on two crucial human capital outcomes for firms.

We examine how parental divorce in early life affects performance in entrepreneurship in adulthood. Drawing on life course theory and empirical analyses of US self-employment and childhood data from the National Longitudinal Survey of Youth 1979, we show that entrepreneurs' experience of parental divorce in childhood benefits their entrepreneurial performance in adulthood through a gain in self-efficacy while simultaneously suppressing entrepreneurial performance through a shortfall in human capital. We also show that whether the performance advantages or disadvantages from parental divorce dominate depends on parental human capital. While parental divorce is associated with underperformance for entrepreneurs whose parents have high levels of human capital, it is positively related to entrepreneurial performance for those with low parental human capital. Our study contributes new theory and evidence on the intertemporal relationship between past family contexts and present entrepreneurial performance.

While age is positively related to entrepreneurial success, the prevailing stereotype favors younger entrepreneurs. To better understand how these contradictory perspectives influence funding decisions, we examine the role of age in a sample of 41,602 reward-based crowdfunding campaigns from Indiegogo. We find a negative correlation between an entrepreneur's apparent age and funding performance, indicating a preference for younger entrepreneurs. However, we also find age-based homophily where older entrepreneurs' campaigns attract older backers. Our study distinguishes between statistical and status-based discrimination to understand the multi-faceted nature of age in reward-based crowdfunding and demonstrate how investment motives mitigate and reinforce age-based discrimination.