Dean A. Shepherd

University of Notre Dame | ND · Mendoza College of Business

This article theorizes and empirically investigates how status and provocative language influence audience engagement with new-venture posts on social media platforms. Using venture capital funding as a status proxy, we analyzed 369,142 Twitter posts by 268 new ventures. We found that status (1) increases engagement with ventures' tweets, and that...

Empathy is a primary driver of social entrepreneurship and entrepreneurial action. However, empathizing individuals can arrive at different conclusions about what targets need. This variance in entrepreneurs’ empathy for targets is important because it will help explain the type of interventions they initiate to help targets and the production of a...

While several editors and scholars have shared critical insights into the craft of writing a theory paper, there is an essential aspect of publishing a theory paper that is less understood: the process by which expert reviewers and authors engage in the review process, which has a significant influence on theory. We examine critiques and responses...

We offer lean scholarship as an approach to developing a portfolio of high-quality, high-impact papers. Indeed, our scholarly identity is typically generated and reinforced by our portfolio of published papers than by any one paper. By lean scholarship, we refer to iterative experimentation, stakeholder engagement, and collective learning in genera...

The future of the field of entrepreneurship is bright primarily because of the many research opportunities to make a difference. However, as scholars, how can we find these opportunities and choose the ones most likely to contribute to the literature? This essay introduces me-search as a tool for blazing new trails in entrepreneurship research. Me-...

Despite admonishments that anthropomorphizing represents a serious error in scientific thinking, we show that anthropomorphizing has been a critically important tool for developing influential theories in entrepreneurship. Analyzing the literatures related to an organization’s entrepreneurial orientationand organizational knowledge reveals how scho...

There are several excellent “From the Editor” notes, but in this chapter, we offer something more hands-on with a perspective directly applicable to entrepreneurship. We believe that sometimes papers are rejected, not because the research is fundamentally flawed but because authors miss some of the fundamentals of a strong paper. Therefore, this ch...

Building theories is essential for advancing knowledge of entrepreneurship. But it is also a highly challenging task. Although there is a burgeoning literature that offers many theorizing tools, we lack a coherent understanding of how these tools fit together—when to use a particular tool, and which combination of tools can be used in the theorizin...

As many new ventures are started by founding teams, it is these founding teams that likely engage in creating their venture’s culture. We draw on theories of cultural dynamics and the literature on team cognitive diversity to investigate the creation of a new venture’s culture. Specifically, we theorize how a founding team’s cognitive diversity imp...

This article theorizes and empirically investigates how status and provocative language influence audience engagement with new-venture posts on social media platforms. Using venture capital funding as a status proxy, we analyzed 369,142 Twitter posts by 268 new ventures. We found that status (1) increases engagement with ventures’ tweets, and that...

Plain English Summary There are different ways organizations make the most out of a surprising challenge to enhance performance, adjust, and pivot for new opportunities. The COVID-19 pandemic has challenged organizations in different ways—some experienced near-exponential increases in demand, whereas others saw their entire business evaporate overn...

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. Specific...

In this chapter—“Entrepreneurs Alleviating Poverty Through Educating Their Children”—we examine the bright-side motivation underlying entrepreneurial action in chronic-adversity contexts. We explore entrepreneurs living in the slums of India, demonstrating that their main motivation for entrepreneurial action is educating their children. In doing s...

Next, this chapter—“Refugee Entrepreneurs Building and Displaying Resilience”—examines how refugees can harness entrepreneurial action to find a positive identity and better life under difficult circumstances. Against a theoretical backdrop comprising resilience, positive psychology, and positive organizational scholarship, we explore the important...

In this chapter—“An Entrepreneurial Process for Exploiting Vulnerable People’s Labor”—we take an even bigger step toward the dark side of entrepreneurial action in response to chronic adversity. In this chapter, we take the perspective of victims to explore a destructive entrepreneurial process that involves multiple actors—namely, that of exploiti...

This chapter—“Corruption as Corporate Entrepreneurship”—continues with the dark side of entrepreneurial action in response to chronic adversity but in the government context. While corruption exists in most countries, it is widespread in the developing world, acting like sand in the wheels of economies and harming the performance of businesses, esp...

Although overconfidence is acknowledged as one of the most common managerial decision-making biases, much uncertainty remains about its implications for firm performance. To resolve this uncertainty, we investigate how and why CEO overconfidence is related to firm performance using meta-analytic techniques on a sample of 199 studies. In particular,...

This chapter—“Women Entrepreneurs Flourishing or Languishing at the Bottom of the Pyramid”—highlights not only the bright side of entrepreneurship (consistent with the previous chapters) but also the potential dark side of entrepreneurship training and venture creation. In particular, this chapter focuses on women entrepreneurs at the base of the p...

This chapter—“Personal Adversity and Justifying Illegal and Costly Entrepreneurial Action”—shifts even more to the dark side of entrepreneurial action in the face of chronic adversity. Specifically, in this chapter, we explore bunkerers—oil thieves—to provide a richer understanding of how individual entrepreneurs interpret their contexts and engage...

This chapter—“Making Do with the Resources at Hand to Improve One’s Life and Others’ Lives”—highlights the bright side of entrepreneurial action in response to chronic adversity. In this chapter, we discuss how most prior research has emphasized the importance of slack resources to explain creativity, innovation, and entrepreneurship. However, scho...

Artificial intelligence (AI) refers to machines that are trained to perform tasks associated with human intelligence, interpret external data, learn from that external data, and use that learning to flexibly adapt to tasks to achieve specific outcomes. This paper briefly explains AI and looks into the future to highlight some of AI's broader and lo...

Plain English Summary Entrepreneurship scholars can form an entrepreneurial mindset to build and manage a portfolio of papers to enhance their research impact. They can do this by creating representations of paper ideas, exploring the viability of those ideas with potential audience members, and either improving the idea for journal publication or...

Given the importance of theorizing about an entrepreneurial phenomenon, we seek to highlight the common challenges of entrepreneurship papers’ theorizing and offer suggestions for how we (as a community of scholars) can address these challenges to develop more robust and impactful entrepreneurship papers to advance the entrepreneurship field. Speci...

Women’s entrepreneurship at the base of the pyramid can offer a way out of poverty for families, foster the development of communities, and provide a route to modernizing countries. Yet, we know little about what entrepreneurship means for the well-being of these entrepreneurs. This study investigates the well-being of marginalized women entreprene...

Different streams of research have led to contradictory conclusions about the venture performance implications of founders’ breadth of experience. Although 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...

Corruption is prevalent in the developing world, negatively impacting small businesses. While research on corruption has focused on bribery from an economics-system perspective, there has been less research on the role of bribery from a more micro perspective. In this study, we explore bribery from the demand side by anchoring our qualitative, theo...

While entrepreneurship can generate economic and social benefits, it can also be a source of negative outcomes. We need to gain a deeper understanding of how individual entrepreneurs interpret their context and engage in entrepreneurial action that can generate substantial negative outcomes. In this paper we shed light on the entrepreneurial proces...

Focusing on the organizing practices by which vulnerable individuals are exploited for their labor, we build a model that depicts how human traffickers systematically target impoverished girls and women and transform their autonomous objection into unquestioned compliance. Drawing from qualitative interviews with women forced into labor in the sex...

Recent dirty work research has begun to explore intersectionality, attending to how meaning is made at the intersection of multiple sources of taint. This research has shown that individuals often construct both positive and negative meanings, which can be challenging to manage because the meanings people construct require a certain coherence to pr...

DOWLOAD BOOK FREE HERE: https://link.springer.com/book/10.1007/978-3-030-78935-0 CHAPTER 1: ATTENDING TO THE EXTERNAL ENVIRONMENT TO IDENTIFY POTENTIAL OPPORTUNITIES Building on a recent study (Shepherd, McMullen, and Ocasio, 2017), this chapter highlights the importance of noticing opportunities as an initial step toward new venture creation. U...

The lean startup framework is one of the most popular contributions in the practitioner-oriented entrepreneurship literature. This chapter builds on a recent paper (Shepherd & Gruber in Entrepreneurship Theory and Practice . 10.1177/1042258719899415 , 2020) to highlight new insights into how new ventures are started based on the lean startup framew...

Although scaling is a “hot topic” in the practitioner literature, it has mostly been ignored (at least explicitly) in the academic literature. Building on a recent editorial, this chapter highlights the importance of scaling for new venture growth. Scaling refers to spreading excellence within a venture as it grows (organically or through acquisiti...

We develop and test an overarching model of entrepreneurial intention that includes profit, social impact, and innovation as the three main drivers of entrepreneurial behavior. A holistic model is developed to identify separately the generic intention to be a self-employed entrepreneur from the associated intention to be a specific type of entrepre...

Building on a recent study (Shepherd et al. in Strategic Management Journal 38:626–644, 2017), this chapter highlights the importance of noticingnoticingopportunitiesopportunities as an initial step toward new venture creationnew venture creation. Unsurprisingly, there has been considerable interest in the processes of allocating attentionattention...

The creation of new ventures and growing them into well-established organizations is the key purpose of managing new venturesmanaging new ventures. This chapter explains the 10 most essential subtopics for managing new ventures (Shepherd et al. in Journal of Management 47:11–42, 2021): (1) lead founderfounder, (2) founding teamfounding team, (3) so...

Entrepreneurs can learn about potential opportunitiesopportunitiesthrough socialsocial interactions with communities of inquirycommunity(ies) of inquiry. However, how do entrepreneurs build such communities, and how do they engage community members over timetime to develop their potential opportunities? Building on a recent study of eight new ventu...

Crowdfunding enables the organizing of support for victims of a tragedy from a wide range of sources. While this support can be financial and non-financial, we know relatively little about the non-financial support donors provide. Donors’ words can have substantial positive and negative effects on sufferers; however, donors are also often limited i...

The future of the field of entrepreneurship is bright primarily because of the many research opportunities to make a difference. However, as scholars how can we find these opportunities and choose the ones most likely to contribute to the literature? This essay introduces me-search and a special issue of research-agenda papers from leading scholars...

Drawing on Affective Events Theory and a sample of 112 matched manager-employee dyads involved in failed corporate entrepreneurial projects, we develop and test a model of when and how managerial leadership can foster high employee performance in their subsequent endeavors. Through path analysis modeling, we show that perceptions of supportive mana...

In the context of the humanitarian refugee crisis in Germany, we conducted an 8-month qualitative study of prosocial ventures that emerged during this crisis to build a theory of motivation in prosocial venturing. We identified two venturing paths driven by founders’ distinct motivations. Founders motivated by others’ suffering focused on rescuing...

Business-model research has largely focused on business models as real entities, as cognitive and linguistic schema, and as formal representations. Although research within these themes has made important contributions to the management literature, it has largely ignored the inter-relationship between business models as schemas and business models...

Education is considered one of the most critical human capital investments. But does formal educational attainment "pay off" in terms of job satisfaction? To answer this question, in Study 1 we use a meta-analytic technique to examine the correlation between educational attainment and job satisfaction (k = 74, N = 134,924) and find an effect size c...

One of entrepreneurs' key tasks is mobilizing resources from external resource holders. Although we know how entrepreneurial ventures gain initial access to resources, we do not yet fully understand how they maintain their resource mobilization, particularly in the face of potential threats. During our 11-month study of prosocial ventures that emer...

The Coronavirus disease (COVID-19) pandemic has been a devastating crisis affecting the physical, social, and financial well-being of people the world over. Unlike business-as-usual, crises create unique context conditions in which to study digital innovation. Crises can create widespread suffering. Crises can also trigger the creation of “compassi...

Although scaling is a "hot topic" in the practitioner literature, it has largely been ignored (at least explicitly) in the academic literature. This editorial highlights the importance of organizational scaling, which we define as "spreading excellence within an organization as it grows." Specifically, the entrepreneurship field would benefit great...

One of entrepreneurs’ key tasks is mobilizing resources from external resource holders. While we know how entrepreneurial ventures gain initial access to resources, we do not yet fully understand how they maintain their resource mobilization, particularly in the face of potential threats. During our 11-month study of prosocial ventures that emerged...

Entrepreneurship and organization theory can both benefit from a mutual exchange to theorize on a number of topics. One such topic is organizational responses to adversity. In this paper, we theorize by abstracting across highly contextualized papers on entrepreneurship's role in responding to adversity and propose that entrepreneurial action, such...

Entrepreneurship and organization theory can both benefit from a mutual exchange to theorize on a number of topics. One such topic is organizational responses to adversity. In this paper, we theorize by abstracting across highly contextualized papers on entrepreneurship’s role in responding to adversity and propose that entrepreneurial action, such...

Although scaling is a “hot topic” in the practitioner literature, it has largely been ignored (at least explicitly) in the academic literature. This editorial highlights the importance of organizational scaling, which we define as spreading excellence within an organization as it grows. Specifically, the entrepreneurship field would benefit greatly...

In this dialogue, I highlight five fundamental assumptions of the field that are challenged by COVID 19 that may require a research pivot: (1) that entrepreneurs are a main force of disruption; (2) that technologies and markets have extended periods of stability that are only infrequently punctuated by disruptions; (3) that entrepreneurs are except...

An important and underexamined topic in the growing literature on community-embedded organizing concerns situations in which dramatic shifts in the environment require the time-sensitive re-establishment of both communities and organizations to address urgent needs. We conduct a qualitative study of emergent community-organization trajectories in t...

Recent research has highlighted how entrepreneurs learn about potential opportunities through social interactions with communities of inquiry. However, we know little about how entrepreneurs build such communities and how they engage them over time to develop their potential opportunities. In this study, we conducted an inductive study of eight new...

Entrepreneurs’ creativity is the starting point of opportunity identification, exploitation, and innovation, so it is generally lauded by journalists, citizen observers, practitioners, and scholars. However, they may overstate the benefits of creative entrepreneurs while neglecting their potential costs. Building on moral disengagement theory, we t...

The entrepreneurship setting—an extreme organizational context—provides fertile ground for organizationally relevant theory testing and development. In this paper, we propose that randomized experiments in the context of entrepreneurship have considerable potential to advance theory in entrepreneurship, as well as other areas of organization scienc...

Research has focused on the role of entrepreneurial action in alleviating poverty. However, there is a gap between individuals’ short-term outcomes from entrepreneurship overcoming immediate resource concerns and the large-scale impact of entrepreneurship on institutional and system change. Therefore, in this study, we explore entrepreneurs’ belief...

Critical to top management’s organizing efforts are the formal rules for how organizational members are to make decisions. However, employees can break top management’s decision-making rules. Although scholars have investigated rule breaking at the individual and group levels of analysis, research is needed into how members come together as a group...

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 chall...

The lean startup framework is one of the most popular contributions in the practitioner-oriented entrepreneurship literature. This study seeks to generate new insights into how new ventures are started by describing the five main building blocks of the lean startup framework (business model, validated learning/customer development, minimum viable p...

Entrepreneurship theory has largely been developed and tested using symmetrical correlational methods, effectively describing the sample-average respondent and subsuming individual differences. Such methods necessarily limit investigation of asymmetries that are evident in entrepreneurship, and provide only a single explanation that belies the mult...

Consistent with social motivation theory, prior research on managerial motivation suggests that effort is contagious across management team members. In this study, we draw on belongingness theory to develop a model on important boundary conditions to social motivation theory in the management team context. The model predicts that new venture manage...

Corporate venture development suggests that internal corporate ventures (ICVs) must become proficient learners if they are to cope successfully with the uncertainty inherent to their operations. Accordingly, the parent corporations in which ICVs operate are challenged to identify and enact appropriate parenting styles that foster their ICVs' learni...

Domestic violence is the most prevalent form of gender-based violence that threatens the wellbeing and dignity of women. In this paper, we examine whether and how exposure to physical or sexual assault by male partners influences women's decision to initiate a new business when they have access to financing. We collected primary data from rural Ban...

Across two studies, we theorize and empirically investigate passion as a moderator of the negative affective consequences of fear of failure in early-stage entrepreneurship. We test our hypotheses in two field studies of naturally occurring affective events—namely, pitching competitions—and we complement self-reported measures of negative affect wi...

Although there are a number of excellent suggestions from editors on how to conduct, structure, and publish research in general, we thought it would be useful to offer some guidance from an entrepreneurship perspective. Writing this paper allowed us to reflect on our work as authors, reviewers, and editors to offer some advice in the form of simple...

Executive summary People face adverse events in a variety of forms. Some individuals are resilient to adverse events in that they are able to maintain positive functioning while others experience considerable disruption. In explaining heterogeneity in resilience, research has emphasized people's resource endowments and pre-adversity organizing prio...

This article explains how collective environmental entrepreneurship can ensure the sustainable exploitation of opportunities based on natural resources. We discuss the major threats entrepreneurial ventures face in pursuing potential nature-based opportunities and the collective action they take to preserve the associated natural resources while al...

Despite increasing recognition of the importance of metaphors to theory development, metaphors' influence on entrepreneurship theorizing has been largely unexplored. This is problematic because a field's metaphors shape its underlying assumptions. This study takes stock of the entrepreneur-ship field through its metaphors by analyzing a corpus of h...

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....

In this paper, we problematize the growing literature on hybrid organizing to demonstrate that research on hybrids and entrepreneurship can benefit from considering the degree of hybridity in organizing the exploitation of potential opportunities for the creation of both economic and social value. Recent work has moved beyond discrete categorizatio...

DOWLOAD BOOK FREE HERE: https://direct.mit.edu/books/book/4138/Spontaneous-VenturingAn-Entrepreneurial-Approach In Spontaneous Venturing, Dean Shepherd and Trenton Williams identify and describe a new approach for responding to disaster and suffering: the local organizing of spontaneous, compassionate, and impromptu actions—the rapid emergence of...

创业认知 ——解密创业者的心智模式 翻译：孙金云

This chapter is a reflection on the Shepherd and Zacharakis (1997) paper, which starts with a review of citations in the intervening 20 years, and dives more deeply into these works to better describe and consider the evolution and use of conjoint analysis in entrepreneurship research. The proliferation of new uses for a conjoint analysis are ident...

Entrepreneurship is multifaceted. The purpose of this review is to acknowledge and critically assess the many and varied dependent variables (DVs) of entrepreneurship over the last 17 years. By focusing exclusively on systematically reviewing entrepreneurship’s DVs, this paper maps out, classifies, and provides order to the phenomena that scholars...