Jeffery S. McMullen

Indiana University Bloomington | IUB · Department of Management and Entrepreneurship

Power, the capacity to influence outcomes in positive or negative ways, is rooted in capital. Scholars and practitioners pervasively believe that financial capital—such as equity—affords profound influence over organizations. Perhaps nowhere is this belief more foundational than in extant thinking about new ventures, where owners—entrepreneurs who...

Professors Robert A. Baron and Michael Frese are the joint recipients of the 2024 Global Award for Entrepreneurship Research. Their research contributions have helped establish the disciplinary foundation necessary to explore entrepreneurship from theoretical and applied psychological perspectives. From a theoretical psychological perspective, Prof...

The new venture creation process is a central phenomenon in entrepreneurship research. Typically, scholarship has sought to identify common, linear stages of development in this process in pursuit of a sustained, growing venture. In contrast to this theory, this study reveals dynamic, non‐linear venturing processes that allowed for venture persiste...

Recent technological advances have triggered unbridled enthusiasm about artificial intelligence (AI) systems. Townsend, Hunt, Rady, Manocha and Jin (2024) resist joining the bandwagon. They draw on Frank Knight’s (1921) theory of uncertainty to afford a rigorous examination of the predictive limits of AI. Knight’s theory emphasizes the inability of...

Entrepreneurial opportunities emerge and dissipate over time, yet little is known about how and why they vary in their ephemerality and what the implications of temporal variance are for the optimal timing of entrepreneurial action. Building on the actualization theory of opportunity and signal processing theory, we propose that profit possibilitie...

Entrepreneurial opportunities emerge and dissipate over time, yet little is known about how and why they vary in their ephemerality and what the implications of temporal variance are for the optimal timing of entrepreneurial action. Building on the actualization theory of opportunity and signal processing theory, we propose that profit possibilitie...

Ramoglou and McMullen (2022) offers a logically rigorous extension and refinement of earlier work on the conceptual foundations of entrepreneurship theory – the actualization perspective of entrepreneurship. Leunbach (2023) and Mitchell, Israelsen, Mitchell & Hua (2023) have crafted two thoughtful and highly scholarly commentaries that help augment...

We offer a brief rejoinder to a recent critique published in the Journal of Business Venturing Insights. We look past the unprofessional tone of the critique to seek opportunities to clarify the positions we took in our work and to explain the motivations behind them. We do so by articulating seven questions worthy of clarification. We conclude our...

This editorial highlights the importance of a robust reviewer pool to the development of the field. We emphasize the role that authors play in ensuring the sustainability of that commons and consider both the field-level and individual-level consequences of failing to do so. In addition, we make a case for the long-term benefits of reviewing, while...

Entrepreneurship has the potential to be an inclusive space comprising many types of conventional as well as unconventional entrepreneurs. In this essay we will argue that when it comes to unconventional entrepreneurs-ranging from refugee entrepreneurs and entrepreneurs with a physical or cognitive disability, to elder entrepreneurs, former convict...

Building on ecological economics and the firm growth literature, I propose a model of real growth through entrepreneurial resourcefulness to determine whether an isolated firm can grow if it can capture only the value it creates. I then use Andy Weir’s bestseller The Martian to illustrate my arguments. The model contributes to the entrepreneurial r...

Expressions about opportunities are used unproblematically in everyday contexts. Yet, the question “What is an opportunity?” has posed a difficult riddle in the academic study of entrepreneurship. Drawing on the philosophy of Ludwig Wittgenstein, we explain that such perplexities are common when words are removed from ordinary language and intellec...

Entrepreneurs and investors sometimes battle for control of new ventures when their relationships deteriorate, a phenomenon that we describe as entrepreneur-investor rivalry. Theoretical accounts of entrepreneurs' and investors relationships preclude the potential for true rivalry, battles where either side can emerge with venture control, yet such...

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...

Digitization has provided entrepreneurs direct access to consumers in cultural industries while offering intermediaries an alternative to critics' reviews when deciding whether to invest in creative products. Using data from the Chinese online self-publishing industry, we examine whether and how intermediaries use popular acclaim when deciding to i...

Despite contributing to its legitimacy and relevance, scholars have raised concerns that an economic paradigm may be limiting the future of entrepreneurship research. To address these concerns, we propose religion as an alternative and complementary foundation for our field's economic legacy by allowing for transformative research that embraces mul...

Entrepreneurial support organizations (ESOs), such as incubators and accelerators, are now ubiquitous. Despite this proliferation, their impact on entrepreneurs, ventures, and communities remains unclear, while academic research remains disjointed and largely descriptive, limiting understanding of the entrepreneurial support process and the influen...

What will entrepreneurship look like in 2030? We conducted a Delphi panel study asking this question of editors and Editorial Review Board members of the two leading entrepreneurship journals, Journal of Business Venturing and Entrepreneurship Theory and Practice in an attempt to lift the eyes of the field to the horizon, outside academe, if only b...

Using meta-analytic techniques, relations among the Dark Triad personality traits – Machiavellianism, narcissism, and psychopathy – were examined in relation to outcomes associated with two different stages of the entrepreneurial process: entrepreneurial intention and entrepreneurial performance. From 39 independent samples (N = 11,819), we found t...

Research summary Innovative entrepreneurship, defined as the creation of new products, services, production methods, or business models, is critical for firm, industry, and economic growth and a key determinant of societal well‐being. This special issue explores the roles of institutions and government policies in promoting or impeding innovative e...

We highlight the important role that time plays in conceptualizations of opportunity in entrepreneurship research. Through two longitudinal case studies, we introduce a more dynamic understanding of opportunities than portrayed by current theorizing, which tends to emphasize “opportunity discovery.” By adopting a dynamic temporal perspective, we in...

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...

Calls for greater contextualization have been powerful in motivating research and knowledge creation about entrepreneurship. However, unless counter-balanced with attempts to identify the field’s conceptual core, these efforts have the potential to devolve into hyper-contextualization, exposing the field to fragmentation, loss of consensus, and pos...

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...

Maker spaces - shared production facilities offering access to basic and advanced manufacturing technologies - have quickly become the latest "must have" for universities, large corporations, and communities looking to foster entrepreneurship and innovation. While the entrepreneurial and educational prospects of maker spaces are certainly intriguin...

Expressions alluding to the existence of entrepreneurial opportunities are used unproblematically in ordinary language. However, the question “What is an entrepreneurial opportunity?” has posed a truly recalcitrant puzzle in the academic study of entrepreneurship. In response to this seemingly profound question there is a proliferation of publicati...

Researchers are confronted with uncertain expectations and demands regarding their potential reliance on rich, multifaceted datasets. In particular, generating multiple papers from such datasets requires careful navigation of the publication process, as this practice is concurrently incentivized and fraught with potentially unanticipated risks. The...

Religion is one of the most pervasive and central topics in society. However, its relative neglect by entrepreneurship research leads to an insufficient understanding of entrepreneurial action. To address this gap, we build on boundary theory and the psychology of religion to develop a sketch of the role of religion in entrepreneurial action, inclu...

In this editorial, I seek to inform administrators and members of promotion and tenure committees about significant developments in the field of entrepreneurship. Using both objective and subjective data, I present a case for why entrepreneurship journals should be considered on par with other, premier management journals, which are widely consider...

The purpose of this editorial is to discuss methodological advancements to enhance quantitative theory-testing entrepreneurship research. As the impact of entrepreneurship scholarship accelerates and deepens, our methods must keep pace to continue shaping theory, policy, and practice. Like our sister fields in business, entrepreneurship is coming t...

Using the study of hybridization in evolutionary biology as metaphorical inspiration, I offer a thought experiment about the emergence and proliferation of social enterprise and the influence of hybrid organizing on the entrepreneurial ecosystem. After establishing a number of analogues between biological and organizational hybrids, I analyze the d...

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...

Social entrepreneurship research has often focused on the benefits and challenges of designing hybrid organizations that integrate competing institutional logics to tackle social problems using market-based methods, especially in developing economies. Drawing on case evidence from the Safe Water for Africa program, we show how and why pricing new p...

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—that v...

Passion is important to venture investors, but what specifically do they want entrepreneurs to be passionate about? This study theorizes that angel investors and venture capitalists consider both entrepreneurs' passion for activities related to the product or service the venture provides (i.e., product passion) and passion for founding and developi...

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...

We extend current knowledge on prosocial organizing by explaining how membership in organizational categories lead entrepreneurs to reevaluate their firms' activities and opportunities. Through a qualitative study of 46 firms that pursued B Corp certification, we developed an identity control model of prosocial opportunity. Our findings suggest tha...

We provide an ethnographic account of how social entrepreneurs in the Safe Water for Africa program made sense of hybrid goods, as well as how and why those understandings affected both the social enterprise's marketing mix and stakeholders' expectations of the enterprise's rights and responsibilities. We find that output maximizing-behavior enable...

Over the last decade, explicit emphasis on the creation of social value has grown in profit-seeking firms as well as nonprofits and has even led to the emergence of a new legal organizational classification known as for-benefit corporations. Like financial value, social value is dynamic and therefore subject to perpetual changes in the firm's exter...

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...

Entrepreneurial identities and emotions can have profound effects on entrepreneurs. We examine how positive emotion (PE) among entrepreneurs may be influenced by the congruence they experience between their self-concept and the entrepreneur social identity. Given that uncertainty in the business environment can exert powerful effects throughout the...

With a wide-ranging set of contributions, this book provides a compilation of cutting-edge original research in the field of entrepreneurial opportunities. The book reopens the subject from diverse perspectives focusing on theories and approaches to entrepreneurial opportunities. It provides a brief history of the idea of opportunity and a framewor...

This article introduces equity theory to the economic growth literature to examine whether a relationship exists between perceptions of distributive justice and the productivity of entrepreneurial behavior. Using survey responses from 317 entrepreneurs in India, we find that productive entrepreneurship is positively related to distributive justice...

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...

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...

Research summary: Exploiting opportunities is critical to a firm's competitive advantage. Not surprisingly, there has been considerable interest in the processes by which top managers allocate attention to potential opportunities. Although such investigations have largely focused on top‐down processes for allocating attention to the environment, so...

Entrepreurship theory within economics has long touted the importance of judgment in entrepreneurial action. More recently, proponents have begun to advocate extension of this work to organization studies. However, critics of entrepreneurial judgment have responded by claiming that the construct is only meaningful post hoc and vapid when examined e...

Critics of entrepreneurial capitalism have argued that entrepreneurship creates dysfunction in individuals, families, communities, and society because entrepreneurs neglect social and environmental dimensions of value in favor of financial value creation. By way of contrast, hybrid organizations, such as Benefit Corporations, are created explicitly...

Point/Counter-point in Journal of Management Studies

Family business and human resource management scholars suggest that firms whose leaders experience affective commitment are more likely to achieve their goals. Building on self-determination theory, we propose a model in which parent-founders promote affective commitment in child-successors by supporting their psychological needs for competence, au...

Entrepreneurial action refers to “behavior in response to a judgmental decision under uncertainty about a possible opportunity for profit” (McMullen and Shepherd, 2006, p. 134). This view tends to conceive of entrepreneurs as change agents who catalyze the economy. Although motivated by self-interest, entrepreneurial action is only rewarded to the...

As many organizations are increasingly using entrepreneurial approaches to enhance their corporate social responsibility strategies (Austin, Leonard, Reficco, & Wei-Skiller, 2006), this study explores the existence of a stable set of antecedents to corporate social entrepreneurship behavior. To that end, the Corporate Social Entrepreneurship Assess...

By offering an alternative to behavioral research methods, neuroscience has transformed cognitive psychology, social psychology, behavioral economics and other disciplines from which entrepreneurial cognition research regularly draws for theoretical insight. In this chapter we examine the potential of neuroscience methods, particularly from cogniti...

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...

By offering an alternative to behavioral research methods, neuroscience has transformed cognitive psychology, social psychology, behavioral economics, and other disciplines from which entrepreneurial cognition research regularly draws for theoretical insight. In this chapter we examine the potential of neuroscience methods, particularly from cognit...

Substantial research explores how firms engage in behaviors to intentionally signal information to encourage a specific reaction, but studies identifying behaviors that unintentionally signal information are comparatively scarce. This study examines whether a firm’s entrepreneurial orientation (EO) is an unintended signal influencing market perform...

We examine the growing disconnect between the process-oriented conception of entrepreneurship taught in the classroom and theorized about in premier journals and the variance-oriented conception of entrepreneurship that characterizes empirical studies of the phenomenon. We propose that a shift in inquiry from entrepreneurship as an act to entrepren...

Arend's response to our paper furthers the discussion on the origins of social entrepreneurship by suggesting that our focus on the motivational origins of social entrepreneurship is misplaced. We address his critiques by highlighting the fact that the social entrepreneur in our model is an embedded agent. While societal forces may shape the role o...

Arend's response to our paper furthers the discussion on the origins of social entrepreneurship by suggesting that our focus on the motivational origins of social entrepreneurship is misplaced. We address his critiques by highlighting the fact that the social entrepreneur in our model is an embedded agent. While societal forces may shape the role o...

Social entrepreneurship has emerged as a complex yet promising organizational form in which market-based methods are used to address seemingly intractable social issues, but its motivations remain undertheorized. Research asserts that compassion may supplement traditional self-oriented motivations in encouraging social entrepreneurship. We draw on...

Social entrepreneurship has emerged as a complex yet promising organizational form in which market-based methods are used to address seemingly intractable social issues, but its motivations remain undertheorized. Research asserts that compassion may supplement traditional self-oriented motivations in encouraging social entrepreneurship. We draw on...