Journal of Business Venturing最新文献

In many informal economies, entrepreneurs face a visibility paradox: increasing visibility to resource-granting stakeholders simultaneously increases exposure to resource-extracting stakeholders. To investigate this phenomenon, we leverage a unique, hand-collected, small-area census dataset of firms in the township of Delft in Cape Town, South Africa, providing rare insight into a population of otherwise unobserved firms. Through an abductive, multimethod approach, we address three interrelated research questions: (i) How do informal economy entrepreneurs make their firms visible? (ii) Which informal economy entrepreneurs make their firms visible? (iii) How does firm visibility relate to firm performance? Our analysis identifies distinct dimensions of authority- and community-oriented visibility and introduces the concept of selective visibility, which refers to making a firm visible to certain stakeholders (e.g., community members) but not others (e.g., authorities). Using a social embeddedness lens, we find that while highly embedded entrepreneurs are more associated with invisibility, less embedded entrepreneurs are more associated with community-oriented selective visibility. The QCA results also indicate a configurational relationship such that visibility's association with performance varies with an entrepreneur's level of embeddedness. As a whole, our study builds theory regarding the taken-for-granted concept of firm visibility and provides important insights that are generative for entrepreneurship research in informal economies and other difficult-to-access settings.

Persistent war is an increasing reality for millions of people worldwide. War contexts create a wide range of problems, but paradoxically may fuel some entrepreneurial activities. This inductive, qualitative study explores how an entrepreneurial ecosystem was launched and sustained amid an ongoing civil war despite repeated setbacks, disruptions, and impediments to pursuing collective goals. Building on our longitudinal qualitative data, we show how the entrepreneurial ecosystem was repeatedly reshaped by altering collective goals as well as providing the pathways and sense of agency needed to make progress toward ever-shifting goals. Our research culminates in a grounded theoretical model of an entrepreneurial ecosystem of hope, which contributes to our comprehension of entrepreneurship within war-affected regions and provides valuable insights into the dynamics of collective hope. This study offers practical implications for policy makers and practitioners by illuminating the role of entrepreneurial phenomena in the challenging context of war.

Although academic interest in organizational scaling is growing, extant research has focused primarily on the antecedents and processes, neglecting how employees experience scaling. Drawing on the scale-up, firm growth, and well-being literature, we take an employee perspective to examine the impact of scaling on employee burnout and job satisfaction. Using a sample of 10,908 new venture employees in Sweden, we show that scaling is positively associated with employee burnout, and negatively with job satisfaction. We also show that the link between scaling, burnout, and job satisfaction depends on whether the employee is in a managerial position or has prior new venture experience.

The growing phenomenon of highly valued startups (e.g., unicorns) poses fundamental questions for entrepreneurship research. We posit that venture scalability and VC funding availability may explain startups' IPO valuations (and timing). Highly scalable ventures may not only capture very large market opportunities, but their scaling strategies may also be constrained by the governance and regulatory burdens faced by public firms. Accordingly, we hypothesize and find that more scalable ventures undertake IPOs at higher valuations, which is positively moderated by VC funding availability. Highly scalable startups also delay their IPOs for longer but only when VC funding availability is high.

We examine whether and when female representation in decision-making groups of venture capital firms affects the firms' decision to fund woman-led businesses. By developing an intra- and inter-group categorization framework for group decision-making, we argue that, in the male-dominated venture capital industry, decision-making groups with higher female representation are less likely to fund woman-led businesses. However, this negative effect is mitigated when the decision-making group has more politically neutral members or when members have more shared prior employment affiliations. Using a longitudinal panel dataset of funding decisions by 151 U.S.-based venture capital firms, the empirical analyses support our theoretical predictions. We also enriched and complemented our empirical findings with qualitative evidence.

Many entrepreneurial opportunities are associated with events, including sports competitions, races and tournaments, concerts and music festivals, and conferences and exhibitions, yet this variant of entrepreneurship has not been specifically accounted for in the literature. We integrate insights from entrepreneurship research with research on temporary organizational forms, stakeholder theory, and platform strategy to define Event-Based Entrepreneurship (EBE) and propose factors that account for the founding and scaling of event-based ventures. In so doing, we lay the conceptual foundations and offer theoretical and practical directions for an expanded research agenda on EBE.

Drawing from expectancy violation theory, we investigate how entrepreneurs' language-based expressions of their political ideology influence the performance of their crowdfunding campaigns. We argue that crowdfunding funders expect campaigns to be apolitical, suggesting that entrepreneurs' expressing their political ideologies – regardless of the specific ideology – create a negative expectancy violation that decreases funding performance. As source credibility is a central boundary condition for expectancy violation theory predictions, we also suggest this relationship is mitigated by three indicators of entrepreneurial credibility: prior successful experience, media usage, and third-party endorsements. Using a sample of 19,898 Kickstarter campaigns and a randomized experiment, we find support for our theoretical predictions.

Leveraging work on role theory and age stereotypes, we deploy a randomized experiment that uses AI to manipulate founder age in fundraising appeals. Broadly, we find that age perceptions matter to investors. Using 949 equity crowdfunding observations, we show that entrepreneurs benefit from appearing older when seeking funding. However, these benefits wane as age perceptions increase, and age perceptions eventually become detrimental to funding efforts, resulting in an inverted-U relationship between age perceptions and funding evaluations. Perceptions of founder intelligence, creativity, energy, and experience mediate this relationship. This study opens new frontiers by introducing founder age perceptions as an important, yet overlooked factor in entrepreneurial fundraising.

We study how the physical effects of climate change motivate entrepreneurs to develop and protect climate change adaptation (CCA) intellectual property (IP) in heterogeneous ways across countries. Integrating the sustainable entrepreneurship literature with the attention-based view, we show that country-level climate impact redirects managerial attention to the disruptive potential of climate change and spurs the sector into action to pursue and protect CCA-related IP. We also find that strong intellectual-property rights regulations and environmental movements in countries strengthen this effect. Our results extend the sustainable entrepreneurship literature by showing how the geography of climate impact explains how CCA IP protection efforts are distributed globally.

Executive summary

Why do entrepreneurs in some countries engage in more climate change adaptation (CCA) intellectual property (IP) protection than others? We postulate that entrepreneurs' attention is simultaneously situated in their country's climatic and institutional environments, and that these contexts shape the salience of CCA IP protection. Formally, we predict that entrepreneurs who would normally deprioritize CCA IP protection as an opportunity in the face of more urgent socioeconomic issues become more attuned to it as their country's climate impact increases. We then theorize institutional conditions that influence entrepreneurs' responsiveness to climate impact. First, we predict that stronger intellectual property rights institutions reduce entrepreneurs' uncertainty in capturing rents from their CCA IP and hence strengthen the relationship between climate impact and CCA IP protection. Second, we predict that informal institutions aligned with environmental movements increase the salience of climate impacts to corporate entrepreneurs by spurring their interests in environmental issues and hence also strengthen the climate impact-CCA IP protection relationship. Our empirical analyses using 689 country-year observations consisting of 95 countries over the period 2005 to 2015 reveal that country-level climate impact drives CCA IP protection, especially when there are strong intellectual property rights (IPR) regimes and environmental movements.