Alex Kier

Washington State University - Vancouver · Management, Information Systems, and Entrepreneurship

Public policy studies often seek to determine the effects of policy changes by treating the effects of individual differences as random error. Viewing managers as embedded agents whose social structures are subject to manipulation by policy makers, we illustrate how individual differences can be infused into policy research to glean insight into ho...

Building on regulatory focus theory and the theory of action phases, we propose that the opportunity seeking of the entrepreneurial mindset is fueled by promotion focus, but transformed from something that liberates individuals from sub-optimal goals into something that traps them in escalation scenarios depending on the stability of environmental...

Bestsellers like The Lean Startup and Business Model Generation have suggested that ideation—the generation and selection of ideas—is important to new venture creation; yet, little empirical research on the topic has been conducted. Using a creative problem solving approach, we developed and tested a new scale that found imaginativeness predicts ne...

Although theories of entrepreneurial action regularly acknowledge the importance of imagination, the ability is rarely defined or measured, and thus effectively treated as uniform in degree and type. Using a creative problem solving lens, we identify and measure three different cognitive skills – creative, social, and practical imaginativeness – th...

Entrepreneurial imaginativeness is important for new venture ideation (the generation, evaluation , and development of ideas for new ventures), but its effects have only been examined at the individual level. Research suggests that new venture creation, including ideation, tends to involve multiple individuals, who are in the process of becoming a...

Persisting with a losing project (i.e., a new product development project facing superior competition) is a social endeavor that can increase the costs of failure to the entrepreneur and other stakeholders. Yet, it tends to be explained almost exclusively in terms of intrapersonal predictors, such as the sunk cost fallacy. This paper examines wheth...

New venture ideation is critical to the entrepreneurial process. To generate creative ideas, some entrepreneurs turn to cannabis, proposing its benefits. However, extant research has not validated such claims. Using a new venture ideation task, we explore differences between cannabis users' and non-users' creativity in new venture ideation by asses...

Research Summary: We investigate the short and long-term effects of public sponsorship in the form of grants on venture growth and subsequent investment funding. We adopt a temporal approach and assess our results using discontinuous growth modeling. This approach allows us to unpack the complexity of sponsorship interventions and provide insights...

The primary purpose of this article is to revisit the construct of strategic intent, clarify its nature, link it to firm performance, and propose a contingency framework to allow for further investigation of the relationship between strategic intent and firm performance. We integrate 25 years of strategy research in goal setting/strategy formation,...

Building on Regulatory Focus Theory, we examine whether senior executives’ perceptions of organizational dynamics are predictive of their firms’ entrepreneurial behavior and whether these relationships depend on perceived environmental hostility. Findings show chronic prevention focus to be a negative predictor of entrepreneurial behavior and situa...