A configurational approach to when entrepreneurs use strong or weak ties to attract their customers

This study investigates when entrepreneurs attract their ventures’ initial customers through strong or weak ties. Attracting customers is important for technology ventures that need to find applications for their technologies. Based on survey data from Belgian technology ventures, our fsQCA results identify three types of resource-seeking behaviors that are characterized by the entrepreneurs’ proactive personalities and human capital, the firm’s resource endowments and the environment. Further investigations reveal that these three types can be described as resource-planning, resource-bootstrapping, and resource-bricolage. Our study contributes to the literatures on entrepreneurial resource acquisition, customers and strong and weak ties

Data from: Data gaps and opportunities for comparative and conservation biology

Biodiversity loss is a major challenge. Over the past century, the average rate of vertebrate extinction has been about 100-fold higher than the estimated background rate and population declines continue to increase globally. Birth and death rates determine the pace of population increase or decline, thus driving the expansion or extinction of a species. Design of species conservation policies hence depends on demographic data (e.g., for extinction risk assessments or estimation of harvesting quotas). However, an overview of the accessible data, even for better known taxa, is lacking. Here, we present the Demographic Species Knowledge Index, which classifies the available information for 32,144 (97%) of extant described mammals, birds, reptiles, and amphibians. We show that only 1.3% of the tetrapod species have comprehensive information on birth and death rates. We found no demographic measures, not even crude ones such as maximum life span or typical litter/clutch size, for 65% of threatened tetrapods. More field studies are needed; however, some progress can be made by digitalizing existing knowledge, by imputing data from related species with similar life histories, and by using information from captive populations. We show that data from zoos and aquariums in the Species360 network can significantly improve knowledge for an almost eightfold gain. Assessing the landscape of limited demographic knowledge is essential to prioritize ways to fill data gaps. Such information is urgently needed to implement management strategies to conserve at-risk taxa and to discover new unifying concepts and evolutionary relationships across thousands of tetrapod species