Origin and emergence of entrepreneurship as a research field

This paper seeks to map out the emergence and evolution of entrepreneurship as an independent field in the social science literature from the early 1990s to 2009. Our analysis indicates that entrepreneurship has grown steadily during the 1990s but has truly emerged as a legitimate academic discipline in the latter part of the 2000s. The field has been dominated by researchers from Anglo-Saxon countries over the past 20 years, with particularly strong representations from the US, UK, and Canada. The results from our structural analysis, which is based on a core document approach, point to five large knowledge clusters and further 16 sub-clusters. We characterize the clusters from their cognitive structure and assess the strength of the relationships between these clusters. In addition, a list of most cited articles is presented and discussed

Smart Timing for Smart Products? Complementor Multihoming in Nascent Platform Markets

Complementor multihoming is becoming pervasive in platform-mediated markets populated by multiple platforms. In a study of the nascent “smart home” industry, we use a novel dataset to examine complementor strategies regarding timing of entry and timing of multihoming, with their corresponding performance implications. We find that early entrants to a platform market multihome faster than later entrants. While early entrants achieve lower performance than later entrants, this negative performance effect is mitigated for complementors that multihome fast. This implies that multihoming is an effective hedging strategy for early entrants in multi-platform markets characterized by high uncertainty. Also, multihoming scope (number of platforms a complementor joins) is associated with higher complementor performance and shorter time to the next platform adoption

Technological diversification within UK’s small serial innovators

This paper investigates the determinants of technological diversification among UK’s small serial innovators (SSIs). Using a longitudinal study of 339 UK-based small businesses accounting for almost 7000 patents between 1990 and 2006, this study constitutes the first empirical examination of technological diversification among SMEs in the literature. Results demonstrate that technological diversification is not solely a large firm activity, challenging the dominant view that innovative SMEs are extremely focused and specialised players with little technological diversification. Our findings suggest a nonlinear (i.e. inverse-U-shaped) relationship between the level of technological opportunities in the environment and the SSIs’ degree of technological diversification. This points to a trade-off between processes of exploration and exploitation across increasingly volatile technology regimes. The paper also demonstrates that small firms with impactful innovations focus their innovative activity around similar technological capabilities while firms that have introduced platform technologies in the past are more likely to engage in technological diversification

Smart Timing for Smart Products? Complementor Multihoming in Nascent Platform Markets

In multi-platform markets, complementors often choose to offer their products or services across several platforms—a strategy known as complementor multihoming. This approach has recently attracted much attention from both industry practitioners and management scholars. Building on existing research regarding the factors that influence complementors’ decision to multihome and the associated performance implications, this study specifically examines the timing strategies involved in complementors’ multihoming decisions. We investigate the drivers of the timing of complementors’ sequential multihomings, focusing on the factors that affect the timing of their first and subsequent multihoming. The empirical context of our research is the ecosystem of platforms and complementors in the nascent smart home market. Our results show that early entrants transition more quickly from single-homing to multihoming (i.e., joining a second platform) than late entrants, suggesting that they adopt a hedging strategy in response to the high uncertainty present in the early stages of the ecosystem. We also find that the drivers of the timing of multihoming may differ for the first and subsequent multihoming. For the first multihoming, the market traction of non-adopted platforms is associated with how quickly complementors multihome. However, this relationship dissipates in subsequent multihoming decisions. Nonetheless, certain factors influence the timing of all multihomings: When joining a second or third platform, complementors are faster to adopt platforms that are technologically similar to those they have already joined. We discuss the managerial implications of these findings for platforms, and complementors navigating multi-platform ecosystems

On the origin and emergence of entrepreneurship as a research field

status: publishe

Development of magnetic materials for photonic applications

In this manuscript, the synthesis and characterization of superparamagnetic particles and their silica-coated counterparts as building blocks for magnetic photonic crystals is fully described. The advantages and disadvantages of the presented synthetic method are discussed. Preliminary results considering the presence of magnetic species within a photonic crystal are also presented. Suppression of emission of the quantum dots within photonic crystals is attributed to a decrease of the number of available photonic modes for radiative decay. The presence of materials with permanent magnetic moments within photonic crystals shows that suppression of their emission is scaled with the strength of the magnetic field