Ted Baker

Rutgers Business School - Newark and New Brunswick · Management and Global Business

A field study of 29 resource-constrained firmsthat varied dramatically in their responses to similar objective environmentsis used to examine the process by which entrepreneurs in resource-poorenvironments were able to render unique services by recombining elements athand for new purposes that challenged institutional definitions and limits.We foun...

According to the advocates of a "Generalized Darwinism" (GD), the three core Darwinian principles of variation, selection and retention (or inheritance) can be used as a general framework for the development of theories explaining evolutionary processes in the socio­economic domain. Even though these are originally biological terms, GD argues that...

While prior research suggests that entrepreneurial bricolage is often useful as a coping mechanism for resource-constrained new ventures, other accounts document detrimental effects of bricolage. As the conditions for effective bricolage have not been systematically examined in prior research, we develop and test theoretical explanations for some i...

Full text available at: https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/10.1177/1042258720930996 This paper responds to Welter’s (2011) call to pay more attention to the diversity of entrepre-neurship in theorizing contexts by examining how places come to be understood as entrepreneurial. We draw briefly and selectively on ideas from a quirky set of disciplines,...

This study seeks to advance the literatures on organizational improvisation and unexpected events. It tackles the question of whether the relative presence of improvisation during a startup’s response to an ordinary, unexpected event affects the value of that response, an issue of clear importance given the ubiquity of unexpected events in startups...

In this chapter, we review the remarkable recent development of Founder Identity Theory by analyzing its accomplishments and describing both some attractive pathways forward and some challenges we believe must be overcome for progress to continue.

As the breadth and empirical diversity of entrepreneurship research have increased rapidly during the last decade, the quest to find a "one-size-fits-all" general theory of entrepreneurship has given way to a growing appreciation for the importance of contexts. This promises to improve both the practical relevance and the theoretical rigor of resea...

Social inclusion is at the heart of sustainable development. Innovation in the ideation, development, and implementation of solutions is necessary to improve social inclusion by systematically addressing the barriers that disenfranchise individuals and communities. We synthesize the 26 contributions in this Handbook to provide a framework for acade...

http://link.springer.com/article/10.1007/s11187-018-0094-5 - readonline at: https://rdcu.be/6ksr . Although the field was initially slow on the uptake, contextualization of entrepreneurship research has come a long way in recent years. Arguably, entrepreneurship demands contextualization more than many other fields, because not only is entrepreneu...

The skills and knowledge required to engage in entrepreneurship are vital elements of participating fully in contemporary society. We consider the “crisis” in the liberal arts in the USA and show why entrepreneurship can and should be considered fundamental to a renewed and contemporary conception of the liberal arts. Integral to our arguments is a...

To be published in Small Business Economics. Special Issue "Entrepreneurship in Context" Abstract: Although the field was initially slow on the uptake, contextualization of entrepreneurship research has come a long way in recent years. Arguably, entrepreneurship demands contextualization more than many other fields, because not only is entrepreneu...

The need to contextualize research in entrepreneurship has become an important theme during the last decade. In this monograph we position the increasing prominence of "contextual entrepreneurship" research as part of a broader scholarly wave that has previously washed across other fields. The challenges and promises we face as this wave carries us...

Cross-sector partnerships have the capacity to bring together partners from very different backgrounds and circumstances toward collective prosocial efforts. We conducted a longitudinal inductive field study of eight cross-sector partnerships formed as new ventures addressing a variety of fundamental social challenges in the context of deep inequal...

Purpose The purpose of this paper is to make the argument that previously marginalized but now flourishing subfields of entrepreneurship research continue to provide insights that can form the basis for future entrepreneurship research that is more broadly practical and critical. What is currently core or “mainstream” in entrepreneurship research w...

We conducted a longitudinal field study of nine nascent ventures attempting to revitalize local municipalities to understand how and why identity processes shape organizing in multi-founder nascent ventures. We develop grounded theory and a process model showing how the patterning of founders' social identities shapes early structuring processes, h...

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...

Purpose The majority of emerging and young firms work under resource constraints. This has made researchers highlight the importance of resourcefulness. Perhaps the most important theoretical development in this context is the emerging, behavioral theory of entrepreneurial bricolage. However, although academic interest is increasing, research on en...

This essay contrasts a perspective that places an excessive focus on technology businesses and growth with a view of entrepreneurship that embraces its heterogeneity. We challenge a taken-for-granted belief that only certain kinds of entrepreneurship might lead to wealth and job creation and additionally suggest that these two outcomes (wealth and...

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

Examining the compilation of chapters in this companion leads to a sweeping conclusion that we believe entrepreneurship scholars should celebrate: the good news is that legitimacy has been achieved without the field embracing the artificial tethers of a distinctive domain. Not only do the contributors represent the juxtaposition of an extraordinary...

Founder identity is increasingly important to our understanding of entrepreneurship but limited in both empirical and theoretical breadth and depth. Transcending three restrictive assumptions in prior research, we contribute to the founder identity literature and the broader social psychology of entrepreneurship in important ways. From a field stud...

We conducted a longitudinal field study of 13 resource-constrained founder-run textile and apparel firms to understand how and why firms vary in their strategic responses to the same adversity. We discovered that founders enact distinctly different definitions of the adversity and use their firms as vehicles to defend who they are or to become who...

We examine how and why missions reflecting founders’ values- laden motivations emerge – or fail to emerge – through the venture organizing process. By conducting a real time longitudinal grounded theoretical study of seven nascent ventures over the course of two years, we were able to observe surprising dynamics not anticipated in prior research. I...

Evidence suggests that both nascent and young firms (henceforth: “new firms”)—despite typically being small and resource-constrained—are sometimes able to innovate effectively. Such firms are seldom able to invest in lengthy and expensive development processes, which suggests that they may frequently rely instead on other pathways to generate innov...

We argue for the increasing importance of providing graduate students with skills in technology entrepreneurship and the commercialization of technology. We describe the lessons we have learned from 14 years of developing commercialization of technology pedagogy and adapting it for use on four continents and within numerous corporations. We demonst...

We argue for the increasing importance of providing graduate students with skills in technology entrepreneurship and the commercialization of technology. We describe the lessons we have learned from 14 years of developing commercialization of technology pedagogy and adapting it for use on four continents and within numerous corporations. We demonst...

Prior theory indicates that resource slack is a primary determinant of firms’ strategic responses to adversity and leads to predictions that resource constraints narrow the range of expected behaviors towards patterns consistent with threat-rigidity. We use a longitudinal field study of 13 resource-constrained textile and apparel firms that varied...

In this study we examine how resource-constrained organizations can maneuver for competitive advantage in highly institutionalized fields. Unlike studies of institutional entrepreneurship, we investigate competitive maneuvering by an organization that is unable to alter either the regulative or normative institutions that characterize its field. Us...

During the last twenty years, women in the United States have greatly increased their entrepreneurial activity. Yet their businesses tend to be smaller than men’s, to grow less quickly and to be relatively concentrated in service industries. In this research, we focus on an important but frequently overlooked part of the entrepreneurial process—opp...

We developed beginnings of a theory of entrepreneurial resilience that incorporates concepts of resourcefulness, adaptive aspirations and entrepreneurial identity, ideology and values. We developed this work through the discovery of grounded theory based on cross-case analysis of eleven survivors and startups in the US fabric and apparel industry a...

The emerging theory of 'bricolage' as a resource behaviour represents an attempt to address the central entrepreneurship research problem of making systematic sense of entrepreneurs that sometimes manage to create significant new economic activity under what appears to be severe resource constraints (Baker & Nelson 2005). However, despite growing i...

Evidence suggests that both start-up and young firms (henceforth: new firms) – despite typically being resource-constrained – are sometimes able to innovate (Katila & Shane 2005). Such firms are seldom able to invest in expensive innovation processes, which suggests that they may rely on other pathways to innovation. In this paper, we test argument...

This chapter addresses the behavioral problems and conflicts observed in multidisciplinary university commercialization teams. We examined 59 commercialization projects at one U.S. university, supplemented by a similar number of projects at other universities in the United States and Europe. We applied well-established ideas about distinctive “thou...

This paper builds on the liabilities of newness literature to suggest that accounting information is important for new firms. Using a sample of over 30,000 companies followed during their first 7Â years of existence, we find evidence that financial indicators mitigate the liability of newness and that this buffering effect is stronger the younger t...

Entrepreneurship scholarship, with opportunity as its defining characteristic, would benefit from an appraisal of Howard Stevenson’s (1983) definition that “Entrepreneurship is the process by which individuals pursue opportunities without regard to the resources they currently control.” We analyze three stories from Allen (2001) to generate insight...

Organizational routines and capabilities play a key role in organizational survival and prosperity. This inductive paper explores the interplay between the development of routines and capabilities in new firms. The rich field data revealed a surprising variety of processes through which new ventures develop routines and these routines intertwine wi...

We consider how a venture capital firm's perceived uncertainty in new and uncertain industry environments affects its decisions to retain founder-CEOs at companies they take public. We further consider how the human capital of the founder-CEO, the overall experience of the venture capital firm (VCF), and the VCF's specific experience with the new i...

Entrepreneurial learning can occur when young firms learn from social networks, from failure events, and from real-time improvisation. This inductive paper explores three learning challenges young firms face in effective entrepreneurial learning. We draw on data from in-depth interviews in sixty young knowledge based firms. The data revealed striki...

Contemporary theoretical perspectives in entrepreneurship suggest an idealized linear model of successful entrepreneurship in which advantage goes to those who discover lucrative opportunities (Kirzner, 1997; Shane and Venkataraman, 2000), adopt consistent goals and strategies to exploit them (Wiklund & Shepherd, 2005), marshal appropriate high qua...

The behavioral theory of “entrepreneurial bricolage” attempts to understand what entrepreneurs do when faced with resource constraints. Most research about bricolage, defined as “making do by applying combinations of the resources at hand to new problems and opportunities” (Baker & Nelson 2005: 333), has been qualitative and inductive (Garud & Karn...

We investigate the relationship between bricolage – an approach to a firm’s resource development – and the firm’s strategic resource position as depicted by the resource-based view (RBV). The RBV is concerned with the resource characteristics of firms that lead to sustainable competitive advantage. Alternatively, bricolage is a process of resource...

In this chapter we examine the process by which new firms become central actors within their industry networks. We focus, in particular, on how relatively new venture capital (VC) firms become more central within investment syndication networks. We present a model that captures the relationships among (1) the social capital and status of the new VC...

This paper analyzes the “Toy Store(y)” narrative by imagining the words and perspectives of several participants other than those from whose perspective the original story is told. By applying the lens of bricolage to a series of critical events and activities described in the Toy Store(y), I illustrate the theoretical and practical application of...

Shane and Venkataraman's Discovery, Evaluation and Exploitation entrepreneurship framework ignores issues central to comparative international entrepreneurship (IE) because of unnecessarily under-socialized assumptions regarding entrepreneurial opportunities and the individuals who discover them. To better promote comparative IE research, we develo...

This article discusses the kinds or patterns of behavior that might account for the ability of some entrepreneurial firms to make do or even to flourish with the resources they have at hand. Contemporary organization theory provides useful insights into the challenges that organizations face in attracting resources and powerful theoretical maps of...

this paper, we use a resource dependence perspective to examine how entrepreneurs respond to human resource challenges as they build their firms. We believe that the early years of firm development and growth represent a dynamic period of entrepreneurial responsiveness and learning about employment practices. Key events and developments shape entre...

Using a study of technology-intensive start-ups, we develop and test the hypothesis that employment practices are shaped by the ways in which entrepreneurs respond to experiences of dependence on early indispensable employees. We find strong evidence that the experience of dependence on employees influences the types of employees hired, recruitment...

We examine institutional and organizational influences upon information exchange and governance structures within R&D consortia in the United States and Japan. We hypothesized that national differences in institutional environments would lead to less active governance and information-exchange activities within Japanese R&D consortia relative to the...

Most entrepreneurs undertake their businesses with very limited resources. Yet some entrepreneurs manage to survive or even to create robust and growing firms despite long periods with what appear initially as inadequate resources. We wondered what kinds or patterns of behavior might account for the ability of some entrepreneurial firms to make do...

Surprise events are an indispensable part of the entrepreneurial process. They may even serve as an important source of learning and capability development (Levinthal & Rerup, 2006). A surprise can reveal that the prior expectations were not accurate, and can help the organization generate more accurate or complete models to inform new expectations...

Resource based theory (RBT) shows that entrepreneurs gain and sustain advantages through certain resources (Barney, 1991). Many entrepreneurs, however, not only lack any discernable resourcebased advantage (Alvarez & Barney, 2007) but are also physically distant from critical resources: suffering geographical disadvantage. We follow recent research...

We find that founder-CEOs are replaced more frequently in VC-backed companies, but there are no significant differences in the post-IPO market performance of founder-led and non-founder led firms. However, “hybrid” strategies that result in non-founder CEOs but at least one founder present have better post-IPO market performance than firms with no...