Entrepreneurial passion and organizational innovation: The moderating effects of events and the competence to exploit events

How do events, especially rare external events such as financial crises, wars, natural disasters, and the COVID-19 pandemic, affect the efficacy of entrepreneurial passion to drive organizational innovation? This study investigates the moderating role of events and entrepreneurs’ competence to exploit the events (opportunity competence) in the relationship between entrepreneurial passion and organizational innovation. Drawing insights from event system theory, we identified two critical event characteristics (i.e., event novelty and event criticality). Integrating the affect infusion model and the self-verification process in the identity literature, we argue that the two event characteristics and opportunity competence are crucial for entrepreneurs to exploit the benefits of entrepreneurial passion in promoting organizational innovation. After analyzing a survey sample of 435 entrepreneurs in Qinhuai Silicon Alley in China and an online survey of 202 entrepreneurs worldwide, we found that entrepreneurial passion exerts a stronger effect on organizational innovation when events are more novel and more critical to entrepreneurs, and when entrepreneurs have greater opportunity competence. We discuss these findings’ theoretical and practical implications later in this paper.