Entrepreneurial role models, fear of failure, and institutional approval of entrepreneurship: A tale of two regions

Studies on the influence of entrepreneurial role models (peers) on the decision to start a firm ar-gue that entrepreneurial role models in the local environment (1) provide opportunities to learn about entrepreneurial tasks and capabilities, and (2) signal that entrepreneurship is a favorable career option thereby reducing uncertainty that potential entrepreneurs face. However, these studies remain silent about the role of institutional context for these mechanisms. Applying an ex-tended sender-receiver model, we hypothesize that observing entrepreneurs reduces fear of fail-ure in others in environments where approval of entrepreneurship is high while this effect is signif-icantly weaker in low approval environments. Taking advantage of the natural experiment from recent German history and using data from the Global Entrepreneurship Monitor Project (GEM), we find considerable support for our hypotheses

Mission, finance, and innovation: the similarities and differences between social entrepreneurship and social business

Social business and social entrepreneurship offer an exciting field for empirical and conceptual management research. Yet, while there are many attempts to define either social entrepreneurship or social business, the boundaries and overlaps of both phenomena often remain vague or contested -thus rendering empirical or conceptual learning more difficult. We propose a three-dimensional definitional framework to define social business and social entrepreneurship, distinguish them, and relate them to each other. Our framework interprets the pure forms of both social business and social entrepreneurship as the two-dimensional combination of a pure social mission with either pure financial self-sustainability (social business) or a pure innovation focus (social entrepreneurship). Since the finance and innovation perspective are distinct yet independent dimensions, we derive and illustrate four cases of how social business and social entrepreneurship may but need not overlap. Challenging the assumption that each dimension is confined to two dichotomous values, we then interpret each dimension as a full spectrum and introduce the idea of mission, finance, and innovation hybridity. Our discussion suggests that multidimensional hybridity is the empirical rule rather than the exception. It is for this reason that the study of the pure forms of social business and social entrepreneurship promises particularly fruitful insights for management research. We conclude with implications for future management research