Creating New Ventures: A review and research agenda

Creating new ventures is one of the most central topics to entrepreneurship and is a critical step from which many theories of management, organizational behavior, and strategic management build. Therefore, this review and proposed research agenda is not only relevant to entrepreneurship scholars but also other management scholars who wish to challenge some of the implicit assumptions of their current streams of research and extend the boundaries of their current theories to earlier in the organization’s life. Given that the last systematic review of the topic was published 16 years ago, and that the topic has evolved rapidly over this time, an overview and research outlook are long overdue. From our review, we inductively generated ten sub-topics: (1) Lead founder, (2) Founding team, (3) Social relationships, (4) Cognitions, (5) Emergent organizing, (6) New venture strategy, (7) Organizational emergence, (8) New venture legitimacy, (9) Founder exit, and (10) Entrepreneurial environment. These sub-topics are then organized into three major stages of the entrepreneurial process—co-creating, organizing, and performing. Together, the framework provides a cohesive story of the past and a road map for future research on creating new ventures, focusing on the links connecting these sub-topics

Polychronicity in top management teams: The impact on strategic decision processes and performance of new technology ventures

This study focuses on polychronicity as a cultural dimension of top management teams (TMTs). TMT polychronicity is the extent to which team members mutually prefer and tend to engage in multiple tasks simultaneously or intermittently instead of one at a time and believe that this is the best way of doing things. We explore the impact of TMT polychronicity on strategic decision speed and comprehensiveness and, subsequently, its effect on new venture financial performance. Contrary to popular time-management principles advocating task prioritization and focused sequential execution, we found that TMT polychronicity has a positive effect on firm performance in the context of dynamic unanalyzable environments. This effect is partially mediated by strategic decision speed and comprehensiveness. Our study contributes to research on strategic leadership by focusing on a novel value-based characteristic of the TMT (polychronicity) and by untangling the decision-making processes that relate TMT characteristics and firm performance. It also contributes to the attention-based view of the firm by positioning polychronicity as a new type of attention structure

Do entrepreneurship programmes raise entrepreneurial intention of science and engineering students? The effect of learning, inspiration and resources

Drawing on the theory of planned behaviour, this study tests the effect of entrepreneurship programmes on the entrepreneurial attitudes and intentions of science and engineering students. This is necessary in order to confirm (or disconfirm) conventional wisdom that entrepreneurship education increases the intention to start a business. The results show that the programmes raise some attitudes and the overall entrepreneurial intention and that inspiration (a construct with an emotional element) is the programmes' most influential benefit. The findings contribute to the theories of planned behaviour and education and have wider implications for a theory of entrepreneurial emotions and also for the practice of teaching entrepreneurship

Should I stay or should I go? Founder power and exit via Initial Public Offering

Founders can voluntarily exit their ventures via initial public offerings (IPOs). In this study, we build on power theory to develop and test a model of founder exit using a dataset of 313 founders from 177 entrepreneurial IPOs between 2002 and 2010. We largely find support for the model—a negative relationship between founder power and full exit. To capture the underlying mechanism of the power-exit relationship, we conducted two experiments in which we randomly assigned decision makers to either a high- or low-power condition. We find that decision makers in the low-power condition are more likely to use a full exit via IPO than those in the high-power condition and that frustration mediates this relationship. However, founders can also engage in partial exits, including a managerial partial exit in which the founder leaves management but keeps ownership and a financial partial exit in which the founder divests ownership but remains in management. We find that the negative relationship between founder power and exit is more negative for full exits than partial exits. With this paper, we contribute to the literature on exit by identifying a novel mechanism—frustration—underlying power’s influence on the likelihood and type of founder exit

Bureaucracy meets digital reality: The unfolding of urban platforms in European municipal governments

The rise of digital technologies provides an opportunity to study smart cities as new organizational forms. We ask whether and how digital platforms and ecosystems affect the bureaucratic governance of municipal governments. To this end, we offer a multiple case analysis based on rich empirical, longitudinal data of seven European smart cities. We find that the contradicting logic of platform governance creates organisational tensions within the bureaucratic municipal government and at the interface between the municipal government and its external partners. We distil a process that describes how these tensions are resolved through a temporary shift to a non-bureaucratic work mode, and the subsequent formalisation and institutionalisation of those practices as new bureaucratic rules. We make three contributions. First, we contribute to the smart-city literature by outlining an overarching process of how data-driven technologies affect bureaucratic municipal governments. Second, we contribute to the ongoing conversation about the changing nature of Weberian bureaucracy showing how bureaucracy preserves its core while simultaneously adapting to and shaping its environment. Third, we highlight the role of lower-echelon bureaucrats as change agents who devise rules at the intersection of technological and societal development

Specialists, generalists, or both? Founders’ multidimensional breadth of experience and entrepreneurial ventures’ fundraising at IPO

Different streams of research have led to contradictory conclusions about the venture performance implications of founders’ breadth of experience. While extant empirical studies have explored the performance implications of founders’ breadth of experience at the start-up stage, we focus on the later stage of the initial public offering (IPO). We theorize that investors categorize venture founders based on two salient dimensions—their industry and functional background—and we relate this categorization to resource acquisition at IPO. To test our model, we use a hand-collected dataset of 175 entrepreneurial IPOs in the Alternative Investment Market in London (2002–2013) and two randomized experiments. We theorize and find that compared to entrepreneurial ventures with a lead founder specializing in one industry or one function, investors generally devalue those with a category-spanning lead founder (a generalist). However, devaluation is less severe when a lead founder is a generalist in one dimension (e.g., industry) but a specialist in the other dimension (e.g., function). We also theorize and empirically test trust as a mechanism for the generalist penalty. Specifically, audience members (investors) have low trust in a generalist producer (founder) in contexts where the two parties consider entering into a partnership (equity investment at IPO), and so that generalist producer is devalued. Finally, we show that an external expert endorsement—in our case, from intensive venture capital affiliations—offsets the generalist penalty, especially when category spanning occurs in multiple category dimensions

On the edge of destruction: An impaired-regulation model of destructive entrepreneurial action

Entrepreneurial action can be directed toward identifying, generating, and exploiting potential business opportunities that can cause harm to others. Over and above the “rules of the game” of the economic system, we theorize on destructive entrepreneurial actions that result from entrepreneurs’ impaired regulation of their decision making. Specifically, we build on the entrepreneurial action literature and draw on regulation theories of goal attainment and moral disengagement to develop an impaired-regulation model of destructive entrepreneurial actions. This model contributes to the entrepreneurship literature by providing new insights into (1) why some entrepreneurs are more susceptible to engaging their ventures in destructive entrepreneurial actions, (2) everyday entrepreneurs (the “who”) engaging in destructive entrepreneurial actions (i.e., the “how” and “why”), and (3) when and why some entrepreneurs respond to their destructive entrepreneurial actions by becoming repentant do-gooders while others grow into serial offenders

How to Educate Entrepreneurs?

Entrepreneurship education has two purposes: To improve students’ entrepreneurial skills and to provide impetus to those suited to entrepreneurship while discouraging the rest. While entrepreneurship education helps students to make a vocational decision its effects may conflict for those not suited to entrepreneurship. This study shows that vocational and the skill formation effects of entrepreneurship education can be identified empirically by drawing on the Theory of Planned Behavior. This is embedded in a structural equation model which we estimate and test using a robust 2SLS estimator. We find that the attitudinal factors posited by the Theory of Planned Behavior are positively correlated with students’ entrepreneurial intentions. While conflicting effects of vocational and skill directed course content are observed in some individuals, overall these types of content are complements. This finding contradicts previous results in the literature. We reconcile the conflicting findings and discuss implications for the design of entrepreneurship courses

Does technology and Innovation Management improve Market Position? Empirical Evidence from Innovating Firms in South Africa

There is a growing recognition of the central role of technology and knowledge management for market success of organizations. Little is empirically know, however, about this relationship. Drawing on the South African Innovation Survey, a unique dataset on innovative behavior of South African firms in manufacturing and services, this paper investigates the question to what extent and in which ways do technology and innovation management activities affect firms’ market position. Findings show that conducting technology strategy activities pays out. Moreover, especially a combination of internal and external technology audits seems to be beneficial for organizational performance

Entrepreneurial-intention constraint model: A comparative analysis among post-graduate management students in India, Singapore and Malaysia

YesAlthough literature on entrepreneurship has increasingly focused on intention-based models, not much emphasis has been laid on understanding the combined effect of contextual and situational factors along with support of university environment on the formation of entrepreneurial intention among students. In an effort to make up for this shortfall, by taking Theory of Planned Behavior as basic framework, the present study seeks to understand the influence of three of the most important factors, viz. (a) endogenous barriers, (b) exogenous environment, and (c) university environment and support on the entrepreneurial intention among management students. The study sample consisted of 1,097 students, wherein 526 students were from India, 252 from Singapore, and 319 were from Malaysia. The results indicates that along with positive attitude and perceived behavioral control that directly influences entrepreneurial intention, university environment and support and exogenous environment also have an indirect but significant impact on shaping of entrepreneurial intention among students. With this, it was found that exogenous environment was found to have a negative relationship with both attitude towards behavior and perceived behavioral control for all three countries.The full-text of this article will be released for public view at the end of the publisher embargo on 2 Jun 2018