Mike Wright

• Imperial College London

This paper provides the first nationally representative assessment of intrinsic job quality in leveraged buyouts (LBOs). We propose a workforce re‐contracting perspective, which views LBOs as having negative implications for some aspects of intrinsic job quality (job demands) but positive implications for others (job resources), and employee wellbe...

This handbook presents the latest theoretical and applied thinking on state capitalism, i.e., the institutional, policy, and ownership arrangements that reflect the direct influence of the state on the economy and firm behavior. It is a timely volume given the worldwide changes regarding the role of the state in the economy. Starting in the 1980s,...

In this introduction to the Handbook of State Capitalism and the Firm, we provide an overview of state capitalism, its evolution, diversity, and theoretical implications. We clarify the tension between the market and the government that drives state intervention in the economy. A brief historical evolution of state capitalism provides a much-needed...

State interventions in markets assume varieties of forms in different economic systems. To capture this variety, we consider state capitalism as a multidimensional concept, first reviewing its historical evolution from both practical and scholarly vantages. We describe several dimensions of state capitalism and demonstrate how cross-national variat...

Accelerator programs constitute an important new element in entrepreneurial ecosystems, comprising focused support to advance the development of entrepreneurial ventures. Yet, we lack understanding of the processes through which accelerators contribute to enhancing entrepreneurial activity and especially the role of entrepreneurship agency in this...

Emerging economies are oftentimes characterized by state capitalism, concentrated ownership and constrained resources, where firms face underinvestment due to resource misappropriation. The adoption of Anglo-American corporate governance practices may result in sub-optimal outcomes. We draw on the multiple agency perspective and research on cross-n...

PE firms and buyouts have emerged as a field of significant interest for academic research and attracted the increasing attention of policy makers, public opinion and popular press. In particular, there is a strong debate on how private equity firms create value in buyout investments. Notwithstanding this widespread interest in value creation in pr...

Research Question/Issue We explore the question: how do IPO investors value the existence of prior shared experience (PSE) between the CEO and the board of threshold ventures? Research Findings/Insights Building on the resource provision role of the board, signaling, and the dynamics of decision making within teams literatures our results show tha...

The emergence of novel and powerful digital technologies, digital platforms and digital infrastructures has transformed innovation and entrepreneurship in significant ways. Beyond simply opening new opportunities for innovators and entrepreneurs, digital technologies have broader implications for value creation and value capture. Research aimed at...

New open innovation initiatives, such as accelerators, living labs, social innovation labs and open labs, involve for‐profit and not‐for‐profit actors working closely together to co‐create both business value and societal impacts. However, there is a lack of theoretical underpinning to understand how and why co‐creation by actors generate different...

New open innovation initiatives such as accelerators, living labs, social innovation labs and open labs, involve for-profit and not-for-profit actors working closely together to co-create both business value and societal impacts. However, there is a lack of theoretical underpinning to understand how and why co-creation by actors generate different...

PE firms and buyouts have emerged as a field of significant interest for academic research and attracted the increasing attention of policy makers, public opinion and popular press. In particular, there is a strong debate on how private equity firms create value in buyout investments. Notwithstanding this widespread interest in value creation in pr...

This article assesses whether job insecurity is higher in leveraged buyouts (LBOs) than elsewhere. It draws on matched employer‐employee data from the British 2011 Workplace Employment Relations Study linked to data from the Centre for Management Buyout Research. The analysis finds no consistent evidence of higher job insecurity in LBOs as measured...

Limitations of the research on the various leadership and strategic issues facing universities seeking to become more entrepreneurial has led this special issue to focus on the management, development, and implementation of this vision. We have solicited original research on the strategic challenges that these universities currently encounter. Rese...

We consider two sources of innovation, technical and financial, and examine their separate and joint impacts, through the process of financial intermediation, on the nature of entrepreneurial opportunity. These impacts are time dependent and reflect the institutional context of entrepreneurship. As illustrations, we investigate three historical epi...

This study examines educational frameworks and practices useful in teaching engineers to develop new business models (BM) that exploit entrepreneurial opportunities in technology-based firms. We compare three existing frameworks (Blue Ocean, the Business Model Canvas, and the Business Model Innovation Framework) used to teach how to develop new bus...

This study examines educational frameworks and practices useful in teaching engineers to develop new business models (BM) that exploit entrepreneurial opportunities in technology-based firms. We compare three existing frameworks (Blue Ocean, the Business Model Canvas, and the Business Model Innovation Framework) used to teach how to develop new bus...

Despite the considerable body of research on acquisitions and their goals, we lack insights on how family firms differ from nonfamily firms in their acquisition goals, particularly in view of the characteristics that distinguish family businesses. Thus, to enhance current understanding, we examine firms’ disclosed goals in their deal announcements...

In this article I comment on the special issue articles regarding a historical approach to academic entrepreneurship. I argue that there is a need to combine commercial and non-commercial approaches.

This article introduces various aspects of technology business incubators (TBIs), emphasizing their increasing role in the spatial context where they are used as platforms and drivers of regional entrepreneurial ecosystems. It outlines the key themes of the emerging role of TBIs in sustainable regional development: TBI biodiversity of ecosystems; a...

This article reviews evidence of the impact of entrepreneurship on job creation, gender and race discrimination, university spin-offs, growth, economic geography, finance and the public sector. It defines entrepreneurship, corrects some conventional wisdoms about it and discusses policy implications of the evidence on its determinants and effects....

This chapter provides an overview of the variety and trends in Management buyouts (MBOs) types or organization. It outlines the theoretical perspectives that have been advanced to explain buyouts. From an academic perspective MBOs have been largely viewed through three theoretical perspectives: agency theory, behavioral theory, and an entrepreneuri...

Building on the social network and strategic entrepreneurship literature, we investigate the overall relationship between returnee entrepreneurs’ networks in different periods and locations, domestic resource acquisitions and firm performance. While the labor mobility literature emphasizes the “gone but not forgotten” networks in the prior location...

RESEARCH SUMMARY To prevent loss of control post‐IPO, founder‐CEOs can implement control‐enhancing mechanisms disconnecting ownership from voting rights. However, this decision places them in a rich versus king dilemma. If they choose to implement such mechanisms and secure the king position, they risk losing money at IPO. If they choose not to imp...

The level of entrepreneurial activity is higher in emerging markets than in developed economies, driven by high levels of necessity entry and less daunting entry barriers, especially in the informal sector. However, a gap remains in our understanding of its extent and of the drivers of its change. This chapter addresses this gap by conceptualizing...

Scholars are paying more attention to knowledge workers (KW) as they gain importance in the knowledge-based economy. Knowledge worker mobility (KWM) can involve various forms of employee and entrepreneurial movements: the transfer of employees from one organization to another either through locational movement or through a change in ownership, the...

The equity gap, the difference between the amount of (risk) capital that would be invested under conditions of well-informed and competitive markets and the amount of capital actually invested, covers both startups and ventures moving beyond startup to the establishment and early growth phase. We provide estimates for the size of the equity gap for...

We add to neglected research on how venture resources and founder experience outside the home country interplay in facilitating venture creation speed. In particular, we investigate how returnee entrepreneurs influence the role of venture resources in the speed of entrepreneurial entry. Using a novel sample of 388 new ventures covering a range of t...

In this paper, we study how information asymmetries influence the relation between serial crowdfunding and campaign success. We argue that the main advantage of serial crowdfunders is related to the role of information asymmetry reduction of the community they had developed through previous campaigns. Therefore, serial crowdfunders experience highe...

New initiatives in student entrepreneurship programs are moving rapidly beyond traditional classroom teaching to experiential learning, which is associated with improved employment outcomes for students (Gosen and Washbush in Simul Gaming, 35:270–293, 2004). Unfortunately, we lack a framework to understand the ecosystem required to enable our stude...

Recent decades have witnessed a remarkable increase in interest in entrepreneurship research, practice and policy. Since its founding in 2007, the Strategic Entrepreneurship Journal (SEJ) has sought to contribute by publishing high quality papers on a range of themes relating to strategic entrepreneurship, broadly defined.

In this retrospective article, we outline the rationale for starting the Strategic Entrepreneurship Journal. We provide evidence on the percentage of published papers in SEJ in each of ten key themes in strategic entrepreneurship identified when the journal was founded. Evidence on progress towards goal achievement in terms of trends in submissions...

Manuscript type Review Research Question/Issue What can be learnt with regard to methods in corporate governance research from editorial experience in handling corporate governance manuscripts? We draw on our experience as editors and guest editors of various journals in highlighting some of the methodological challenges in corporate governance re...

In this paper, we focus attention on serial crowdfunders, that is, entrepreneurs who repeatedly turn to crowdfunding to finance their projects. We argue that serial crowdfunders take advantage of the social contacts with those that backed their previous campaigns. This internal social capital developed within the platform, which is not available to...

In this article, we apply the idea of narrative to strategy and to the development of strategy in the higher education context. We explore how strategy is formed as an intertextual narrative in a comparative study of higher education in the UK. Existing research suggests that competition between narratives, such as that in higher education, should...

Most universities committed to the commercialization of academic research have established technology transfer offices (TTOs). Nonetheless, many researchers bypass these TTOs and take their inventions directly to the marketplace. While TTO bypassing has typically been portrayed as deliberate and undesirable behavior, we argue that it could be unint...

We explore the process of professionalization pre- and post-buyout (MBO) or buyin (MBI) of former private family firms using longitudinal evidence from six UK family firms undergoing an MBO/I in 1998. Professionalization behaviour was monitored up to 2014. Previous studies have conceptualized professionalization as a threshold to be attained. We de...

The role of ownership heterogeneity in influencing the extent and nature of innovation has been neglected but is an important omission as ownership differences can influence the goals, time horizons, and governance mechanisms relating to innovation. In this article I develop a novel framework that explores the potential impact and future research a...

We analyse the expected impact of Brexit on private equity and its implications for management research. Specifically, we explore the implications for PE funds and funding, and at the portfolio firm level with respect to employment and performance.

Manuscript type: Review Research Question/ Issue: Which forms of state control over corporations have emerged in countries that made a transition from centrally-planned to marked-based economies and what are their implications for corporate governance? We assess the literature on variation and evolution of state control in transition economies focu...

Despite the rapid growth and importance of small and medium-sized enterprises and the venture capital (VC) industry in China, this is the first article to examine comprehensively the role of VCs in public firms listed on the Small and Medium Enterprise Board and the Growth Enterprise Board. Supporting monitoring and certification hypotheses, the st...

Despite the rapid growth and importance of small and medium-sized enterprises and the venture capital (VC) industry in China, this is the first article to examine comprehensively the role of VCs in public firms listed on the Small and Medium Enterprise Board and the Growth Enterprise Board. Supporting monitoring and certification hypotheses, the st...

The management buyout is an important exit strategy for small business owners. Negotiations of buyout deals have received little research attention to date. This is surprising given buyout negotiations' complexity giving rise to multiple issues that require consideration and often conflicting interests of deal parties. This paper examines perceived...

This handbook contributes to our understanding of strategy implementation and identifies considerable opportunities for future research on this important process, with a focus on resources, governance, human capital, and accounting-based control systems.

There is an extensive literature on the success/failure of firm-funded R&D projects, but growing policy interest focuses on publicly funded R&D projects. We discuss this literature, which builds on a long stream of research of which Albert Rubenstein was a prime investigator, and use the literature to motivate the theoretical and empirical parts of...

We develop and test a theory of how organizations learn from performance feedback in the context of strategic decisions, where delayed outcomes result in performance feedback that is incomplete. In this context, firms facing a focal decision observe performance feedback for only a subset of their previous decisions. Using a sample of 7,223 private...

The paper analyses the impact of private equity (PE) backed leveraged buyouts (LBOs) on innovative output (patenting). Using a sample of 407 UK deals we find that LBOs have a positive causal effect on patent stock and quality-adjusted patent stock. Our results imply a 6% increase in quality-adjusted patent stock three years after the deal. The incr...

There is a need to rethink and redefine the social value added of entrepreneurial activities to society. In this paper we develop five pillars on which the evolving social role of entrepreneurship can rest and have its impact: (1) connecting entrepreneurial activities to other societal efforts aimed at improving the quality of life, achieving progr...

Academic entrepreneurship, which refers to efforts undertaken by universities to promote commercialization on campus and in surrounding regions of the university, has changed dramatically in recent years. Two key consequences of this change are that more stakeholders have become involved in academic entrepreneurship and that universities have becom...

Conventional wisdom holds that there is a global trend toward liberalization of markets, yet the role of the state has expanded or shifted in certain areas rather than being generally pushed back. We explore common forms in which this "new statism" has manifested itself, specifically focusing on sovereign wealth funds, the military-industrial and p...

This article outlines a definition of venture capital as risk capital and providers of monitoring and added value. The article discusses the stages in the venture capital life-cycle process from identifying and screening deals, through valuation, structuring, monitoring, and exit. Different types of venture capital firm are identified. A brief revi...

University spinouts (USOs) are a distinctive subset of new technology based firms, which relate to the university environment from which they emerge and the associated role of the academic within the new firm. In this essay, we explore the distinctive nature of USOs, and review four important dimensions of USO research. Drawing on the taxonomy deve...

A typical management buyout ( MBO ) installs a governance structure on a firm with the following characteristics: a concentration of equity held by incumbent management and by private equity (PE) firms, and increased leverage secured against the firm's assets and future cash flows. The traditional agency theory perspective of MBOs posits that the M...

This article explores what we do (and do not) know about entrepreneurial finance and its relationship with growth. Broadly, there is a need for research to go beyond traditional supply side/market failure issues to better understand the role of entrepreneurial cognition, objectives, ownership types and firm life-cycle stages in financing/investment...

This introductory article to the special issue on building the evidence base for small and medium-sized enterprise (SME) growth policy reviews the themes covered by the contributions to the special issue and identifies a number of directions for future research and policy.

Shareholder empowerment has become an increasingly thorny issue. On one hand, empowering shareholders is expected to rein in self-serving managers, improve corporate accountability, and constrain corporate wrongdoing. On the other hand, critics argue that shareholder empowerment may compound the problem of managerial self-serving with shareholder s...

We study to what extent the ability to reach out to different communities is key for career progression in academia and the role that entrepreneurship has in this process. We focus on path- breaker scientists, looking for promotion in a different scientific field. We consider 21,596 scientists, employed by the 64 Italian STEM universities who appli...

We develop and test a theory of how organizations learn from performance feedback in the context of strategic decisions, where delayed outcomes result in performance feedback that is incomplete. In this context, firms facing a focal decision observe performance feedback for only a subset of their previous decisions. Using a sample of 7,223 private...

In many countries with a weak institutional environment and constrained resources, firms face underinvestment due to the diversion of resources away from productive investment opportunities, or tunneling. We examine how the composition of the board of directors can supplant this problem of institutional voids by facilitating business groups and sta...