David M. Townsend

Virginia Tech (Virginia Polytechnic Institute and State University) | VT · Department of Management

One of the great paradoxes of corporate entrepreneurship (CE) is that even with good intentions and prodigious resources initiatives supporting the renewal and revitalization of organizations through entrepreneurial action are often programmed to fail before they are even launched. The cause of this malady stems from the challenges corporate entrep...

In recent years, the emergence and growth of startups in the space sector transformed activities that used to be the sole purview of government entities and large aerospace companies into opportunities for commercial entrepreneurship. The purpose of this article is to explore these trends, and to highlight the present challenges and future possibil...

Trade credit strategies – comprised of the approaches used by internationalising firms to set the payment terms and schedules for their customers – are one of the few levers available to new small firms to overcome the liability of outsidership. They are vital to entrepreneurial firms seeking to achieve international market growth in the context of...

In the management and business ethics literatures, stakeholder engagement has been demonstrated to lead to more ethical management practices. However, there may be limits on the extent to which stakeholder engagement can, as currently conceptualized, resolve some of the more difficult ethical challenges faced by managers. In this paper we argue tha...

Over the past decade, entrepreneurial action theory (EAT) has emerged as one of the foundational, multi-level theories of entrepreneurship.

In the field of entrepreneurship, the creation of future goods and services inextricably binds the fate of new ventures to the influence of time throughout the entrepreneurial process. In recent work, scholars have taken important steps to account for the unique role of time in theories of entrepreneurial action. Our research builds on these approa...

Profoundly disruptive data breaches and cyber-attacks have heightened the salience of security issues facing firms as well as their suppliers, alliance partners, and customers. However, cyber-security is simply one of the many security management challenges large firms face in pursuing growth while simultaneously forestalling attacks upon their phy...

External enablers (EEs) are exogenous, macro-environmental forces that influence the rate, extent, and substance of entrepreneurial activity. A steadily increasing body of empirical research has sought to identify, describe, and predict the aggregate impact of EEs, yet few studies have assessed whether EEs exert similar or dissimilar effects across...

Reward‐based crowdfunding platforms – in which campaigns exchange rewards for financial backing to develop a product or service – are one of the fastest‐growing segments of the crowdfunding industry. We use an extension of social exchange theory (SET) called the resource theory of social exchange (RTSE) to examine resource exchanges through rewards...

Analysis of the impact of McMullen and Shepherd (2006) on entrepreneurship theory.

Using a transaction-level analysis of 1,040 small lumber exporters from 52 countries, we develop and test a framework wherein internationalizing entrepreneurs pair affordable loss logics (ALL) with real options reasoning (ROR) to generate value-creating opportunities while substantively forestalling the unfavorable impacts of trade partner opportun...

High-achieving employees, the "stars" of an organization, are widely credited with producing indispensable, irreplaceable, value-enhancing contributions. From the recruitment of celebrity CEOs to the fierce competition for star scientists, and from lucrative contracts for sports icons to out-sized bonuses for top salespeople, human capital strategi...

Given the COVID-19 crisis, the importance of space in the global economic system has emerged as critical in a hitherto unprecedented way. Even as large-scale, globally operating digital platform enterprises find new ways to thrive in the midst of a crisis, small and medium-sized enterprises (SMEs) nestled in local economies have proven to be fragil...

Uncertainty exists within a small constellation of core constructs that are central to the study of entrepreneurship. And yet, despite the common agreement and consensus that uncertainty plays a central role in entrepreneurship theory and research, there are important unresolved debates around several key questions including conflicting views on th...

Research Summary In recent years, scholarship on intra‐industry entrepreneurial spinouts has coalesced around a heredity‐focused perspective, propounding the notion that spinouts from high‐quality parent‐firms outperform those emanating from low‐quality parent‐firms. This view has found strong support in high‐tech sectors, but it is unclear whether...

Our central premise is that the dichotomization of risk and uncertainty into distinct categories, while useful in the early stages of theory development in the field of entrepreneurship, now poses several key obstacles to building more rigorous and nuanced contemporary entrepreneurship theories. The problems stem from the deterministic assumptions...

ABSTRACT: Does a firm’s entrepreneurial orientation (EO) play a role in creating or destroying value through corporate acquisitions? As the source of sustainable competitive advantage continues to shift from financial capital and fixed assets to human capital and fungible knowledge stocks, more and more firms have sought to pursue entrepreneurial a...

Across the social sciences, there is a growing recognition that rural innovation and entrepreneurship are at the front lines of responding to increasing dynamism and complexity in social, cultural, and economic environments. Yet, a review of the disparate literatures on rural venturing reveals that this research has largely escaped the attention of...

PRE-PRINT of Forthcoming Article in Academy of Management Perspectives ABSTRACT: Across the social sciences, there is a growing recognition that rural innovation and entrepreneurship are at the front lines of responding to increasing dynamism and complexity in social, cultural, and economic environments. Yet, a review of the disparate literatures o...

The rapid advancement of computationally complex machine learning systems, commonly known as artificial intelligence (AI), is the fruit of a decades-long effort to endow machines with cognitive capabilities that equal or even exceed those possessed by human actors. As the growing sophistication of AI algorithms revolutionizes entrepreneurial action...

In this chapter, we discuss the impact of crowdfunding to resolve early-stage funding gaps among young ventures, evaluating the extent to which different forms of crowdfunding function as a digital substitute for traditional sources of early-stage finance. We then discuss the unique challenges crowdfunding creates for young ventures. We conclude th...

The rapid advancement of computationally complex machine learning systems, commonly known as artificial intelligence (AI), is the fruit of a decades-long effort to endow machines with cognitive capabilities that equal or even exceed those possessed by human actors. As the growing sophistication of AI algorithms revolutionizes entrepreneurial action...

More often than not, corporate acquisitions are expensive and difficult, especially those transacted for the purpose of advancing the aims of corporate entrepreneurship (CE). Motivated by frequent, high-cost failures, firms are experimenting with novel organizational structures and fresh approaches to acquisition-driven CE. In this study, we examin...

Increasingly, entrepreneurship scholars have been compelled to grapple with mounting evidence that entrepreneurship-related phenomena are subject to power law distributions in which a very small number of individuals, firms and events account for a disproportionately large amount of the total economic impact. The specter of a few remarkable stories...

Whether business venturing emerges in the context of nascent-stage start-ups or corporate giants, one of the enduring and fundamental assumptions underlying theories of entrepreneurial action is that entrepreneurs operate in uncertain environments. And yet, nearly a century since the unveiling of Knightian uncertainty as a precursor to profit-makin...

Equity financing in entrepreneurship primarily includes venture capital, corporate venture capital, angel investment, crowdfunding, and accelerators. We take stock of venture financing research to date with two main objectives: (a) to integrate, organize, and assess the large and disparate literature on venture financing; and (b) to identify key co...

Research summary: This article draws on identity control theory and a study of acquisition premiums to explore how CEO celebrity status and financial performance relative to aspirations affect firm risk behavior. The study finds that celebrity CEOs tend to pay smaller premiums for target firms, but these tendencies change when prior firm performanc...

This paper delineates the conceptual domain of dual-identity social entrepreneurship (DISE) and grounds its components theoretically. DISE entails the creation of ventures whose business model is designed by individual founders to create demonstrable and continued public value from strategic actions while simultaneously creating continued economic...

Research in entrepreneurship has been booming, with perspectives from a range of disciplines and numerous developing schools of thought. It can be difficult for young scholars and even long-time researchers to find their way through the lush garden of ideas we see before us. The purpose of this book is to map the research terrain of entrepreneursh...

This paper focuses on how the change of ownership structure at the time of initial public offering (IPO) will raise governance problems and affect the firm’s long-term performance after IPO. More specifically, we argue that for high-tech firms, founders and venture capitalists (VCs) selling equity at IPO will reduce the firms’ performance after IPO...

Overconfidence in one’s entrepreneurial abilities is often assumed to motivate the behaviors of founders of high growth ventures. However, when founders encounter significant obstacles in the firm growth process, some begin to doubt their efficacy of their abilities to manage these growth processes successfully. In these circumstances, prior resear...

Technology-based ventures face considerable challenges when attempting to raise early-stage capital during the early-stages of development. To create an operational business they need access to financial capital, but external investors prefer to see an operational business before investing capital. This study extends arguments grounded in dynamic m...

Psychological ownership is a powerful mental state through which social artifacts such as ideas, inventions, opportunities, and even firms become a part of an entrepreneur’s identity. The experience of owning a venture, however, is not the same for all individuals. While some entrepreneurs feel a passion for their business and see the venture as th...

Resource-based logic contends that firm performance is a product of superior resource endowments. Yet, many firms initiate operations with significant resource constraints and still generate superior performance. In this study, we explore how the commercialization of radical innovations constrains the growth of technology-based ventures, and how in...

This paper explores the factors that shape the extent to which organizational disapproval and repair attempts impact spillover to firms within an alliance network. Using a long-term event study and random effects GLS model, we find that that social factors such as the pre-event visibility of the alliance, the tenor of post-event media coverage, and...

Resource-based theory contends that the manner in which firms are organized plays a critical role in determining whether resources can be leveraged to create wealth. Although numerous factors influence organizing decisions, prior research in the heterogeneous resource approach contends that individual resources are the causal driver in the process...

This study seeks to better understand why some individuals decide to start new businesses and others do not, particularly in light of high base rates of failure. In addressing the question of "Why do some individuals choose to start new ventures?" a common perspective is that potential entrepreneurs with high levels of confidence in potential outco...

Family firms can enjoy substantial longevity. Ironically, however, they are often imperiled by the very process that is essential to this longevity. Using the concept of managerial discretion as a starting point, we use a human agency lens to introduce the construct of successor discretion as a factor that affects the family business succession pro...

Undercapitalization in early-stage ventures is one of the most challenging obstacles to success facing entrepreneurial startups (Holtz-Eakin, Joulfaian, & Rosen, 1994). Limited research has probed this area and it is often atheoretical with key concepts not rigorously defined (Thornhill & Amit, 2004). In this study we propose a definition of underc...

In entrepreneurship theory, ownership is most often associated with the amount of equity controlled by an individual entrepreneur. However, several scholars acknowledge that feelings of ownership often exist in the absence of objective control. As such, we explore emerging literature on psychological ownership to provide a theoretical basis for exp...

A central tenet of resource-based logic is that undervalued resources utilized by firms organized to exploit them will produce superior economic performance over the long run. Yet when young technology-based ventures pursuing new opportunities do not possess full property over these resources, input providers retain the right to bid up factor price...

Social entrepreneurship (SE) is emerging as a common approach to meeting social needs. However, SE founders appear to be organizing under both for-profit and non-profit organizational forms to engage in essentially the same activities. We investigate this lack of consistency regarding the choice of organizational form by examining two possible expl...

We examine the impact of the governance in entrepreneurial firms at the time of the IPO focusing on market valuation based on whether the founder is still with the company. Using agency theory to explain the governance devices (and their purpose), we probe their impact on firm valuation. We develop hypotheses using concepts from psychological owner...

Within the broad framework of the entrepreneurial opportunity recognition literature, the debate has continued as to whether opportunities are discovered or created. While under the paradigm of neoclassical economics, entrepreneurial opportunities are held to be the temporary result of disequilibrium in external markets, a behavioral perspective on...

We examine the impact of the governance in entrepreneurial firms at the time of the IPO focusing on market valuation based on whether the founder is still with the company. Using agency theory to explain the governance devices (and their purpose), we probe their impact on firm valuation. We develop hypotheses using concepts from psychological owner...

Identifying and exploiting opportunities is frequently described as the most fundamental of entrepreneurial behaviors (Shane & Venkataraman, 2000; Venkataraman, 1997). However, recent work criticizes the teleological basis of most extant theories of the opportunity identification process arguing that many entrepreneurs do not start firms with speci...

The central premise of the resource management perspective (Sirmon, Ireland, & Hitt, 2007) in resource-based theory contends that resources must be actively managed in dynamic environments to produce superior economic performance over the long-run. However, before resources can be actively bundled and leveraged to create economic value, the firm’s...