Journal of Business Venturing最新文献

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.

We hypothesize that environmental, social, and governance (ESG) goals enable crowdfunding platforms to attract more investors and thus survive longer. Using data on the population of 508 security-based platforms established in the 38 OECD countries between 2007 and 2020, we document that platforms with higher levels of ESG selection criteria are more likely to survive over time. The importance of ESG criteria is more pronounced for platforms operating in countries with lower power distance. In decomposing ESG, we find that governance is the most significant component of the three, while environmental criteria have increased in importance for platform survival in recent years.

Entrepreneurial opportunities emerge and dissipate over time, yet little is known about how and why they vary in their ephemerality and what the implications of temporal variance are for the optimal timing of entrepreneurial action. Building on the actualization theory of opportunity and signal processing theory, we propose that profit possibilities exist in the convolution of consumer desire, technical feasibility, and economic viability of an innovation. Conceiving consumer desire – a necessary ingredient of any profit opportunity – as consisting of fleeting or enduring consumer preferences and fixed or variable consumer expectations, we identify four possible distributions of consumer desire over time. We then show how the interaction of these distributions with technical feasibility functions produces a temporal typology of entrepreneurial opportunities. Our analysis suggests that, despite sharing conceptual similarities in structure, each type of opportunity emphasizes a different form of asymmetry across opportunity categories, which is likely to differentially affect the optimal timing of entrepreneurial action. We conclude by pointing out how considerations of time facilitate the move away from fruitless philosophical debates and toward a more theoretically nuanced and empirically informative view of the concept.

We study failures between 1993 and 2017 in the complete population of 1731 English and Scottish university spinoffs founded since 1977. We borrow and expand the concept of density dependence from organizational ecology to theorize that a spinoff's propensity to fail is affected by the number of spinoffs active not only in the aggregate population but also within its parent university's portfolio. We contribute to organizational theory, demonstrating the importance of organizational groups that form within larger populations on individual organizations' propensity to fail. We contribute to literature on academic entrepreneurship showing that, for most universities, spinoff portfolio growth can lower associated spinoffs' failure rates, but that such effects need to be juxtaposed to the aggregate population's finite capacity to support an expanding number of spinoffs.

As ‘scaling’ has gained significant attention from different stakeholders, multiple definitions have emerged, endangering the legitimacy of the area as a distinct field of inquiry. Using a mathematics perspective, we define scaling in the business context as a time-limited process of exponential growth. We then identify drivers of scaling and show that scaling for competitive advantage requires increasing returns to scale in input-output relationships (superlinear scaling). This is followed by the application of graph theory, supported with findings from a Delphi study, to demonstrate why scaling requires internal transformation. Finally, we discuss our definition's uniqueness, how it can be operationalized, and opportunities for future research.

In the Global North, where social entrepreneurs and their stakeholders agree that social enterprise needs to do more for stakeholders than traditional business, social entrepreneurs balancing financial and pro-social goals seek to avoid mission drift by being responsive to their stakeholders. In many areas of the Global South, despite the work of NGOs and foreign aid, social problems remain persistent and pervasive, so social entrepreneurs face vastly different stakeholder demands. Our qualitative study of 36 social entrepreneurs in Kenya, Uganda, and Rwanda builds on behavioral theory to understand how social entrepreneurs balance pro-social and financial goals in this context. We find that they experience a mismatch between their social impact aspirations and the expectations of stakeholders, which leads to concerns of Impact Drift, which we define as the decoupling of pro-social actions from enduring social impact outcomes. Concerns of impact drift prompt a norm-breaking approach to social impact, involving orchestrating novel coalitions of stakeholders and employing heuristics to limit their focus and reassure them about their approach.

This study extends emerging theories of star performers to digital platforms, an increasingly prevalent entrepreneurial context. It hypothesizes that the unique characteristics of many digital platforms (e.g., low marginal costs, feedback loops, and network effects) produce heavy-tailed performance distributions, indicating the existence of star entrepreneurs. Using longitudinal data from an online learning platform, proportional differentiation is identified as the most likely generative mechanism and lognormal distribution as the most likely shape for distributions of entrepreneurial performance in digital contexts. This study contributes theory and empirical evidence for non-normal entrepreneurial performance with implications for scholars and practitioners of digital entrepreneurship.

Entrepreneurship education and training targeting individuals living within impoverished regions has proliferated. However, empirical results suggest recipients are failing to adopt the newly prescribed practices, particularly the practice of experimenting with product, process, and marketing innovations. Research on institutional logics suggests the way practices are framed plays an important role in adoption. In a field experiment involving 683 entrepreneurs within rural Sri Lanka, we compared the effectiveness of two framing tactics: within-logic contrasting, and cross-logic analogizing. We find that cross-logic analogizing is more effective, and suggest our findings likely extend to other contexts where logics are highly institutionalized.