Shane Scott

Teesside University · Department of Sport and Exercise

With the rise of accelerators, angel groups, and business plan competitions, pitching has become an important step for most entrepreneurs raising capital. In this exploratory study, we investigate the effects of pitch training, exploring a variety of outcomes over two time horizons. We conducted a field experiment that randomly assigned 271 would-b...

The rise of business accelerators, angel groups, and startup competitions has meant that founders increasingly pitch their businesses to investors in group settings, raising the question of whether the order in which ideas are pitched affects outcomes. We test in a field experiment whether range-frequency theory or the theory of bounded rationality...

Although prior research has shown that risk-taking preferences and choices are correlated across many domains, there is a dearth of research investigating whether these correlations are primarily the result of genetic or environmental factors. We examine the extent to which common genetic factors account for the association between general risk-tak...

We explore how variation in entrepreneurs' displayed passion affects informal investor interest in start-up ventures by examining neural responses to entrepreneurs' pitches using functional Magnetic Resonance Imaging (fMRI). We find that founders displaying high passion increase investor neural engagement by 39% and investor interest in the venture...

We define academic entrepreneurship here as the creation of new businesses based on university-developed knowledge. We review the legislative and organizational interventions enacted to foster academic entrepreneurship; the form, magnitude and performance of this activity; and the trade-offs between academic entrepreneurship and scholarly research.

In this article, we conduct a systematic review of the emerging literature on the biological perspective in management and investigate research spanning the areas of genetics, physiology, and neuroscience. We examine 291 papers published in 133 journals over an 85-year period as well as 10 conference/working papers and six books. On the basis of th...

Accredited investors finance more than 75,000 U.S. startups annually. We explain how training aspiring entrepreneurs to pitch their new business ideas to these investors affects their odds of continued funding discussions. We model accredited investors’ decision to continue investigation as a real option whose value is a function of their experienc...

Accredited investors finance more than 75,000 U.S. start-ups annually. We explain how training aspiring entrepreneurs to pitch their new business ideas to these investors affects their odds of continued funding discussions. We model accredited investors’ decision to continue investigation as a real option whose value is a function of their experien...

The start-ups with the most potential to innovate and generate employment are the ones most likely to rely on capital provided by outside investors. Several institutional developments including the rise of business accelerators, angel groups, and startup competitions, have meant that founders seeking this type of capital increasingly pitch their bu...

We review the empirical literature on the effects of individual income tax policy on entrepreneurship. We find no evidence of consensus, even on relatively narrow questions such as whether individual income tax rates deter or encourage entrepreneurial entry. We believe the absence of consensus reflects both the complexity of mechanisms connecting t...

Since the end of the shakeout following the bursting of the dot com bubble, we have seen substantial innovation in the institutions and organizational arrangements used to finance early-stage high growth technology companies. This paper will document the emergence of business accelerators, angel groups, micro venture capital funds and online equity...

This case describes the evolution of an entrepreneur's venture-capital fundraising, from seed-stage financing through later-round efforts. The case focuses on where the "action" is in venture finance: the exploitation of social capital by an entrepreneur and investors. Much of the teaching materials on venture finance focus on the economics of fina...

This study examines the influence of inventor appearance on how technology licensing officers perceive the commercial potential of new university inventions. An experiment with technology licensing officers at Carnegie I research universities in the United States serves to manipulate inventor appearance in otherwise identical invention disclosures....

We define academic entrepreneurship here as the creation of new businesses based on university-developed knowledge. We review the legislative and organizational interventions enacted to foster academic entrepreneurship; the form, magnitude and performance of this activity; and the trade-offs between academic entrepreneurship and scholarly research.

Technology licensing officers play an important role in the creation of university spinoffs. Anecdotal data suggests that licensing officers make use of the representativeness heuristic when deciding which inventors’ technologies should (not) be commercialized through the founding of new companies. In this context, use of the representativeness heu...

Research on the evaluation of science and technology shows that when the value of new technology is uncertain, evaluators are influenced by the status of the actors associated with the new work. However, existing studies drawing on observational approaches face various obstacles in attempting to isolate status effects while controlling for quality....

During the past fifty years, academics have tried to understand the factors that influence the tendency of people to engage in entrepreneurial activity. Recently, researchers have examined whether there is a genetic predisposition to entrepreneurship. By dint of our genetic makeup, are some of us more likely than others to come up with new business...

As markets and business patterns change, new business establishments are created to serve them. Those new establishments can be provided by entrepreneurs creating new firms or by the owners of existing businesses opening new locations. We show that over the past three decades, new establishments have increasingly been provided by existing businesse...

We explored the effect of having a creative personality on the identification of business opportunities and the tendency to start businesses. Examining a sample of 3242 twins from the United Kingdom, which we surveyed in 2011, we confirmed that people with creative personalities are more likely than others to identify business opportunities and sta...

Neuroscience research is a welcome and overdue addition to the field of entrepreneurship. We hope that Martin de Holan's article and the ensuing debate in this issue of the Journal of Management Inquiry will help spur further scholarship in this area.

Technology licensing officers play an important role in influencing the commercialization of university inventions. Because the rights to inventions of faculty, staff and students at U.S. universities, as well as most universities in Europe, belong to the institutions where those inventions were made, technology licensing officers regulate which in...

Behavioral genetics techniques were applied to a sample of self-employed monozygotic (MZ) and dizygotic (DZ) twins from the USA to examine whether genetic factors influence entrepreneurial performance. The study found that genetics affects the amount of income earned by self-employed people. In addition, the study found that common genes influenced...

Previous research suggests that people tend to discover the same opportunities in a given technological change. Austrian economics challenges these assumptions and, since the accuracy of these assumptions is important to the development of entrepreneurship theory, they are explored further. The following propositions are presented: (1) all individu...

To date, the phenomenon of entrepreneurship has lacked a conceptual framework. In this note we draw upon previous research conducted in the different social science disciplines and applied fields of business to create a conceptual framework for the field. With this framework we explain a set of empirical phenomena and predict a set of outcomes not...

A review is presented of two articles in this issue, "A Narrative Perspective on Entrepreneurial Opportunities" by R. Garud and A. P. Giuliani and "Epistemology, Opportunities, and Entrepreneurship: Comments on Venkataraman et al. (2012) and Shane (2012)" by S. A. Alvarez and J. B. Barney.

State per capita income differences narrowed considerably between 1939 and 1976. However, this convergence has been incomplete. We examined the sources of relative per capita income growth using an augmented growth model and a panel of the 48 contiguous states from 1939 to 2004. We explored the effect of tax burdens, public infrastructure, size of...

We examined the interactions between four genes associated with dyslexia (ROBO1, KIAA0319, DCDC2, DYX1C1) and education on the tendency to become an entrepreneur. We used a two-staged design consisting of a discovery sample of 692 individuals, and a replication sample of 797 participants from the TwinsUK cohort. Associations were identified between...

I examine the impact of the 2010 AMR Decade Award article on the entrepreneurship field over the past ten years, identifying aspects of "The Promise of Entrepreneurship As a Field of Research" that have been largely accepted by the field, those that the field has challenged, and those that the field has found to be unclear. I also correct errors ma...

To identify specific genetic variants influencing the phenotype of entrepreneurship, we conducted a genome-wide association study (GWAS) with 3,933 Caucasian females from the TwinsUK Adult Twin Registry. Following stringent genotype quality control, GWAF (genome-wide association analyses for family data) software was used to assess the association...

This study uses employment data to examine why some industries host more new high-growth firms than others. Using a unique data base of 201 industries over a 15-year period, we find that increases in the proportion of employment of scientists and engineers in industries are positively associated with counts of fast-growing new firms; however, we do...

The tendency to be an entrepreneur may be influenced by genetic variation. Sensation seeking is more common among entrepreneurs than among the general population. Twin studies show that the tendency to be an entrepreneur is heritable and that common genes influence both sensation seeking and entrepreneurial tendency (Nicolaou et al. Manag Sci 54:16...

We applied multivariate genetics techniques to a sample of 3,412 monozygotic and dizygotic twins from the United Kingdom and 1,300 monozygotic and dizygotic twins from the United States to examine whether genetic factors account for part of the covariance between the Big Five personality characteristics and the tendency to be an entrepreneur. We fo...

We applied quantitative genetics techniques to a sample of 347 pairs of monozygotic and 303 pairs of dizygotic twins taken from the MIDUS database to examine the influence of genetic factors on the variation across people in the tendency to be self-employed and to choose other occupations. We found that a heritability hypothesis is supported for th...

This chapter extends and elaborates the individual-opportunity nexus framework on entrepreneurship. First, the chapter discusses in detail the existence of entrepreneurial opportunities, and the processes of opportunity discovery and exploitation. Second, the chapter describes several typologies of opportunities. Third, the chapter discusses the im...

Recognizing opportunities for new businesses is an important part of the entrepreneurial process, one that researchers seek to explain and human resource managers seek to encourage. In this study, we examined whether the same genetic factors that affect openness to experience also influence recognizing opportunities. We applied bivariate genetics t...

We applied quantitative genetics techniques to a sample of 851 pairs of monozygotic and 855 pairs of dizygotic female twins to examine the influence of genetic factors on the variation across people in opportunity recognition. We also examined the extent to which the same genetic factors contribute to both opportunity recognition and the tendency t...

Policy makers often think that creating more start-up companies will transform depressed economic regions, generate innovation, and create jobs. This belief is flawed because the typical start-up is not innovative, creates few jobs, and generates little wealth. Getting economic growth and jobs creation from entrepreneurs is not a numbers game. It i...

This article offers an argument for how genetic factors may influence the tendency of people to engage in entrepreneurial activity, and describes four mechanisms through which genetic factors could operate. It also explores ways that researchers can use quantitative and molecular genetics to examine entrepreneurship, and discusses the potential imp...

Research and public policy on academic entrepreneurship are largely based on the assumption that faculty members start businesses to commercialize inventions that have been disclosed to university administrators and have been patented. In this paper, we analyze a sample of 11,572 professors and find that much academic entrepreneurship occurs outsid...

The stereotype of the "angel investor" is a retired wealthy entrepreneur who sees potential, asks tough questions, takes a large stake, and in a few years makes a massive return in an IPO. This outsider fills the gap between the venture capitalist and the professional investor, swooping in with cash and expertise to bring dreams to fruition. Unfort...

We examine firms' choice of organizational governance form. Using longitudinal data on a sample of business format franchisors operating in North America, we show that the cross-sectional evidence commonly used to demonstrate support for efficient contracting explanations for organizational governance form is not robust to the year of investigation...

The effects of appropriability on invention have been well studied, at least since Arrow (1962), but there has been little analysis of the effect of approbriability on the commercialization of existing inventions. Exploiting a database of 966 attempts by private firms to commercialize inventions licensed from MIT between 1980 and 1996, we explore t...

The Kauffman Firm Survey (KFS) is a panel study of new businesses founded in 2004 and tracked over their early years of operation. The survey focuses on the nature of new business formation activity; characteristics of the strategy, offerings, and employment patterns of new businesses; the nature of the financial and organizational arrangements of...

As part of an effort to gather more data on new businesses in the United States, the Ewing Marion Kauffman Foundation sponsored the Kauffman Firm Survey (KFS), a panel study of new businesses founded in 2004 and tracked over their early years of operation. The Kauffman Foundation contracted with Mathematica Policy Research, Inc., (MPR) to conduct t...

This study examined the infl uence of genetic factors on the tendency to engage in entrepre-neurship. We found that, in the particular sample we examined, between 37 and 42 percent of the variance in the tendency of people to engage in entrepreneurship is accounted for by genetic factors. A substantial part of this variance was mediated by the psyc...

We used quantitative genetics techniques to compare the entrepreneurial activity of 870 pairs of monozygotic (MZ) and 857 pairs of same-sex dizygotic (DZ) twins from the United Kingdom. We ran model-fitting analyses to estimate the genetic, shared environmental and nonshared environmental effects on the propensity of people to become entrepreneurs....

This case describes how eight entrepreneurs discover different opportunities for new businesses to exploit a single technological invention. The case focuses on the process of entrepreneurial discovery and its implications for the creation of new firms. Much of the teaching materials on entrepreneurship assume that entrepreneurs have already discov...

This white paper provides information on angel groups using the data from the 2007 Angel Capital Association membership survey.

The Kauffman Firm Survey is a panel study of 4,928 businesses founded in 2004 that are being tracked annually over their first eight years. The survey focuses on the nature of new business formation activity, characteristics of the strategy, offerings, and employment patterns of new businesses. It also looks at the nature of the financial and organ...

There are far more entrepreneurs than most people realize. But the failure rate of new businesses is disappointingly high, and the economic impact of most of them disappointingly low, suggesting that enthusiastic would-be entrepreneurs and their investors all too often operate under a false set of assumptions. This book shows that the reality of en...

The Kauffman Firm Survey (KFS) is a panel study of new businesses founded in 2004 and tracked over their early years of operation. The survey focuses on the nature of new business formation activity; characteristics of the strategy, offerings, and employment patterns of new businesses; the nature of the financial and organizational arrangements of...

The Kauffman Firm Survey (KFS) is a panel study of new businesses founded in 2004 and tracked over their early years of operation. The survey focuses on the nature of new business formation activity; characteristics of the strategy, offerings, and employment patterns of new businesses; the nature of the financial and organizational arrangements of...

We examine the attributes of technological inventions that influence their commercialization. Using a unique dataset of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT)-licensed patents, we show that the likelihood of invention commercialization, which we measure by the achievement of first sale, is positively associated with two characteristics of...

One effect of increased patenting by universities over the past 20 years has been a rise in lawsuits to enforce university patent rights. In this paper we ask what effect patent litigation has on university efforts to license technology. Using secondary data on licensing and interviews with technology licensing office (TLO) directors for research u...

Large firms face a conflict in managing a portfolio of high-risk projects. When an ongoing project is thought to have a low likelihood of success, project team members take risks to improve its chances of success. However, upper-level managers who allocate resources tend to withhold resources from a project with a low likelihood of success in favor...

This report describes a statistical evaluation of the similarities and differences between male and female entrepreneurs and their ventures. The purpose of the study was to gain a better understanding of the extent to which entrepreneurship by men and women is different. Using data from the Panel Study of Entrepreneurial Dynamics, the sample includ...

Many young firms use strategic actions to attract partners who help them increase the size of their operations quickly. This article examines the use of strategic actions to attract partners and increase system size in the context of franchising. We build on research in entrepreneurship, marketing, organization theory, strategic management, and fin...

Considering significant reasons why some newventures are more likely than others to receive capital from external sources,it isargued that new venture finance follows a pattern of multistage selection over time. Using a sample of the life stories of 221 of new Swedish ventures in 1998, the venture financing process is analyzed from the perspectives...

This article is an introduction to the focused issue on entrepreneurship. It provides motivation for greater scholarly investigation of the phenomenon of entrepreneurship, explains the evolution of the focused issue, offers an overview of the seven papers in the issue, and offers the editors thoughts on the relationship of the papers in the focused...

Recent studies have shown that entrepreneurs benefit from previous employment in successful firms.

One reason established firms provide venture funding to start-ups is to identify and monitor potential acquisition targets. Consistent with this view, we find that 61 top corporate venture capital (CVC) investors had prior venture ties with one out of every five start-ups they acquired during 1987-2003. Nonetheless, our estimates suggest that share...

This paper provides a survey on studies that analyze the macroeconomic effects of intellectual property rights (IPR). The first part of this paper introduces different patent policy instruments and reviews their effects on R&D and economic growth. This part also discusses the distortionary effects and distributional consequences of IPR protection a...

This document summarizes the results of four focus groups conducted with angel investors. The goal of the focus groups was to provide information for research staff of the Federal Reserve Banks to develop hypotheses for future studies of angel investing. The author of this report conducted the focus groups, which took place during the summer of 200...

In this study, the environmental characteristics that giverise to innovation in new firms are investigated. Following a discussion of theresource-based view of the firm, several hypotheses are proposed. Takentogether, these hypotheses predict that new firms will have a higher rate ofinnovation in smaller, more competitive markets in which financial...

"This book provides a strong foundation for impending entrepreneurs to aid indetermining the possible positive outcomes of the venture."-Marcy Freed, President, VitalStim, Inc."This book deals very bravely with the opportunity of technology entrepreneurship. This is a great, courageous effort."-Jerome S. Engel, Executive Director, Lester Center for...

According to a study featured in the Federal Reserve Bank of Cleveland's 2005 Annual Report, differences in state income levels can be explained largely by two factors: innovation and workforce skills. The study's findings suggest that increasing a region's knowledge base should be a primary component of economic development strategies.

The process by which firm founders create new organizations is of considerable interest to evolutionary theorists and entrepreneurship researchers. This article tracks the life histories of 223 Swedish new ventures started between January and September 1998 by a random sample of firm founders. We explore the effect of legitimating activities on the...

and the two anonymous reviewers for comments on the earlier drafts of the paper. We are also grateful to Deborah Ancona, D. Diane Burton, Jean Jacques Degroof and Scott Shane for our earliest discussions on team issues in entrepreneurship. Funding support from the National University of Singapore is gratefully acknowledged.

Drawing on goal setting theory, we argue that writing business plans before undertaking marketing activities should enhance the continuation of venture-organizing efforts. We examine 223 new venture-organizing efforts initiated in the first 9 months of 1998 by a random sample of Swedish entrepreneurs and show that those organizing efforts in which...

This article is a review of work published in Management Science on the topics of technological innovation, product development, and entrepreneurship since the inception of the journal in 1954. We intend the article to serve two goals. First, we hope that it will be useful to doctoral students and researchers interested in understanding what questi...

This article is a review of work published in Management Science on the topics of technological innovation, product development, and entrepreneurship since the inception of the journal in 1954. We intend the article to serve two goals. First, we hope that it will be useful to doctoral students and researchers interested in understanding what questi...

Universities are seen as a source of technology development that is useful to entrepreneurial activity. As a result, policy makers often consider mechanisms to stimulate technology commercialization at research universities as a way to encourage entrepreneurial activity in a region. However, the transfer of technology from universities to the priva...

The formation of university spinoff companies is described, and their role in the commercialization of university technology and wealth creation in the United States and else where is investigated. Why university spinoffs are a subject of importance in scholarly investigation is explained, as well as the historical development of university spin of...

Many prior researchers have criticized business planning, arguing that it interferes with the efforts of firm founders to undertake more valuable actions to develop their fledgling enterprises. In this paper, we challenge this negative view of business planning, arguing that business planning is an important precursor to action in new ventures. By...

Researchers have generally suggested that new technology firms should exploit radical technologies with broad scope patents to compete with established firms, implying that new firms founded to exploit university inventions will be more likely to survive in all industries if they possess these attributes. However, the existing empirical evidence in...

Recent research on entrepreneurship has focused largely on macrolevel environmental forces [Aldrich, H. (2000). Organizations evolving. Beverly Hills: Sage] and the characteristics of entrepreneurial opportunities [Christiansen, C. (1997). The innovators dilemma. Cambridge: Harvard Business School Press]. Although researchers adopting this focus ha...

This article extends and elaborates the perspective on entrepreneurship articulated by Shane and Venkataraman (2000) and Venkataraman (1997) by explaining in more detail the role of opportunities in the entrepreneurial process. In particular, the article explains the importance of examining entrepreneurship through a disequilibrium framework that f...

Because of methodological and theoretical obstacles, research on organizational foundings has largely focused on societal and population-level explanations. This paper takes the view that understanding firm foundings also requires linking to individual-level processes. We suggest that careers are an important mechanism linking individual-level proc...

At least since Arrow (1962), the effects of appropriability on invention have been well studied, but there has been little analysis of the effect of appropriability on the commercialization of existing inventions. Exploiting a database of 805 attempts by private firms to commercialize inventions licensed from MIT between 1980 and 1996, we explore t...

Sociologists and organizational theorists have long claimed that the processes of knowledge creation and distribution are fundamentally social. Following in this tradition, we explore the effect of institutional prestige on university technology licensing. Empirically, we examine the influence of university prestige on the annual rate of technology...

The results of this study provide insight into why some universities generate more new companies to exploit their intellectual property than do others. We compare four different explanations for cross-institutional variation in new firm formation rates from university technology licensing offices (TLOs) over the 1994–1998 period—the availability of...

This special issue examines technology entrepreneurship. Drawing from a rich tradition of research at the interface of the study of entrepreneurship and technological innovation, the articles in the issue examine the effect of environmental conditions on technology entrepreneurship, the processes by which entrepreneurs assemble organizational resou...

Because of methodological and theoretical obstacles, research on organizational foundings has largely focused on societal and population-level explanations. This paper takes the view that understanding firm foundings also requires linking to individual-level processes. We suggest that careers are an important mechanism linking individual-level proc...

New firms are often established through a series oforganizing activities, but little research exists regarding the impact of thesequencing of these activities on firm performance and survival.Thisstudy seeks to provide theoretical support for the belief that new ventureorganizing does impact firm performance. A literature review describes the findi...

We extend the resource-based perspective to explain innovation in new firms that have yet to develop resources. Using data on firms' efforts to commercialize technological inventions, we tested a model of the environmental conditions under which new firms' lack of resources alternately promotes or constrains innovation. We found that new firm innov...

This article discusses four dimensions of university–entrepreneurial firm collaboration—(1) industry-sponsored contract research, (2) consulting, (3) technology licensing and (4) technology development and commercialization—of which practitioners involved in university–private sector technology interaction need to be aware. The article identifies s...

Explaining how entrepreneurs overcome information asymmetry between themselves and potential investors to obtain financing is an important issue for entrepreneurship research. Our premise is that economic explanations for venture finance, which do not consider how social ties influence this process, are undersocialized and incomplete. However, we a...

This article discusses four dimensions of university–entrepreneurial firm collaboration—(1) industry-sponsored contract research, (2) consulting, (3) technology licensing and (4) technology development and commercialization—of which practitioners involved in university–private sector technology interaction need to be aware. The article identifies s...

Many research universities engage in efforts to license inventions developed by university-affiliated inventors. However, no systematic explanation of the conditions under which university inventions will be licensed or commercialized has been provided. Drawing on transaction cost economics, I provide a conceptual framework to explain which univers...

The question of how initial resource endowments-the stocks of resources that entrepreneurs contribute to their new ventures at the time of founding-affect organizational life chances is one of significant interest in organizational ecology, evolutionary theory, and entrepreneurship research. Using data on the life histories of all 134 firms founded...

No abstract available.

The American Institute of Contemporary German Studies (AICGS) assembled a group of researchers and policy makers in Germany and the United States to identify research and policy issues posed by the transformation we have come to call the new economy. This paper, which is the product of their collaboration, focuses on three issues. The first relates...

It is a commonly accepted assumption in policy circles today that the western countries are in the midst of a fundamental economic transformation in which the “old economy,” triggered by the industrial revolution, is giving way to the “new economy” of the electronic revolution. Competing “e” policy agendas – promising either to promote a new era of...

At least since Schumpeter (1934 and 1942), researchers have been interested in identifying the dimensions of technology regimes that facilitate new firm formation as a mode of technology exploitation. Using data on 1,397 patents assigned to the Massachusetts Institute of Technology during the 1980-1996 period, I show that four hypothesized dimensio...