Journal of Business Venturing最新文献

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.

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.