Graduate entrepreneurship in Tanzania: Contextual enablers and hindrances

In Tanzania, despite efforts in teaching entrepreneurship at universities, recent tracer-studies have reported falling rates of graduate self-employment. Among the factors that contribute to this decline, the Tanzanian entrepreneurial environment plays an ambivalent role. Based on the concept of entrepreneurial embeddedness, the personal stories of ten Tanzanian graduate entrepreneurs are content-analyzed. The results suggest that embeddedness in the social environment is not of a singular but of a mixed nature. Tanzanian graduate entrepreneurs operate in a developing environment characterized by complex, partly converging and partly conflicting contextual forces, which simultaneously advance and impede entrepreneurial activities. On the one hand, the changed political climate, strong family ties, emerging links with countries like China, and improved banking and taxation systems are among the factors conducive to graduate entrepreneurship in Tanzania. On the other hand, however, the lack of start-up capital, inhibitive banking and taxation, issues of trust, poor technology, corruption, and cheap imports from countries such as China discourage graduate entrepreneurs' business ventures. While current national policies emphasize graduate entrepreneurship, there is a failure to implement these policies at lower government level. Amidst inflexible higher learning institutions, educators are challenged to innovate ways in which entrepreneurship courses will address issues that entrepreneurs face in Tanzania.Full Tex

Starting global, an entrepreneurship-in-networks approach

The results of my study show that using emails of a source of data is highly valuable. This shows that not only the entrepreneurs can benefit from technological developments like e-mail and Internet, but we as researchers can benefit from these innovations as well. Therefore, I would recommend researchers to add company-e-mails as a qualitative source of data in their case studies whenever they can. To optimise the reliability of the e-mail analysis using multiple researchers working in teams or separately would be advisable

Giving second chances: the impact of personal attitudes of bankers on their willingness to provide credit to renascent entrepreneurs

Following recent public and scientific discussions on credit provision for entrepreneurs and credit management policies of banks, this study’s objective is to examine the effect of personal attitudes of bankers on their willingness to consider credit applications from renascent entrepreneurs. Previously, applications from renascent entrepreneurs were automatically rejected. Recently, more and more banks leave the evaluation of these applications to the bankers themselves. In the current study (n = 608) we use an attitudinal perspective to suggest how bankers’ entrepreneurial attitudes, their commitment to credit applications, their perceptions of bankruptcy (in terms of stigmatization and learning opportunities), and their past experience with credit provision to renascent entrepreneurs, influence their willingness to consider new credit applications from renascent entrepreneurs. Overall, results show that individual bankers extensively determine renascent entrepreneurs’ access to financial capital. Implications for banks’ credit provision policy toward renascent entrepreneurs, and for theory, and suggestions for future research are provided in the conclusion and discussion

Enduring effects or business as usual? Entrepreneurship after bankruptcy. International Journal of Business Environment

Previous bankruptcy is often seen as sign of poor entrepreneurial skills but few have examined whether renascent entrepreneurs actually perform worse or better upon reentering and how performance differences might be explained. Using a sample of 1,745 Dutch SMEs firms of which 67 were managed by renascent entrepreneurs this study examines potential differences in performance between renascent and other firms and explores to what extent this can be attributed to effects of the bankruptcy involvement on embeddedness, innovativeness, ambition and financial discipline. Non-parametric and multiple mediation analyses were conducted to test a set of hypotheses. Renascent entrepreneurs were found to show better sales level and were more innovative but also indicate more negative growth rates. Further, they show less financial discipline, but do not differ in their overall embeddedness and ambition levels. These mixed findings suggest that previous bankruptcy involvement is not necessarily a clear admission of failure