Journal of Business Venturing最新文献

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.

Integrating the cognition literature in entrepreneurship and strategy with the career imprinting literature, we propose that the geographic diversification of export sales in international new ventures (INVs) resembles that of their founders' most recent (geographically diversified) employer because founders bear a repertoire of the ‘logics of action’ from their employers regarding how to diversify geographically. We then propose two boundary conditions that influence the relationship between the geographic diversification of export sales of founders' most recent employers and that of their INVs: length of exposure and time since last exposure to their most recent geographically diversified employer. We test these hypotheses using longitudinal data on a sample of 3420 INVs. Our findings broadly support our theoretical propositions except for the moderating role of founders' length of exposure.

Given the challenges inherent in starting companies, investigation of how entrepreneurs use their time at work to develop ventures has received prominent attention by scholars. We argue that how entrepreneurs use their leisure time has not received commensurate scrutiny. Leisure crafting, the proactive pursuit of particular leisure activities for specific goals, could play an important role in the entrepreneurial process. Herein, we develop and test a theoretical model describing how leisure crafting among entrepreneurs affects opportunity recognition and venture performance. Using three studies we provide strong evidence that leisure crafting positively relates to opportunity recognition and venture performance, which is mediated by thriving at work and moderated by work task focus. These findings provide generative insights into the nature of leisure and the micro-processes that drive entrepreneurship.

We test a general model of career mobility and entrepreneurship based on the premise that job transitions between organizations are influenced by the unique role of the organizational founder. Three related ideas inform our inquiry. First, individuals in that role are endowed with the right to act as representatives of their organizations which increases commitment and deters external mobility. Second, the founder role, because of its uniqueness, defines how entrepreneurs think of themselves thus aligning person and position. Repeat entrepreneurship occurs because after a founder leaves, this alignment is disrupted and the need to restore it leads to becoming a founder again. Third, we see the founder role as imbued with charismatic authority. This creates an aura of deference and a propensity to emulate the founder that inspires organizational members working alongside the founder to themselves become entrepreneurs. We investigate these ideas empirically in the context of the global high-end fashion industry through a research design that allows us to compare leading designers' career histories as both founders and members and their transitions to and out of entrepreneurship.

In this study, we introduce visual totality of a crowdfunding pitch video which considers not only visual segments with human faces but also segments without human faces. Drawing from Emotions as Social Information (EASI) theory and expression theory, we analyze more than 4 million frames in 3184 Indiegogo rewards-based crowdfunding pitch videos using the ResNet 50 deep neural network. Results indicate that the impact of peak negative affective visual expression on funding performance is stronger than that of its positive counterpart for both segments with and without human faces. Additionally, the influence of peak negative affective visual expression from human faces is stronger in the first half (vs. the second half) of the pitch video. Further, we found a substitute moderating effect between the peak negative affective visual expression from segments with and without human faces on funding performance. We conducted an additional data collection to ascertain that pain points serve as the underlying mechanism through which negative affective visual expressions related to funding outcome. We discuss the theoretical and practical implications of our study to the crowdfunding literature and the broader research on entrepreneurial resource acquisition.

We develop a comprehensive entrepreneur identity assimilation process model by drawing on in-depth interviews with 30 employees who completed the process and 12 employees who initiated but did not complete it. Extending identity process and identity-play theories, we uncover the mechanisms of daydream-play and substantive play undertaken in phases of broad, focused and specific exploration leading to identity assimilation. Extending prior knowledge of possible selves, we also find that the dynamic pairing of undesirable employee possible self and aspirational entrepreneur possible self builds commitment to entrepreneur identity assimilation over time. Implications for theory and practice are discussed.

Although firms increasingly operate with platform-based business models, only a few have been shown to prosper and survive in the long run. While the literature has traditionally focused on platform growth along with facilitating network effects through value creation, our knowledge around platform scaling remained rather limited. Using an inductive theory elaboration approach with a longitudinal case study of a two-sided platform, Takeaway.com, we offer in-depth understanding about how the top management team members used decision rules to navigate emergent opportunities and challenges over time, and to transition from platform growth to platform scaling. We find that the top management team members purposefully and repeatedly use and revise a portfolio of decision rules to cultivate indirect and data network effects, which allows them to initially facilitate the growth of their platform and over time support the transition to scaling the platform. Our findings provide important implications about the distinct nature of platform growth and platform scaling, and the role of decision rules in cultivating a combination of network effects over time in order to arrive at platform scaling and ensure platform survival and prosperity over an extended period.

Founding teams often experience the exit of co-founders. To develop theory about how founding teams deal with adversity emerging from the exit of one of their members, we take a team-resilience perspective and study the development of six founding teams. Our inductive model highlights how founding teams take different trajectories following team member exits, leading to different types of psychological closure, which impact the teams' resilience building. Our model also suggests how teams not engaging in distancing from the exit-related adversity experience additional adversity within the continuing team, eventually leading to team failure. Our findings challenge and extend extant studies on exits in founding teams and team resilience.

This study addresses entrepreneurs as targets of crime. Leveraging insights from strategic responses to institutional pressures as the main theoretical frame, coupled with supporting insights from routine activities theory and interview data from 14 entrepreneurs who have been victims of crime, we introduce entrepreneur-led ventures becoming targets of crime via their engagement in routine activities that increase venture visibility. We then conceptualize that crime severity pushes entrepreneurs toward venture visibility-reduction responses, such as truncating growth, relocating, or discontinuing the venture. Survey data from 87,486 legally registered entrepreneur-led ventures in Mexico provide strong support for the relationships in our theoretical model. We find that as routine venture activities increase, entrepreneurs encounter crime of increasing severity, with the routine venture activity of making transactions at a bank serving as the strongest attractor of crime. Building on these findings, we observe an indirect effect through crime severity such that the choice to relocate the venture is the most likely response to being targeted by criminals. Our results advance the literature at the intersection of crime and entrepreneurship, especially in developing economies, and offers venture visibility as a mechanism that shapes both criminals' targeting of ventures and entrepreneurs' attempts to reduce being targeted.