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Practice makes perfect: Entrepreneurial-experience curves and venture performance
... The other is "progression through adversity," where entrepreneurs have to overcome severe obstacles on their way to success. Examples include work on serial entrepreneurship and learning from failure (Toft-Kehler et al., 2014), including popularized theories of "fail fast" (Ries, 2011). ...
... Some claim that failure is a good thing, since there is learning from failure. When scrutinized systematically, however, it is hard to distinguish who learns and who does not, under what conditions, and how many failed ventures are needed for someone to eventually learn (Parker, 2013;Toft-Kehler et al., 2014;Yin et al., 2019). For every rag to riches tale, there are many more highly educated, upper-middle-class entrepreneurs who become much more successful (Halvarsson et al., 2018;Hvide & Møen, 2010;Levine & Rubinstein, 2017). ...
... For every serial entrepreneur claiming they have learned from past failures, we lack alternative stories of the prevalence and costs of failure of those who never make it back on to the playing field. The majority of serial entrepreneurs run erratically performing firms (Parker, 2013), and those who do improve performance over time seem to be dependent on slowly accumulating knowledge about industries and social settings that they gradually learn to call their home turf (Toft-Kehler et al., 2014;Yin et al., 2019). Within every conflict in an entrepreneurial story, there is often a counterfactual story to be told. ...
Research is not merely report-writing; it also involves elements of storytelling. In this essay, we reflect on two narrative archetypes in entrepreneurship research: the stories of entrepreneurship as a road to salvation and means to emancipation. We outline a framework to analyze research from a storytelling perspective, apply this framework to identify implicit assumptions and methodological biases in mainstream research, and discuss how a storytelling framework can be used to generate alternative stories. We argue for a more empirically grounded research agenda that continues the development of entrepreneurship research into a rich and diverse field.
... Although detailed studies are lacking regarding serial entrepreneurship and performance, the studies that have been conducted have often had mixed results (for example, Eggers & Song, 2015;Gruber et al., 2008;Lafontaine & Shaw, 2016;Paik, 2014;Toft-Kehler et al., 2014) or have demonstrated no performance differences between serial entrepreneurs and those with no history (Iacobucci et al., 2004). Past research based on the theories of cognition and generative learning suggests that serial entrepreneurs achieve better performance with each new venture (Cope, 2005). ...
... Focusing on the serial entrepreneur's experience and their ability to learn from these, some researchers find no relationship with performance (Alsos & Kolvereid, 1998), while other researchers suggest the existence of a nonlinear relationship (Toft-Kehler et al., 2014;Ucbasaran et al., 2009). However, recent research confirms that there is no overwhelming evidence to suggest a correlation between past entrepreneurial experience and subsequent entrepreneurial performance (Valliant & Lafluente, 2018). ...
... Accordingly, access to data through Global Entrepreneurship Monitor (Simmons et al., 2014) or country-level datasets, such as the panel study of income dynamics for the USA (Parker, 2013) or Quadros de Pessoal for Portugal (Amaral et al., 2011), in addition to offering researchers the opportunity to collect data from different sectors and industries (Hyytinen & Ilmakunnas, 2007), allow scholars to dig deeper when investigating serial entrepreneurs' attitudes, learning processes, performance, and other factors. Essentially, quantitative methodological approaches, such as piece-wise constant hazard function (Amaral et al., 2011), Cox proportionalhazards model (De Jong & Marsili, 2015, and other regression and multivariate models, are used in order to assess the significance and importance of factors such as characteristics (Westhead & Wright, 1998), competence, and overall performance (Toft-Kehler et al., 2014). Qualitative methods, like interviews, case studies, comparative case studies, and grounded theory approaches, have been used to reveal the underpinnings motivations of serial entrepreneurs -their attitudes, perceptions, and strategic approaches, among others. ...
Little research has been conducted regarding serial entrepreneur-ship compared to entrepreneurship research more broadly, despite research that suggests that as many as 50% of all entrepreneurs are 15 serial entrepreneurs. Entrepreneurship research shows that most new ventures fail, yet serial entrepreneurs continually exit previous ventures and start new ones. Our study explores 118 scholarly articles indexed in Web of Science and Scopus databases on serial entrepreneurship through multiple correspondence analysis. 20 Through our analysis, we identify key areas for future research, explore and consolidate the theoretical foundations used, and provide a review of academic literature for future researchers to utilize. Our perceptual map has identified four key research areas that researchers should focus upon: heuristics in entrepreneurship, 25 entrepreneurial capabilities, the entrepreneurial ecosystem, and technological development and resources.
... However, these benefits are moderate and confined to a rather narrow time window. This study expands entrepreneurial learning research into the emerging field of digital-platform ecosystems (Nambisan, 2017;Rietveld et al., 2019) and contributes to the recognition of time as a crucial explanatory variable in the entrepreneurship literature (Cope, 2005;Toft-Kehler et al., 2014). ...
... Some studies have reported that such experience can improve the performance of subsequent ventures. However, these effects tend to be more fragile and contingent on additional factors, such as the number of prior ventures and similarity between prior and current ventures (Gimeno et al., 1997;Gompers et al., 2010;Iacobucci and Rosa, 2010;Paik, 2014;Toft-Kehler et al., 2014). Overall, related research has so far focused primarily on traditional business-startup entrepreneurship and has mostly ignored more dynamic learning settings such as digital-platform environments. ...
... A primary challenge for the transfer of knowledge from prior ventures to new ventures is the difference between the prior and the current venture (Rerup, 2005). In their study of Swedish startup entrepreneurs, Toft-Kehler et al. (2014) identified several barriers that prevented entrepreneurs from extracting appropriate knowledge from their prior ventures and applying it to their new ventures. These barriers were related to differences in the content and context domains, as well as temporal distance between the prior and the current ventures. ...
The emergence of large-scale digital platforms such as Facebook, Google Play and Apple App Store around 2008 has created opportunities for independent entrepreneurs to offer their self-developed software applications (“apps”) to large groups of platform users. The development and release of tens of thousands of apps by thousands of independent developers has created dynamic entrepreneurial ecosystems. This paper investigates whether and how learning by independent habitual entrepreneurs unfolds in substantively different ways in such dynamic platform-based environments. We argue that in these entrepreneurial ecosystems, the timing of learning efforts becomes essential. For Facebook app developers, we find that learning from their own prior app projects remains feasible. However, entrepreneurs have only a few months during which they can benefit from what they learned from a prior app project. This study supports the feasibility of time-contingent learning from prior app projects for increasingly prevalent dynamic entrepreneurial ecosystems such as digital platforms. Implications for future research and management practice are outlined.
... In prior studies, many factors have been analysed as practices that contribute to women entrepreneurs' business performance and literatures reveal that those practices had positive relationship with business performance (Hassan et al., 2014;Toft-Kehler et al., 2014;Pergelova and Angulo-Ruiz, 2015;Welsh et al., 2018). The experience, engage in building relationships with customer, management skill and entrepreneurial trait to compete in the business world are an added value to the key success for women entrepreneurs (Dana, 1995;Ramadani et al., 2013;Anggadwita and Dhewanto, 2016;Anggadwita et al., 2017aAnggadwita et al., , 2017b. ...
... Entrepreneurial Experience (EE) are define as the accumulation of entrepreneur past involvement in entrepreneurial activity (Toft-Kehler et al., 2014). It is also serves as a proxy for expertise; an ability to generalise knowledge from past experience and to apply it to new situation (Hayes, 1989). ...
... The second highest mean is EE. Toft-Kehler et al. (2014) suggested that EE can assist entrepreneur to learn and pursue in entrepreneurship provided that they have opportunities to gain experience, overcome barriers to learning, and build an entrepreneurialexperience curve. In addition, similar study also showed that entrepreneurs with managerial experience, unique knowledge, and whose employees have unique knowledge obtain higher mean scores in the general indicator of entrepreneurial success (Staniewski, 2016). ...
... In their study, Toft-Kehler et al. (2014) studied the effect of negative transfer by investigating how start-up experience (the number of ventures founded) predicted venture performance. They found that the relationship between start-up experience and performance can be illustrated using the U-shaped curve. ...
... These findings suggest that when entrepreneurs possess only limited start-up experience (founded one or two ventures), they tend to negatively transfer their knowledge to subsequent ventures and perform even worse than entrepreneurs without any venture founded. However, when the start-up experience of entrepreneurs is greater (founded three or more ventures), they are able to overcome barriers of learning and pursue opportunities with greater success (Toft-Kehler et al., 2014). We argue that this atypical relationship should be shown also between start-up experience and the quality of a business plan. ...
... According to Toft-Kehler et al. (2014), we hypothesised that there is a U-shaped relationship between an entrepreneur's prior start-up experience and the quality of his/her proposed business plan. The results with respect to comparing the quality of business proposals of individuals with one, two, and three or more founded ventures do not support a U-shaped relationship assumption. ...
... These resources can consist of unique competences that are internally available (within the founding team) or gathered externally through established organizations, namely incumbent firms or universities participating as initial shareholders. Internally, we focus on founders' entrepreneurial experience, which has been deemed a crucial competence that shapes venture outcomes partly due to experiential learning (Cope, 2011;Delmar & Shane, 2006;Parker, 2013;Toft-Kehler et al., 2014). 2 Entrepreneurial experience can both facilitate the steps involved in the selection process and provide valuable signals to job seekers when they assess the reliability and security of the job offer. ...
... Founders' past experience in entrepreneurship can also activate labor supply. Serial entrepreneurs may have learned from past experience and outperform novice founders (Delmar & Shane, 2006;Toft-Kehler et al., 2014). If so, entrepreneurial experience can provide signals of a firm's quality, commitment, and legitimacy (Bublitz et al., Resource-(and Competence-) ...
Plain English Summary
Hiring is challenging for start-ups and not all manage to hire personnel beyond the founders in nascent stages. We show that the odds of early-stage hiring are higher when innovation-driven start-ups secure certain competences and resources at entry. We build on the resource- and competence-based views of the firm and on signaling theory to explain how certain competences assembled at entry can explain differences in start-ups’ early hiring rates. We show that founders with previous entrepreneurial experience and backed by particular shareholders (incumbent firms or universities) are more likely to hire employees in early stages, especially when running innovation-driven startups. These competences and resources, when coupled with an innovation orientation, can make a difference by either expanding the firm’s resources to hire or encouraging prospective employees to join in the early stages of the firm. These findings have important implications for research and practice. They uncover the important role of initial resources in increasing a start-up’s hiring propensity, unravel the contingent role of the firm innovation strategy, and shed light on a channel (i.e., early-stage hiring) through which founding conditions may affect start-up performance.
... The effort level of scanning plays a mediating role between general cognitive schema and business model innovativeness. The research model is shown in Figure 2. [33] and the code distance of Industrial Classification for National Economic Activities (GB/4754-2011), calculate the industry similarity between the industry where they worked and the current entrepreneurial industry. The industry similarity index is used to reflect the internal and external attributes of the entrepreneurs' work experience. ...
... Some scholars distinguished experience types according to work functions [36]. Some scholars distinguished them according to geographical or industrial similarities [33]. Some scholars distinguished them into management experience and entrepreneurial experience [37]. ...
Sustainable innovation now plays a leading role in the transformation and upgrading activities of enterprises, and the new business model is increasingly a typical form of innovation. Therefore, based on neo-institutional theory of organization, this study mainly analyzes the impact of cognitive schemas on new ventures’ business model innovativeness by selecting new service industry enterprises as the research object and referring to data from the China Statistical Yearbook and “China Innovation and Entrepreneurship Index”. In addition, we entrusted professional market research companies and business incubators to collect 142 valid questionnaires. The results show that general cognitive schema negatively affects business model innovativeness, while specific cognitive schema positively affects it. Specifically, general cognitive schema reduces the level of effort and sustainability of entrepreneurial environmental scanning activities, which is not conducive to the design of highly innovative business models; specific cognitive schema not only improves the level of effort and sustainability of entrepreneurial environmental scanning activities, but also drives the entrepreneurs to pay more attention to new information outside the industry, which is conducive to the design of a highly innovative business model.
... A fourth stream, which is depicted on the left of Figure 2 with red nodes, is more diverse in that it covers the experience-performance effects in international contexts and diverse types of economies (Delios & Beamish, 2001;Le & Kroll, 2017;Li & Zhang, 2007;Li, Vertinsky, & Li, 2014;Luo & Peng, 1999;Zhang, Yang, Tang, Au, & Xue, 2013) and the role of experience in 14 entrepreneurial firms (Cooper, Gimeno-Gascon, & Woo, 1994;Dencker & Gruber, 2015;Hernandez-Carrion, Camarero-Izquierdo, & Gutierrez-Cillan, 2017;Toft-Kehler, Wennberg, & Kim, 2014). For instance, among studies that consider international contexts, Luo and Peng (1999) found that the intensity and diversity of the host country experience of multinational enterprises (MNEs) affected the financial and market performance of the subunits of MNEs in China. ...
... Learning curve models. Learning curve models are founded on work in psychology at the individual level (Thurstone, 1919). The insights from individual learning were subsequently extended to the organizational context, when early organizational studies (Alchian, 1963;Wright, 1936) suggested that organizations also improve their ability to conduct a focal task as they accumulate experience from repetitively engaging in the same task (Argote, 2013;Epple, Argote, & Devadas, 1991). ...
Organizational experience is generally expected to have a positive effect on subsequent task performance. However, research over the past two decades has recognized an increasing number of circumstances in which the performance effects of experience are less clear or even negative. Given the inconclusive evidence on the nature of the experience–performance relationship, we conduct a systematic review and synthesize previously unconnected streams of literature on the organizational experience–performance relationship into a contingency framework on how the applicability, accessibility, and adoption of experiential knowledge jointly moderate the commonly assumed positive effect of organizational experience on performance in a focal task. Based on our integrative contingency framework, we identify important gaps in our understanding of these boundary conditions and develop a research agenda to expand our understanding of organizational experience effects on organizational performance.
... McDaniel, Schmidt, and Hunter (1988), studied a sample of 16,058 and found a correlation between job experience and performance which is also consistent with the results of Schmidt, Hunter, and Outerbridge (1986). In another study by Toft-Kehler, Wennberg, and Kim (2014), they look specifically at entrepreneurs and find that a low amount of entrepreneurial experience leads to poor performance while a high amount of experience leads to improved performance. In a more recent study, Bradley, Gokkaya and Liu (2017) find that overall related experience does lead to improved results and performance. ...
... Due to the fact that effort reduction as an effect of target ratcheting has been shown to help managers perform to targets, experience may play a role in effort reduction. (1988) Survey and Archival analysis Job experience of early career managers on performance McDaniel et al, 1988 Archival Analysis Job experience and job performance Quińones, Ford and Teachout (1995) Meta-data Analysis Work experience and job performance Toft-Kehler et al. (2014) Archival Analysis Entrepreneur experience and performance ...
The consequences of missing targets can be found on a daily basis in many organizations. As such, targets and target setting in an extremely important topic to companies and one that should receive more attention. Although the vast amount of reasons for missing targets are difficult to study, the process of setting the target which includes budgeting has been proven to affect performance and achievement through goal setting theory (Locke & Latham, 2002). Thus, targets are an important element in almost every organization (Chenhall, 2003). We focus this review of literature exclusively in the relationship between target setting and firm performance and as such consolidate, organize, and synthesize past literature in this field and provide a clear direction for future research. We further identify two impactors found to affect firm and management performance but never researched as an impactor of the relationship between target setting and firm performance. Those impactors are Transparency of targets and length of management experience. In this paper, we fill the gaps identified above and inform the study of target setting in order to spark future research on this topic. We also identify the dimensions affecting the relationship between target setting and firm performance as well as the different measurement approaches in target setting literature.
... Investors tend to seek additional information when they make their investment decisions proposed by novice entrepreneurs rather than by serial entrepreneurs. The entrepreneurship literature stresses the importance of entrepreneur characteristics -such as gender, founding experience, social capital -as a key factor in predicting success or financial performance of new ventures (Lee & Chiravuri, 2019;Stuart & Abetti, 1990;Toft-Kehler, Wennberg, & Kim, 2014). Stuart and Abetti (1990) found evidence that the entrepreneurial experience, namely the number of past start-up involvements, is one of the most significant antecedents contributing to a successful venture. ...
... Entrepreneurial experiences have long been examined as a significant characteristic that affects venture performance. In particular, the serial entrepreneurship literature stresses the importance of entrepreneurs' founding experience as a key factor in predicting new ventures' success or financial performance (Stuart & Abetti, 1990;Toft-Kehler et al., 2014). Stuart and Abetti (1990) found evidence that the entrepreneurial experience, namely the number of past start-up involvements, is one of the most significant antecedents contributing to a successful venture. ...
Entrepreneurs are showing an increasing focus on understanding and managing their social media strategies to optimize the success of their crowdfunding campaigns. While much of the current crowdfunding literature focuses on the roles of social media engagement in the funding performance of crowdfunded projects, in this study, drawing on social media engagement theory, we examine how product and entrepreneur characteristics moderate the influence of social media engagement on funding performance in the reward‐based crowdfunding. Using a dataset of technology crowdfunded projects, we investigated whether Facebook and Twitter engagements affect funding outcomes and if so, how the two interact with each other and their influences vary by project type (hardware and software) and entrepreneur characteristics (gender, experience, and social capital). We found that both Facebook and Twitter engagements positively affect funding, but the two weaken each other's impact, particularly for hardware products. Additionally, Facebook engagements had a larger effect on funding outcomes in the early days of a campaign driven by its prelaunch efforts, whereas Twitter engagements had a larger impact in later days. Furthermore, our findings indicated that Facebook engagement is more influential for hardware products. An entrepreneur's internal social capital built inside the crowdfunding platform also weakened the effects of Facebook engagements generated outside the platform, whereas Twitter engagements on subsequent funding had less influence on experienced entrepreneurs. Our findings suggest that Facebook mainly serves as a channel to show the significant commitment of entrepreneurs to their projects and increase persuasiveness, while Twitter helps to raise awareness by broadcasting crowdfunding campaigns among potential investors.
... There are two main types of venturing experience: venture founding and venture investing. 4 Given that founding a new venture is dissimilar from investing in one, founders and investors likely use different cognitive frameworks to recognize opportunities and determine the future success of new ventures (e.g., Toft-Kehler et al., 2014). They likely have different interpretations of the informational signals sent by entrepreneurs (e.g., Drover et al., 2018), which alters how their investment propensity influences their venture evaluation. ...
... A founder prototype builds upon the experience of exploiting entrepreneurial opportunities through the creation of new ventures (Toft-Kehler et al., 2014). In contrast, the experience of exploiting entrepreneurial opportunities by investing valuable resources in new ventures for future financial returns shapes an investor prototype (Zacharakis and Shepherd, 2001). ...
Experienced founders and investors are arguably the venture community members most likely to possess needed financial and social resources for startups. We present a model of venture evaluation where entrepreneurs solicit these resource providers for needed financial and social resources. Our model addresses how resource providers' venture investment propensity influences their evaluation of entrepreneurs' informational signals and how their venture evaluation predicts their willingness to provide financial and social resources. We test our model using real-time decisions and find resource providers with founding experience (both non-investor founders and investors with founding experience) leverage their investment propensity more than non-founder investors when evaluating new ventures. In addition, our post-hoc analysis reveals that resource providers' founding experience is associated with their willingness to confer social resources. Overall, this paper focuses on the perspective of resource providers and addresses how their investment propensity, types of venturing experience, and venture evaluation influence their willingness to render resource support to new ventures.
Executive summary
New venture creation is often dependent upon a community of individuals who support dedicated entrepreneurs. This support includes financial (e.g., money, equipment, etc.) and social resources (advice, referrals, etc.) that entrepreneurs use to develop their products and services for the marketplace. Entrepreneurs initiate this process when they solicit venture community members for resource support.
While there is depth in the extant research concerning the importance of financial and social resources, few studies provide a more granular view illuminating why experienced venture community members are willing to confer resources at the nascent stages of venture development. Indeed, there is little consensus concerning what attributes and information lead to resource support by these resource providers, especially at the nascent stages of new venture creation. These mixed findings lead to varied guidance, at times conflicting, concerning how entrepreneurs should solicit resource providers in venture communities. We suggest that the lack of clarity occurs because the literature does not fully address resource providers' background and characteristics, including the types of venturing experiences they possess.
Our research question addresses what factors influence resource providers' willingness to engage in resource conferrals to entrepreneurs in support of their new ventures. We focus on the antecedents and consequences of resource providers' interpretation of entrepreneurs' informational signaling. Resource providers' propensity to invest in new ventures (in short, investment propensity) should be associated with their interpretation of entrepreneurs' informational signals. More specifically, we hypothesize the higher resource providers' investment propensity, the more likely they will perceive the future success of new ventures under evaluation.
Our study also focuses on the differential effects of venture founding and investing experience on the relationship between investment propensity and venture evaluation. Based on these two types of venturing experience, we classify resource providers into three types: (a) non-investor founders, (b) non-founder investors, and (c) investors with founding experience. As potential resource providers, these venture community members are most likely to have accumulated the financial and social resource stocks necessary for supporting new ventures. Therefore, we hypothesize that the difference between founding experience and investing experience modifies the relationship between resource providers' investment propensity and their venture evaluation. More specifically, we posit that compared to non-founder investors, resource providers with founding experience—both non-investor founders and investors with founding experience—leverage their investment propensity to a greater extent in their venture evaluation. Afterward, we delineate the relationship between resource providers' venture evaluation and willingness to provide financial and social resources to entrepreneurs in support of their new ventures. The focal resources considered in this study are (a) monetary investment, (b) advice, and (c) recommendations to others.
We tested our model using real-time survey data that comprised 217 individual pitch evaluations of 46 startups and 38 survey respondents over a six-year timeframe. While we found no statistical support for the relationship between resource providers' investment propensity and venture evaluation, we did find differences between resource providers with and without founding experience. Specifically, we found that among founders, including non-investor founders and investors with founding experience, their investment propensity is positively related to their venture evaluation compared to investors without founding experience. Finally, we found that resource providers' venture evaluation is positively related to their willingness to invest in, advise, and recommend new ventures. Our additional post-hoc analysis revealed that compared to investors without founding experience, founders are similarly willing to confer financial resources but are more willing to confer social resources. Based on our findings, our study provides evidence that differences in the types of resource providers' venturing experience can help explain how resource providers' domain-specific risk propensity (specifically, investment propensity) can shape their venture evaluation and willingness to confer financial and social resources.
... Novice entrepreneurs' perspectives (Westhead & Wright, 1998;Chi, 2006;Wiklund & Shepherd, 2008;St-Jean & Audet, 2013) should consider the role of entrepreneurs and entrepreneurship (Toft-Kehler, Wennberg & Kim, 2014;Wagner, 2007), entrepreneurial attitude to improve business quality (Baimai & Mukherji, 2015) and the generation of new economic activities to create wealth (Cooper, Woo & Dunkelberg, 1988;Hussain & Sajjad, 2016) and employment in the labor market (Dai, Maksimov, Gilbert, & Fernhaber, 2014;Davidsson, 2015). Entrepreneurship is a driving force for economic growth and development (Feldman, 2014;Mathias, Williams & Smith, 2015;Lundqvist, Middleton & Nowell, 2015;Sousa & Santos, 2016ab;, mainly in the sectors of innovation and technology in recent decades (Chao-Tung & Yi-Wen, 2007;Trifan, Guica & Micu, 2012;Feldman, 2014). ...
... Entrepreneurship is a driving force for economic growth and development (Feldman, 2014;Mathias, Williams & Smith, 2015;Lundqvist, Middleton & Nowell, 2015;Sousa & Santos, 2016ab;, mainly in the sectors of innovation and technology in recent decades (Chao-Tung & Yi-Wen, 2007;Trifan, Guica & Micu, 2012;Feldman, 2014). In the small and medium-sized market, in developing or peripheral countries, entrepreneurship is leveraging and improving economic growth in smaller cities (Alonso, Casas, Castro, & Solis, 2004;Alsos & Kolvereid, 1998;Farmer, Yao & Kung-Mcintyre, 2011) and large companies are also, increasingly, accumulating wealth due to doing business through the acquisition of other companies in the same economic or parallel sector, mainly companies located in emerging countries (March & Simon, 1993;Baron & Ensley, 2006;Toft-Kehler, Wennberg & Kim, 2014). With business growth in the market, entrepreneurship business practices are getting stronger (Stevenson & Jarillo, 1990;Ajzen, 2001;Bosma & Schutjens, 2011) as well as entrepreneurial activity practices and learning (Gordon, Davidsson & Steffens, 2009) and opportunity recognition (Schmidt & Bohnenberger, 2009;Bae, Qian, Miao, & Fiet, 2014). ...
Este livro “Estudos de Gestão e Empreendedorismo” inclui uma parte substancial dos estudos, previamente objeto de dupla revisão anónima, apresentados no XIX Seminário Luso-Espanhol (SLE) de Economia Empresarial que se realizou na Universidade do Algarve/Escola Superior de Gestão, Hotelaria e Turismo em 2017, promovido pelo Círculo Ibérico de Economia Empresarial (CIBECEM). Os estudos são fundamentalmente de natureza empírica, versam sobre temas atuais e, poderão constituir fonte de estímulo para a prossecução da investigação nas diversas áreas científicas.
Este livro está organizado em cinco partes:
Parte I – Gestão Geral
Parte II – Contabilidade e Gestão Financeira
Parte III – Marketing e Empreendedorismo
Parte IV – Economia e Turismo
Parte V - Educação
A Parte I agrega estudos de gestão de diversa natureza. Catarina Cavaco et al. analisa a relação entre a inteligência emocional (IE) e o burnout, descreve a importância da IE como forma de prevenção ao burnout com base numa metodologia quantitativa envolvendo profissionais de saúde.
Helder Antunes e Paulo Pinheiro abordam a gestão do conhecimento e a aprendizagem organizacional. Desenvolveram uma revisão sistemática da literatura e propuseram um modelo integrativo. Das bases de dados Web of Science e Scopus, foram analisados 1335 artigos científicos entre 1960 e 2017.
O estudo de caso de Sara Romeiro et al. visa identificar e analisar o nível de desenvolvimento das práticas de Responsabilidade Social nas Instituições Particulares de Solidariedade Social, no que diz respeito à sua dimensão interna e externa e nas vertentes ambientais, económicas e sociais, bem como a hierarquia das relações das mesmas com todos os seus stakeholders.
Maria José Gomes et al. ensaia uma proposta de investigação sobre a Metodologia Balanced Scorecard aplicada a um setor económico (setor vitivinícola) numa região portuguesa (Alentejo) e apresenta uma síntese do state of art da Metodologia.
À luz da teoria institucional, Maria do Céu Alves e Margarida Rodrigues através da metodologia de estudo de caso estudaram de que forma os expatriados podem ser considerados um mecanismo de controlo das multinacionais, sobre as suas subsidiárias e analisaram os impactos da distância entre a empresa mãe e as filiais, da existência ou não de uma linguagem comum e ainda das tensões organizacionais criadas na filial depois da colocação de um expatriado.
A Parte II trata de temas das áreas da contabilidade e da gestão financeira. Ana Martins estuda a utilidade da informação financeira com base na indústria bancária. Neste trabalho avalia a normalidade e proporcionalidade dos rácios mais utilizados no setor bancário, através da análise das características das respetivas distribuições.
Vítor Gabriel e Fernanda Matias analisam as dinâmicas de curto prazo e de longo prazo entre as bond yields dos seis países fundadores da UE, no período amostral compreendido entre abril de 1986 e maio de 2016, o qual foi subdivido em três subperíodos, de modo a explorar o efeito resultante de diferentes condições de mercado.
A auditoria informática nas grandes empresas espanholas foi o tema do estudo de Alfonso Moro et al.. Surgiu na sequência de outro trabalho realizado pelos autores em 2015 sobre a evolução da auditoria informática no setor empresarial espanhol.
Uma incursão pelos sistemas de medição do desempenho dos hotéis é levada a cabo por Ana Rita Faria et al. Este estudo pretende contribuir para um conhecimento mais aprofundado dos sistemas de medição do desempenho no setor hoteleiro, dando particular destaque ao Balanced Scorecard (BSC). O estudo identifica os sistemas de medição e os indicadores de desempenho mais utilizados e procura estabelecer relações entre as características dos hotéis e a adoção de tais sistemas.
Por sua vez, a eficiência das empresas hoteleiras em Portugal - uma aplicação DEA - foi a temática investigada por Ana Martins et al. O estudo analisa a eficiência das empresas hoteleiras portuguesas através de uma metodologia bietápica. Na primeira etapa analisa-se a eficiência das empresas com recurso aos modelos DEA (Data Envelopment Analysis) tradicionais e ao modelo Slack Based Measurel (SBM) e na segunda etapa, aplicam-se os modelos complementares da supereficiência, fronteira invertida e eficiência composta.
Maria Casteleiro e Maria do Céu Alves estudaram o impacto do sistema de normalização contabilística (SNC) nas Instituições Particulares de Solidariedade Social (IPSS). O principal objetivo deste estudo consiste em criar um framework, que permita aferir a perceção dos Contabilistas Certificados (CC) das IPSS relativamente ao impacto, implicações e qualidade do sistema de normalização contabilística para o setor e também para o prestígio da própria profissão.
Eládio Pedreño e Laura Pascual-Nebred investigam a problemática da denominada manipulação contabilística, que permite, mesmo dentro da lei, modelar a imagem fiel que as contas anuais devem fornecer. Essa manipulação contábil pode ser realizada por meio de contabilidade criativa ou por meio de gestão de lucros.
Patrícia Quesado e Maria Carlos Lopes apresentam um trabalho que visa implementar o sistema Activity Based Costing (ABC) numa empresa que produz carroçarias para diferentes modelos de autocarros.
A mensuração e a gestão dos ativos intangíveis foi objeto do estudo de Susana Rua et al. Efetuaram uma análise comparativa da mensuração dos ativos intangíveis no âmbito do SNC (Sistema de Normalização Contabilística) português e do PGC (Plan General de Contabilidad) espanhol.
Por sua vez, Lurdes Silva et al. investigam a transparência na prestação de informação de âmbito contabilístico e fiscal das entidades sem fins lucrativos. Trata-se de um estudo de caso de uma entidade do setor não lucrativo no que concerne às suas obrigações contabilísticas e fiscais.
A Parte III é dedicada aos estudos elaborados na área do marketing e do empreendedorismo. O estudo de José Saura e Pedro Palos-Sánchez recai na medição do Marketing Digital na Internet. O principal objetivo da pesquisa consiste em identificar os principais parâmetros do Web Analytics (AW) para a mensuração de técnicas de Marketing Digital.
Isabel Ribeiro e António Gonçalves investigam o perfil do consumidor de frutas desidratadas e o consumo e hábitos de compra deste produto em consumidores do Norte de Portugal.
Cláudia Dias et al. pretendem consolidar o estado da pesquisa académica na área do Marketing Empreendedor (ME), pelo que a opção metodológica assentou na elaboração de uma análise bibliométrica com recurso à técnica de coocorrência de termos.
Tendências do consumo de mel em Bragança (Portugal) foi a temática estudada por Isabel Ribeiro e António Fernandes. Este trabalho pretende traçar o perfil do consumidor do mel e descrever os seus hábitos de compra e consumo.
Diego R. Toubes et al. estuda a relação da cultura com a atitude e a prática empreendedora no Japão e em três países da Europa (Itália, Espanha e Portugal). Através de uma pesquisa com 188 pequenas empresas nestes quatro países, as dimensões culturais associadas a cada país são identificadas a partir da perspetiva do empreendedorismo e a forma como a diversidade de culturas influencia a experiência empreendedora.
As perspetivas de empresários noviços em atividade empreendedora na Extremadura foi a temática desenvolvida por António Sousa et al. Os empreendedores iniciantes são indivíduos com expectativas de se tornarem empreendedores, mas sem experiência prévia em negócios.
Eduardo Aranda e Remédios Linares estudam a orientação empreendedora nas empresas familiares de Mérida. O objetivo geral desta pesquisa é conhecer a importância da Orientação Empreendedora (OE) para as empresas familiares de Mérida, bem como analisar se existem diferenças entre o comportamento empreendedor de empresas familiares e não familiares
Juan Borrero analisa a importância da cultura do país e da universidade na intenção empreendedora dos estudantes universitários. Este estudo analisa as perceções de desejabilidade, viabilidade e intenção para iniciar novos negócios e como essas variáveis influenciam a intenção empreendedora comparando contextos institucionais diferentes, Espanha e Marrocos.
A Parte IV inclui os trabalhos das áreas da economia e do turismo. Vitor Martinho estuda a influência das atividades de investigação e desenvolvimento na importância relativa da produção agrícola. O objetivo deste estudo é analisar a influência da inovação, através das atividades de R&D e de variáveis ambientais na economia agrícola, considerando como base os desenvolvimentos de Cobb & Douglas (1928).
É também estudado o papel das redes comerciais e internacionais para a internacionalização no negócio da cortiça durante o século XIX e também apresentado um estudo de caso com base na empresa familiar Reynolds.
Raúl Martínez et al. comparam o desempenho de dois sistemas de negociação algorítmica de big data na Ibex, de janeiro a agosto de 2017. Estes sistemas utilizam modelos de inteligência artificial baseados no sentimento do investidor.
Pedro Palos-Sanchez et al. no seu estudo pretendem determinar a importância que o turismo de produção de azeite e produtos orgânicos relacionados está gradualmente adquirindo. Este turismo alternativo está aumentando significativamente nos países do sul da Europa e é uma alternativa ao turismo sazonal baseado no sol e na areia.
O impacto das peregrinações no turismo religioso, análise e previsão do fenómeno Mariano de Fátima constitui a temática investigada por José Fuinhas et al. Os resultados da previsão abrem portas para estudos do impacto económico, político e social das peregrinações ao Santuário.
A Parte V inclui os trabalhos que recaem na área da educação. Carolina Santos et al. investiga a lealdade dos Alumni dos cursos superiores de 1.º ciclo, apresentando uma proposta de modelo concetual. A compreensão de como a imagem da instituição e a satisfação profissional atuam no binómio satisfação-lealdade foram os construtos base para a construção do modelo concetual proposto.
Nuno Sousa et al. pesquisam a partilha de conhecimento entre docentes do ensino superior através de uma revisão quantitativa da literatura. Neste artigo analisam-se estudos empíricos de natureza quantitativa sobre a partilha de conhecimento entre académicos.
O livro termina com o estudo de Isabel Ribeiro e António Fernandes que recai no comportamento financeiro dos alunos de uma instituição pública de ensino superior portuguesa. Foi aplicado um estudo quantitativo, observacional, transversal e analítico.
Gostaríamos de mencionar que os trabalhos publicados neste livro contribuem para enriquecer o conhecimento das matérias estudadas e especialmente suscitar novas ideias para investigações futuras e de agradecer o empenho dos autores e revisores que contribuíram para esta publicação.
Os Editores
Fernanda Matias, José António C. Santos, Margarida Custódio Santos, Carlos Afonso,
Célia M. Q. Ramos, Celísia Batista
... With regard to this, Fischer et al. (1993) opined about a female-owned business's lower sales and growth performance. Prior research demonstrated that entrepreneurial management team, age, and entrepreneurial traits (Aidis et al., 2012;Nil et al., 2011;Dharmaratne, 2013;Dvir et al., 2010;Rankhumise and Lehobye, 2012;Elert et al., 2015;Gartner et al., 2004;Hirschsohn, 2008;Hult et al., 2004;Isa et al., 2021a, Khan, 2014Kuratko, 2011;Ramadani et al., 2013;Raman et al., 2013;Sathya and Vithyapriya, 2016;Toft-Kehler et al., 2014;Trang, 2016), level of education, experience, and business skills play a remarkable role in attaining success. The less educated women entrepreneurs came across obstacles while starting their venture due to lack of education, fewer managerial skills, and low networking (Phonthanukitithaworn et al., 2019). ...
... The literature highlights the success model of women entrepreneurs in SMEs, cottage industries and enterprises, whereas the literature does not include the success model of women entrepreneurs in the service industry. Aidis et al., 2012;Akhter and Ward, 2009;Alise and Teddlie, 2010;Ariffin et al., 2020;Asif et al., 2015;Nil et al., 2011;Bhagyalaxmi and Ishwara, 2012;Dharmaratne, 2013;Dvir et al., 2010;Hult et al., 2004;Hussain and Yaqub, 2010;Ismail, 2016;Jennings and Brush, 2013;Kalim, 2019;Khan, 2014;Latif et al., 2011;McGrath and MacMillan, 1992;Naser et al., 2009;Toft-Kehler et al., 2014;Voola and O'Cass, 2010 ...
PURPOSE: Women's entrepreneurship is a topic of significant concern, and a detailed review of the literature related to the success model of women entrepreneurs, particularly in developing Asian countries, is lacking. In this regard, eight women's entrepreneurial success models (Malaysia, Pakistan, India, Indonesia, Sri Lanka and Bangladesh) between 2012 and 2019 (inclusive) are analysed. The purpose and contribution of this paper are to highlight the clear picture of women's entrepreneurial success models comprised of controllable and uncontrollable issues and challenges that can be classified under several factors, such as socio-cultural, environmental and individual. DESIGN/METHODOLOGY/APPROACH: First, the paper will review recent research using citation analysis to classify the main factors of women's entrepreneurial success currently highlighted in the literature. Second, a comparative analysis will be undertaken as there is a need to examine and stock the literature related to women's entrepreneurial success models in developing Asia.
... As previously mentioned, not every copycat organization is able to grow and sustain success. This contradicts the perception of experienced entrepreneurs creating more prosperous ventures because of learning effects (Toft-Kehler et al., 2014). Toft-Kehler et al. argue that merely having experience does not necessarily "trigger increased performance" when "incorrect inferences are drawn" (Levitt & March, 1988). ...
... Toft-Kehler et al. argue that merely having experience does not necessarily "trigger increased performance" when "incorrect inferences are drawn" (Levitt & March, 1988). On the contrary, founders who draw the right conclusions are labeled "expert-entrepreneurs" (Toft-Kehler et al., 2014). This relates to the requirement of having these in leadership of copycats. ...
The approach of copying business models to create a successful company is discredited as non-innovative and propagated as a low-risk variant of entrepreneurship although a simple so-called copycat would only increase competition in the market and not guarantee success. Hence, the question of which characteristics of a business model enable success of such developed businesses arises. This paper presents a methodical approach to the analysis of enablers in business models based on case study research. With the validation of the approach using the business model canvas, a study among e-commerce companies is conducted, and success factors for copycats are identified. The methodological concept can also be applied to other industries and can deliver detailed results using more complex business model tools.
... Pengalaman wirausaha adalah keterlibatan terdahulu dalam mendirikan bisnis, serta dapat memberikan manfaat positif yaitu dapat mengidentifikasi lebih banyak peluang kewirausahaan (Toft-Kehler et al., 2014). Pengusaha jenis ini mungkin dapat merespon tantangan lebih cepat karena mempunyai pemahaman yang lebih baik dari pengusaha pemula dalam mengumpulkan dan menggunakan informasi (Kotha & George, 2012). ...
... Pengusaha jenis ini mungkin dapat merespon tantangan lebih cepat karena mempunyai pemahaman yang lebih baik dari pengusaha pemula dalam mengumpulkan dan menggunakan informasi (Kotha & George, 2012). Manfaat lain dari pengalaman terdahulu ialah memotivasi kesadaran wirausahawan tentang apa yang dibutuhkan untuk membangun usaha baru untuk mengejar sebuah bisnis dengan sukses (Toft-Kehler et al., 2014). Dengan adanya pengalaman terdahulu yang relevan dengan bisnis wirausahawan cenderung lebih menyadari sumber daya yang dibutuhkan. ...
By taking a Theory of Planned Behavior (TPB), this study examines the relationship between students' entrepreneurial, attitude (AT), subjective norms (SN), and perceived behavior control (PBC). The data used in the analysis is from 150 graduate students from 12 universities in Yogyakarta. The results indicate that attitudes and perceived behavior control significantly influenced students' entrepreneurial intentions, but not subjective norms. This study helps understand the role of a qualified educational background, namely the Master of Management in shaping entrepreneurial intentions. Finally, this study reveals the importance of examining students' entrepreneurialism in today's digital age.
... The Perspectives part of the book provides the reader with a sense of how and why the broad labels of behavior, practice, and process approach this question of "What do entrepreneurs do?" Teague and Gartner (Chapter 2) review and move beyond previous scholarship on entrepreneurial behavior (Bird and Schjoedt, 2017;Bird et al., 2012;Bird et al., 2014) and suggest that the most fruitful way to continue this line of inquiry is to focus on expert skill development (Ericsson, 1985, 1998, Ericsson and Pool, 2016. By doing so, explorations of entrepreneurial expertise would encompass scholarship in effectuation (e.g., Dew et al., 2009Dew et al., , 2015Read and Sarasvathy, 2005;Sarasvathy, 2008), as well as a portion of the cognitive perspective on entrepreneurial behavior (e.g., Mitchell, 1996;Mitchell and Chesteen, 1995;Mitchell et al., 2017;Toft-Kehler et al., 2014). Based on practice approaches and theories (Miettinen et al., 2010;Schatzki et al., 2001;Whittington, 2006) Thompson and Byrne (Chapter 3) describe the nature of "entrepreneurship as practice" in terms of its theoretical foundations and methodology, to champion a perspective that puts "practices," which are characterized as the "doings and sayings" of individuals in a specific context, as central to understanding the nature of entrepreneurship. ...
... Those difficulties eat up much managerial attention and physical resources, but they tend to ease as a foreign subsidiary ages (Henderson, 1999) and gains experience in its host country (Zaheer & Mosakowski, 1997;Zhou & Guillén, 2015). Repeated interactions with different stakeholders in the host country over time will normally lead a foreign subsidiary to benefit from a learning curve (Argote, Beckman, & Epple, 1990;Toft-Kehler, Wennberg, & Kim, 2014). For example, managers will be spending less time and effort looking for trusted local suppliers or familiarizing themselves with local laws and regulations as a subsidiary gains more host country experience. ...
Knowledge transfer from a parent multinational to a foreign subsidiary does not automatically lead to innovation in a host country. To develop from a learner into an innovator, a foreign subsidiary must develop sufficient absorptive capacity. But too much reliance on knowledge transferred from a multinational could hinder local innovation by generating resource constraints and organizational rigidity. We thus predict an inverted U-shaped relationship between knowledge transfer from a parent multinational and local innovation. Moreover, factors which influence the transition from learner to innovator were investigated using data on patent applications by foreign subsidiaries of 75 large multinationals in China between 2008 and 2016. The number of research and development centers the subsidiary maintains was found to be influential, as is hiring a local executive as the subsidiary’s top manager. Greater institutional distance between the parent’s and the subsidiary’s economies was found to promote the transition, as do greater technological richness and more vigorous competition in the host country. The relationship between knowledge transfer from a parent multinational and local innovation is weaker, however, in older subsidiaries.
... The founder(s) entrepreneurial experience can be an important determinant of new venture performance (Hambrick, 2007;Ucbasaran et al., 2008). Entrepreneurial experience can be gained through working in a new/startup firm or the familiarity or knowledge of entrepreneurial activity through parents, relatives, or an individual's own experience of founding a business (Toft-Kehler et al., 2014). Regardless of the source of knowledge, entrepreneurial experience allows a founder to avoid pitfalls through sensemaking, defined by Cardon et al., (2011, p. 82) as "an interpretive process in which people assign meaning to ongoing occurrences" and attribution helps people explain the antecedent of an event either be it personal action or the events or actions of others. ...
Plain English Summary
Entrepreneurs with high education and experience get more value-added benefits from accelerators. The accelerator programs can help create a 'community of organizations, institutions, and individuals that impact the enterprise and the enterprise's customers and suppliers; entrepreneurs’ resources help create an environment that increases the potential of the new ventures. Additionally, a team of entrepreneurs with education, industry, and entrepreneurial experience can help with the venture's performance. Therefore, accelerator programs should focus on firms with highly educated entrepreneurs since entrepreneurs with high education and experience get more value-added benefits from accelerators. For the corporate managers engaged in corporate/intrapreneurship, employees with industry and entrepreneurial experience can be a great resource, and human resource managers can help with recruiting these individuals. Policymakers should pay close attention to younger firms since they are vulnerable. Further, policymakers should pay close attention to ventures with entrepreneurs with educational experience since entrepreneurs’ industry and entrepreneurial experience can complement their lacking.
... Yet, as Kolb (1984) posits, experience can be a source of learning that could lead to elements of expertise. the entrepreneurship literature has a significant stream of literature on the value of experience as a basis for better performance as an entrepreneur (Krueger, 2007;reuber & Fischer, 1994;toft-Kehler et al., 2014) as well as on the value of learning by experience (Cope & Watts, 2000;Corbett, 2005;Man, 2006;neck & Corbett, 2018;unger et al., 2009;Wang & Chugh, 2014;Winkler et al., 2021). We see the challenge in integrating the entrepreneurial learning literature into an entrepreneurial expertise approach is in identifying what, specifically, entrepreneurs learn, or experience, over time, and, whether any of these activities, skills, or knowledge involve elements of practice. ...
... Even if empiric studies and analyses have found weak or no link between EE and the motivation of starting a business, it has been proved that the link between entrepreneurial performance and EE is quite important and that there is a positive relation between the two in terms of income, firm survival or growth and profits (van der Sluis, et al., 2008), (Unger, et al., 2011) (Van Praag, et al., 2013). The so-far findings displayed by the literature in regards to the effectiveness of EE leads to the conclusion that the success of EE approach consists of the theoretical relevance of practical curriculum (Elert, et al., 2015) because successful entrepreneurship is rather related to being faced with previous entrepreneurial experience than formal education (Dencker, et al., 2009), (Folta, et al., 2006), (McNally, et al., 2013), (Toft-Kehler, et al., 2014) and the acquisition and enhancement of the skills desired in entrepreneurship are more important and relevant for success rather than a degree (Lazear, 2004), (Wagner, 2003). The majority of the studies sought to measure the effect of EE on the development of entrepreneurial-enhancing assets such as knowledge, skills, intentions to launch a business or general positive perception regarding entrepreneurship mostly because these outcomes can be measured as indicators right after the completion of the educational program (Elert, et al., 2015). ...
Entrepreneurial education (EE) has been a blossoming subject over the past years especially due to its importance and relevance to the economy both regionally and globally. The academic world still needs to conduct sustained research on the topic in order to fully throw a light on the importance that EE has on the society and its decisive role in transforming it. Economic, financial and EE has gained new dimensions lately, with an important raise of the focus both in theory and practice. This research studies the need for EE and financial literacy. In Europe, recent surveys show that young people acknowledge their lack of knowledge regarding entrepreneurship and state that schools should help them have an entrepreneurial mindset and know more about finances. In today’s dynamic environment and especially after the covid-19 crisis, the need on the workplace has changed and the skills that can be acquired through entrepreneurship and financial training and acknowledged by scholars, population, businesspeople and media as vital for the way things work in today’s economy. Teaching individuals how to think entrepreneurial becomes even more important in times of crises, or in a dynamic environment, where creativity, adaptability and innovation are key for survival. Key trends and developments are analyzed and the actors involved in shaping and raising awareness regarding financial illiteracy and the need for EE.
... Our findings reveal that the norms around performing gender may be impacting the 'doing' of innovation and provide an alternative discourse to the underperformance metanarrative of women's entrepreneurship that Dean et al. (2019) argue needs to be challenged. The focus of the extant literature on managers' skills and competencies are often discounted to understand the real effects exerted by female managers and owner-managers on firm innovation and firm performance (Toft-Kehler et al., 2014). Studies investigating the interaction effects of female top managers and female owners on innovation breadth are rare in existing research (Arun et al., 2020). ...
Social norms influencing women's activities are recognised more widely in the entrepreneurship literature, but how these may affect innovation in developing countries' contexts has attracted limited attention. This paper addresses this gap by exploring how women to women interactions influence firm level innovation and value-added productivity, using the World Bank Enterprise survey data from 16 low- and middle-income countries. We find that the combination of female owners and female top managers promotes innovation, which in turn enhances a firm's value-added productivity. Our research suggests there may be value in alerting (potential) women entrepreneurs of the benefits of working with an experienced woman manager. We argue initiatives such as female-to-female mentoring may be valuable for innovation within developing countries to overcome social and cultural barriers impeding women's participation in entrepreneurship.
... As Tversky and Kahneman (1981) and Hammond et al. (1998) seminally identify, when making a decision people may recall the most vivid memories of a specific situation. This mechanism, which is a make-happy bias, is called recallability; it is often intertwined with similarity, which is a sketchy-attribute bias also extensively considered in EDM studies (Toft-Kehler et al., 2014). The latter substantiates the tendency: "to evaluate more positively those who are more similar to themselves" (Zhang & Cueto, 2017: 9). ...
How can cognitive biases affect the birth and evolution of entrepreneurial ventures? In Entrepreneurial Decision Making (EDM), this lively research question remains largely unaddressed when the world of Unicorns, as a per se entrepreneurial species, is considered. Thus, through this conceptual article, we aim to contribute toward knowledge creation in this context. We start by proposing a conceptual framework of Unicorns’ EDM based on a behavioral approach. Through three propositions, this novel framework advances how the birth, transition, and consolidation of a Unicorn may be explained by the sequentially intertwined occurrence of biases, from which establishment and legitimization eventually emerge. We complement the framework with examples from the social media industry and then discuss its main implications for theory and practice.
... In their prior entrepreneurship, serial entrepreneurs have accumulated certain social network resources. This kind of support from various parts of society will enable the entrepreneurs to maintain stronger confidence when facing and challenging risks and seeking high-risk rewards (Toft-Kehler et al., 2014). ...
Serial entrepreneurial performance is affected by serial entrepreneurs’ risk preference, but the way prior experience affects the relationship between the risk preference and performance remains unclear. Through regression analysis of 588 listed serial entrepreneurial companies in China, this paper shows that serial entrepreneurs who make more use of risk have higher serial entrepreneurial performance. For serial entrepreneurs with relevant industry experience, the degree of influence of their risk preference on serial entrepreneurial performance will be strengthened. For serial entrepreneurs with rich entrepreneurial experience, the degree of influence of their risk preference on serial entrepreneurial performance will be weakened. The results are conducive to the effective use of prior experience and reasonable adjustment of risk preference for serial entrepreneurial enterprises, thereby improving the performance of serial entrepreneurship.
... Citing a worldwide survey involving 140,000 adults, Kelley et al. (2012) similarly found that 40% of the world's new ventures were founded by individuals or groups who had previously started a business. Of perhaps greater importance are studies showing that those with past entrepreneurial experience are better at recognizing opportunities (Ucbasaran et al., 2003), have loftier expectations (Westhead et al., 2005), and have more economically successful ventures (Toft-Kehler et al., 2014). ...
This article develops a two-part theoretical framework synthesizing the socioemotional wealth (SEW) perspective with image theory to explain the ways in which family decision makers screen and potentially adopt habitual new venture opportunities. The model theorizes that opportunities are initially screened according to their ability to preserve SEW and fit with the family’s value images and subsequently explains how SEW willingness interacts with the family entrepreneur’s trajectory and strategic images to predict whether the venture will be pursued as a serial or portfolio opportunity. Theoretical implications and directions for future research are also discussed.
... The empirical evidence for the correlation between entrepreneur experience and performance is controversial. Toft-Kehler, Wennberg, and Kim (2014) and others proposed that such a correlation depends on the type of entrepreneur. 16 We assume that financial aid does not depend on incorporated ability or unincorporated ability because these abilities are difficult for universities to observe. ...
Elite college attendance significantly impacts students' entrepreneurship decisions and career dynamics. We find that an elite college degree is positively correlated with entrepreneurship (i.e., owning an incorporated business) but not with other self‐employment forms. Our overlapping generations model captures self‐selection in education and career choices based on heterogeneous ability and family wealth endowments over the life cycle. Our estimates show that (1) entrepreneurs and other self‐employed individuals require different types of human capital, and (2) elite colleges generate considerably more human capital gain than ordinary colleges, particularly for entrepreneurs. Distinguishing between elite and ordinary colleges improves our prediction of entrepreneurship decisions. Providing subsidies for elite colleges is more efficient than subsidizing their ordinary counterparts to encourage entrepreneurship, enhance intergenerational mobility, and enhance welfare. In contrast, although start‐up subsidy increases entrepreneurship, it does not improve their performance, and it is inferior to education subsidy in generating efficiency, equality, and intergenerational mobility.
... In contrast, we argue that prior entrepreneurial experience may reduce role conflict. First, according to social learning theory, prior entrepreneurial experience enables individuals to enlarge their tacit knowledge and skills related to entrepreneurial activities, such as opportunity pursing, financing seeking, market development, and customer management (Toft-Kehler et al., 2014;Olugbola, 2017). The entrepreneurial domain knowledge improves his or her competitiveness in building their business advantages (Dimov, 2010). ...
Despite the growing interest in academic entrepreneurs’ role conflict, we have not gained sufficient insights into its antecedents. Based on social learning theory, we examine how academic entrepreneurs’ prior experience—prior academic experience and prior entrepreneurial experience—influence their role conflict. Through multilevel linear regression and robustness tests using data from 394 academic entrepreneurs, we show that prior academic experience positively impacts role conflict, while prior entrepreneurial experience negatively impacts role conflict. Moreover, the negative effect of academic experience is weaker for academic entrepreneurs who have a longer length of prior entrepreneurial experience. Our study contributes to the literature on the antecedents of academic entrepreneurs’ role conflict and has important practical implications for academic entrepreneurial project cultivation and selection.
... Entrepreneurial experience mainly refers to the practical experience and industry experience of entrepreneurs [19]. Under the guidance of previous experience, entrepreneurs can experience more entrepreneurial insights or capture more valuable information in the process of entrepreneurship, so that it is easier to identify the entrepreneurial opportunities in favor of their own enterprises. ...
Previous studies have shown that the mental model of entrepreneurs has a significant impact on the growth of entrepreneurial enterprises. This paper explores a new method to analyze entrepreneur mental model and construct its portrait. Firstly, according to existing research results, this paper summarizes three key factors that affect entrepreneurial mental model: prior knowledge, personality characteristics and opportunity perception. Since then, the methods of entrepreneur mental portrait are introduced, which including cluster analysis method and fuzzy comprehensive evaluation method. Based on the investigation and analysis of 277 entrepreneurs, our study shows that the above construction method of mental model can accurately describe the entrepreneur mental model. The contribution of this paper is to explore the mental division of different types of entrepreneurs, and give the method of mental portrait of entrepreneurs, which provides a meaningful reference for promoting innovation and entrepreneurship education and training.
... From previous research (e.g. Aldrich & Yang, 2014;Ries, 2010;Toft-Kehler, Wennberg, & Kim, 2014), we already know that start-ups need to continually learn from emerging markets. They typically operate in a market where uncertainty is very high (Paternoster et al., 2014). ...
In this study, we examined how to manage start-ups experiencing a high level of uncertainty in emerging markets, and what are the principles of agile strategic learning in a start-up? Pragmatic literature on start-ups has put significant emphasis on agility and quick learning in managing a start-up, but scientific literature is scant in this field. In this study, we conceptualized agile strategic learning as start-ups’ capability to reflect on their experiences with existing hypotheses and reframe them in line with new insights about emerging markets and customers. Thus, agile strategic learning is a continuous transformative learning process where start-up teams rapidly experiment with new things, aiming to learn by testing existing beliefs, plans, and models. The agile strategic learning approach creates a competitive advantage for start-ups. We recommend further research on the methods and practices that promote the rate and agility of learning in managing start-ups.
... From a practical standpoint, it is more challenging to avoid the risks of an unsuccessful venture. It is not as simple as avoiding a single strategy or transferring knowledge from a failed past attempt to the current one (Toft-Kehler, Wennberg, & Kim, 2014). ...
New ventures face a variety of competitive and external challenges as they seek high performance. This requires an assortment of market and non-market growth strategies best aligned with the complex environments they face. However, rather than holistically evaluating these multiple drivers of high performance, past research has primarily focused on a narrow subset of strategies and environmental conditions. We attribute this to a mismatch between studying causally complex relationships with conventional symmetric regression methods. Instead, we advocate for an asymmetric configurational perspective that tests the causal complexity of high and not-high venture performance. We employ fuzzy-set qualitative comparative analysis (QCA) to detect different strategy configurations of entrepreneurial orientation, market orientation, and political networking amid complex environments of hostility, dysfunctional competition, and lack of institutional support for nearly 200 Chinese new ventures. Instead of a one-size-fits-all approach with an “either/or” trade-off, our main findings reveal six pathways with different configurations for high performance: either entrepreneurial or market orientation – or both – are necessary for high performance, and there are no consistent pathways for unsuccessful ventures. This offers a more complete picture of how new ventures operate and explains why individually conflicting results can be true collectively. We also demonstrate how configurational theory and methods can be employed to analyze the complexities of entrepreneurship.
Because family businesses are highly complex enterprises, researchers need appropriate theoretical and methodological tools to study them. The neoconfigurational perspective and its accompanying method, qualitative comparative analysis, are particularly well suited to phenomena characterized by complex causality, but their uptake in family business research has been slow and fragmented. To remedy this, the authors highlight their unique ability to address research questions for which other approaches are not well suited and discuss how they might be applied to family business phenomena.
The authors introduce the core tenets of the neoconfigurational perspective and how its set-theoretic epistemology differs from traditional approaches to theorizing and analysis. The authors then use a dataset of family firms to present a primer on conducting qualitative comparative analysis and interpreting the results.
The authors find that family firm resources can be combined in multiple ways to affect business survival, suggesting that resources are substitutable and complementary. The authors discuss how the unique features of the neoconfigurational approach, namely equifinality, conjunctural causation and causal asymmetry, can be fruitfully applied to break new ground in scholarly understanding of family businesses.
This article allows family business researchers to apply the neoconfigurational approach without first having to consult multiple and disparate sources often written for other disciplines. This article explicates how to leverage the theoretical and empirical advantages of the neoconfigurational approach in the context of family businesses, supporting a more widespread adoption of the neoconfigurational perspective in family business research.
Purpose
This study's main objective is to examine the effect of learning from entrepreneurial failure on performance, with a type of failure as a moderator variable. Interactions between internal and external causes of failure and learning from entrepreneurial failure are also investigated, as well as entrepreneurs' aspects (i.e. age, experience and education) and organisational contextual factors (i.e. size, sector and location).
Design/methodology/approach
This study employed a hypothetico-deductive approach through a survey of 250 purposively sampled entrepreneurs who had suffered business failures. The survey data were subjected to regression analysis and moderated regression using WarpPLS software and an independent sample t test for an in-depth analysis.
Findings
The results indicated that learning from entrepreneurial failure positively affected business performance, an effect moderated by the type of failure, particularly with large failures. Only perceived internal causes of failure exerted a positive effect on learning from entrepreneurial failure; the external causes did not. The effect of failure on business performance was stronger on entrepreneurs who were older and experienced, had non-university educations and operated small- and medium-sized enterprises (SMEs) outside Java–Bali islands.
Originality/value
This study's findings provide empirical evidence that supports the experiential learning theory and attribution theory in explaining the interaction between learning and failure, its cause, its consequences and its magnitude as perceived by entrepreneurs of SMEs in Indonesia, where the rate of failure is relatively high. The authors’ study also emphasises the roles of the entrepreneur and organisational contextual factors, which matter in learning to improve performance.
Pivoting decisions are strategic decisions made after the identification of a failure (or potential failure) of an element(s) of the business model, which may threaten the resource base of the startup. Although widely recognized among practitioners, pivots have only recently captured the attention of academics. Prior research had highlighted the importance and common occurrence of this decision, the role of the founders and the influence of their beliefs and cognition on pivots, and the implications on audiences, investors, and other stakeholders. However, there is a lack of understanding of why some entrepreneurs decide to pivot whilst others opt to persist regardless of the emergence of failures. Moreover, it is not yet clear whether pivots occur differently and how they differ from each other. To address these research gaps, this study conducts empirical qualitative research and employs a processual approach based on case studies. This study contributes to unveil how belief updating leads to pivot decisions, a process that occurs differently among startups albeit with five common core elements: Initial belief, belief breaking (the failure), retrospective sensemaking, abandonment of past belief, and prospective sensemaking. This research also found out that the interplay between the perception of failure and attribution of failure plays a major role in determining whether the failure will cause an actuating or inerting response, resulting in the belief updating or belief reinforcement, respectively. The findings contribute to the entrepreneurial literature by providing a better understanding of the influence of failure (perceptions and attributions) on entrepreneurs' beliefs and further actions.
This article connects work on emotion, rhetoric, and entrepreneurial experience as it reports findings from a questionnaire issued to 80 entrepreneurs who belong to the global entrepreneur community Startup Grind. The findings from this study offer researchers a more robust representation of the rhetorical theories that guide entrepreneurs’ professional communication practices. In particular, the authors report on the distribution and dependency between two variables: operative rhetorical theory (indicated by one of four choices) and entrepreneurial experience (indicated by number of ventures and total years of experience).
Although pre-entry experience is widely regarded as a critical asset that positively influences new entrant performance, empirical support is mixed. To address this inconsistency, we conduct a meta-analysis of the empirical findings in 272 papers. We draw theoretically on the organizational learning literature to argue that the pre-entry experience–new entrant performance relationship is contingent on the characteristics of pre-entry experience, the environmental context of the new entrant, and the interaction between the two. In particular, we examine the effects of two levels of pre-entry experience (firm and founder), four types of founder-level pre-entry experience (entrepreneurial, managerial, industry, and functional experience), and two types of environments (industry and institutional). The meta-analysis results show a significant and positive correlation between founder-level pre-entry experience and economic performance of 0.07. Likewise, the failure rates of spinouts and diversifying entrants are 11% lower than that of start-ups. The moderating analysis results show that the correlation of founder-level pre-entry experience and economic performance is lower in knowledge- or technology-intensive (KTI) industries and higher in low-KTI manufacturing and service industries. The correlation is also higher in institutional environments with high power distance and individualism. These findings provide compelling new evidence for the importance of pre-entry experience and advance our understanding of the boundary conditions on the pre-entry experience–new entrant performance relationship.
Supplemental Material: The online appendix is available at https://doi.org/10.1287/orsc.2022.1589 .
Deterministic learning is less feasible in high-noise and low-signal entrepreneurship contexts. The empirical evidence on serial entrepreneurs having an advantage over novice entrepreneurs is mixed. Entrepreneurs learn by lowering high noise (w) and increasing the fidelity of a learning outcome (θ). We draw on Jovanovic and Nyarko’s (1995) Bayesian learning framework. Assessing learning by doing across fifteen combinations of the number of businesses and the industry distance among founded firms, our findings are bleak. Learning in successive businesses is a high-noise (w) and low-signal (θ) environment, where the progress ratio, or the ratio of total learning to initial learning, is close to 1. In launching businesses in multiple industries, these learning challenges are slightly higher. Overall, learning by doing is noisy and delivers limited improvements in business duration.
Entrepreneurship resilience during a crisis is an important research area. However, prior research has not examined cognitive antecedents of entrepreneurial resilience. Using the 2014 oil price crisis in the Middle East as a natural experiment, we draw on system justification theory to understand why and how entrepreneurs differ in the extent of their attitudinal changes toward corruption. We find foreign entrepreneurs substantially increased their willingness to engage in corruption whereas local entrepreneurs did not. Among foreign entrepreneurs, corruption willingness increases more among those from countries where corruption is not the norm, than those from more corrupt home countries.
Purpose
The purpose of this paper is to investigate the moderating role of previous venture experience on the relationship between learning breadth and innovation breadth, defined as the range of innovation types within a firm, and the impacts on SME performance.
Design/methodology/approach
A theoretical model was developed, and hypotheses were tested using step-wise multivariate regressions on survey data from 509 North American SME respondents.
Findings
The results demonstrate that the previous venture experience of a firm's top management plays a key role in enhancing the innovation breadth for a given level of learning breadth. There is a curvilinear relationship between innovation breadth and learning breadth, and increases in innovation breadth lead to increases in firm performance.
Practical implications
The results indicate that organizations seeking higher performance returns by expanding their breadth of innovations need parallel attention on higher learning breadth in order to adequately capture the value from this broader set of innovations.
Originality/value
The paper contextualizes learning and innovation in the SMEs and argues that the consideration of diversity (breadth) of learning and innovation can help us understand their performance implications across industries. It also extends the effect of previous venture experience (PVE) of the leadership team in explaining performance. Beyond their ability to address external factors, PVE has a moderating effect on the relationship between learning and innovation breadth across the organization. Previous venture experience serves as both a guide and catalyst for investments in learning activities that lead to a broader range of innovation activities across the firm.
Entrepreneurial exit is an important phase of the entrepreneurial process that has a significant impact on enterprises and the economy. Extant research in developed countries has shown that personal and business motives of entrepreneurs trigger exit intentions, which, in turn, affect their choice of exit strategy. Though all-India census indicates that most of the closed enterprises are micro and small enterprises (MSE), the factors influencing the exit decision of the Indian MSE owners still remain largely unexplored due to their unorganised nature. Since the majority of Indian MSEs are owned by individuals, and human capital represents the assets of each individual, this article aims to understand the influence of entrepreneurs’ human capital on exit intention for re-entry using the theory of planned behaviour. This study employs a questionnaire-based survey approach and uses a sample size of 150 MSE owners of working enterprises in industrial estates of Mangalore and Udupi districts for hypotheses testing. Empirical analysis is performed using SPSS software, and the results indicate that entrepreneurs with good health and inherited experience have exit intentions and subsequent entrepreneurial re-entry. This knowledge may be useful for stakeholders to understand serial entrepreneurship with a proper exit mechanism.
In the management literature, the role of learning from experience and its effect on performance has been highlighted. However, little is known about the effects of strategic change on performance due to aspects pertaining to the mobility of learning. Building on different learning theories, we theorize about the effect of strategic change on performance when: (i) strategic change does not require the mobilizing of resources; (ii) strategic change does not involve exposure to a new set of stakeholders; and (iii) time commitment to previous strategies is low. We confront our contentions with data on serial campaign launchers in crowdfunding. The data indicates that changing industry adversely affects fundraising performance due to the specificity of a portion of the accrued learning. This adverse effect is mitigated by venture launching experience and exacerbated following failure. Implications for practitioners and scholars are discussed.
We respond to recent calls for a better understanding of the effects of management control systems (MCS) in small start-ups. Using a sample of business-incubated start-ups, we examine the performance effects of the alignment between MCS and innovation strategies. Using regression analyses, we find higher performance when financial (non-financial) MCS are associated with an emphasis on exploratory (exploitative) innovation strategies. Overall, this study contributes to understanding the contingent effects of MCS and innovation strategies in business-incubated start-ups, as well as the consequences for their outcome and survival.
Drawing on human capital theory and the knowledge-based view, our meta-analysis integrates the results from 85 independent samples spanning 2009–2020 (572,888 total observations). Our findings provide empirical evidence for the small, but significant, correlation between entrepreneurs’ prior experience and firm performance (r = 0.095). In addition, several moderators are identified: type of experience (that is, specific vs generic), entrepreneurs’ characteristics (that is, education), type of business created (that is, self-employed vs small- and medium-sized enterprises), and the cultural context in which entrepreneurs are embedded (that is, level of uncertainty avoidance). Implications for research and practice are discussed and avenues for future studies about entrepreneurs’ prior experience and their role in the entrepreneurship process are outlined.
Purpose
While most extant research focused on different dimensions of the entrepreneurs’ social network such as the size and quality of the network, the focus of this paper is on the extent to which entrepreneurs utilize their personal network with suppliers, competitors, customers, and government officials to support the operations of their ventures. This paper also takes into account the effects of industry level determinants that can influence the relationship between entrepreneurs’ personal network usage and young firms’ performance.
Design/methodology/approach
The paper employs confirmatory factor analysis and moderated hierarchical multiple regressions on a sample of 246 young firms in Kuwait.
Findings
The results indicate that entrepreneurs' personal network usage is positively associated with young firms' performance. The results also reveal that industry dynamism strengthens this relationship, while in hostile industries the relationship between network usage and young firms' performance becomes weaker.
Originality/value
The present study provides insights into how the extent of utilization of an entrepreneur's personal network affects the firm's performance. Furthermore, by unpacking how industry dynamism and industry hostility influence the entrepreneurs' ability to reap benefits from their personal networks, this paper enriches the research on the role of industry factors in the performance of young firms.
This study explores the relationship between the founder’s entrepreneurial experience and new venture performance in the China’s emerging economy. Based on a sample of ventures in the southern region of China, we demonstrate that the relationship between entrepreneurial experience and performance in Chinese ventures is nonlinear. The empirical study reveals that a high level of experience has a negative impact on performance and there is an inverted U-shaped relationship between the founder’s entrepreneurial experience and new venture performance under the context of the China’s emerging economy. We also find that environmental uncertainty moderates the inverted U-shaped relationship.
Entrepreneurial experience alone may not necessarily guarantee venture success. Some entrepreneurs develop into experts through learning from their experiences, whereas others fail to do so. To explain the missing link between experience and expertise, we introduce a social-cognitive model of self-regulated entrepreneurial learning (SREL) to demonstrate how entrepreneurial expertise can be systematically developed to increase the probability of entrepreneurial success. We identify key self-regulatory learning processes essential to entrepreneurial learning by developing propositions and related practice-oriented applications of the SREL model for entrepreneurs.
In this paper, I explore business cycle‐related dynamics in differences in exit decisions between serial and novice entrepreneurs. Using time series geographic variation in economic conditions, I examine how businesses founded by serial and novice entrepreneurs differentially respond to changes on average state personal income, alternative employment options, and home values. Weibull survival model estimates indicate that serial entrepreneurs are more likely to endure declines in aggregate income and credit availability, but are relatively more likely to go out of business as slack increases in the labor market (increases in unemployment rate). In the second part of the paper, I provide evidence that these dynamics are driven by differences in business strategies and the use of financial resources.
The model developed here explains why some firms survive while other firms with equal economic performance do not. We argue that organizational survival is not strictly a function of economic performance but also depends on a firm's own threshold of performance. We apply this threshold model to the study of new venture survival, in which the threshold is determined by the entrepreneur's human capital characteristics, such as alternative employment opportunities, psychic income from entrepreneurship, and cost of switching to other occupations. Using a sample of 1,547 entrepreneurs of new businesses in the U.S., we find strong support for the model. The findings suggest that firms with low thresholds may choose to continue or survive despite comparatively low performance.
Multiplicative interaction models are common in the quantitative political science literature. This is so for good reason.
Institutional arguments frequently imply that the relationship between political inputs and outcomes varies depending on the
institutional context. Models of strategic interaction typically produce conditional hypotheses as well. Although conditional
hypotheses are ubiquitous in political science and multiplicative interaction models have been found to capture their intuition
quite well, a survey of the top three political science journals from 1998 to 2002 suggests that the execution of these models
is often flawed and inferential errors are common. We believe that considerable progress in our understanding of the political
world can occur if scholars follow the simple checklist of dos and don'ts for using multiplicative interaction models presented
in this article. Only 10% of the articles in our survey followed the checklist.
Acquiring the knowledge they need to organize new businesses is a life-long learning process for nascent entrepreneurs, both before and during the organizing process. We argue that creating viable and profitable ventures depends not only on the habits, heuristics, and routines that nascent entrepreneurs have acquired from family, schools, and work careers prior to the startup stage, but also on what they can learn by doing, borrowing, and experimenting during the startup process. Entrepreneurs without effective habits or heuristics, or who have acquired less knowledge or fewer routines, may not be able to learn fast enough from feedback during the startup process to avoid being selected out. We conclude the paper by offering critical questions and a research agenda for learning and organizing in new ventures.
This paper applies evolutionary economics reasoning to the strategic alliance context and examines whether and how routinization processes at the partnering-firm level influence the performance of the cooperative agreement. In doing so, it introduces the concept of interorganizational routines, defined as stable patterns of interaction among two firms developed and refined in the course of repeated collaborations, and suggests that partner-specific, technology-specific, and general experience accumulation at the partnering-firm level influence the extent to which alliances result in knowledge accumulation, create new growth opportunities, and enable partnering firms to achieve their strategic objectives. We also consider how governance design choices at the transaction level shape the effectiveness of interorganizational routizination processes. Based on a sample of 145 biotechnology alliances, we find that only partner-specific experience has a positive impact on alliance performance, and that this effect is stronger in the absence of equity-based governance mechanisms. We interpret these results to support the role of interfirm coordination and cooperation routines in enhancing the effectiveness of collaborative agreements.
This article tests the insights and predictions of venture success as offered by reporters and experts in Inc. magazine, to the predictions generated from an analysis of data from a venture screening questionnaire. The venture screening questionnaire, consisting of 85 items covering four broad categories: (1) Individual Characteristics; (2) Entrepreneurial Behaviors; (3) Strategy; and (4) Environment, was used to evaluate 27 “Anatomy of a Start-up” articles from Inc. magazine. The creation of the questionnaire was guided by the following premises:
The field of strategic management is predicated fundamentally on the idea that managements' decisions are endogenous to their expected performance implications. Yet, based on a review of more than a decade of empirical research in the Strategic Management Journal, we find that few papers econometrically correct for such endogeneity. In response, we now describe the endogeneity problem for cross-sectional and panel data, referring specifically to management's choice among discrete strategies with continuous performance outcomes. We then present readily implementable econometric methods to correct for endogeneity and, when feasible, provide STATA code to ease implementation. We also discuss extensions and nuances of these models that are sometimes difficult to decipher in more standard treatments. These extensions are not typically discussed in the strategy literature, but they are, in fact, highly pertinent to empirical strategic management research.
This study of chain affiliation in the Manhattan hotel industry examines the benefits and drawbacks of affiliation with a chain, which can be a source of operating knowledge and economies of scale for components but also a potential source of strategic constraint. Our analysis demonstrates the effects of chain affiliation on the failure of component organizations and competitive dynamics in the Manhattan hotel industry from 1898 to 1980. Under most circumstances, chain affiliation improves the survival chances of component hotels in Manhattan. All chain memberships are not equal, however, and the survival benefits to components vary systematically with the nature of the operating experience and the number and distribution of components of hotel chains. Our findings show how understanding the role of chains can inform both learning and ecological models of organization.
The conventional approach to measuring interindustry relatedness uses the Standard Industrial Classification (SIC) system to capture the “distance” between industries. Although relatedness measures based on SIC codes (or equivalent classifications) are readily available and easy to compute, they do not screen effectively for the conditions under which related diversification creates value. This article constructs an alternative, survivor-based measure of interindustry relatedness and compares it to similar measures based on distances between SIC codes. The authors find that survivor-based measures consistently outperform SIC-based measures in predicting firms' decisions to enter new markets, even when herding tendencies and motives related to mutual forbearance are taken into account.
While earlier researchers have argued that the founding team's industry and start-up experience should positively affect new venture performance, robust empirical support for these arguments has been lacking. Moreover, theory suggests that the relationship between founding team experience and new venture performance may be more complex than previous empirical research suggests. We test specific hypotheses about the effect of founding team industry and start-up experience on the survival and sales of 223 new ven- tures initiated by a representative sample of Swedish new ventures, using a methodology that overcomes the limitations to previous research. Our results show that founding team experience enhances both new venture survival and sales, but that the effects are non-lin- ear, and vary with venture age.
Although interest in organizational learning has grown dramatically in recent years, a general theory of organizational learning has remained elusive. We identify re- newal of the overall enterprise as the underlying phenomenon of interest and organ- izational learning as a principal means to this end. With this perspective we develop a framework for the process of organizational learning, presenting organizational learning as four processes-intuiting, interpreting, integrating, and institutionaliz- ing-linking the individual, group, and organizational levels.
This paper focuses on dynamic capabilities and, more generally, the resource‐based view of the firm. We argue that dynamic capabilities are a set of specific and identifiable processes such as product development, strategic decision making, and alliancing. They are neither vague nor tautological. Although dynamic capabilities are idiosyncratic in their details and path dependent in their emergence, they have significant commonalities across firms (popularly termed ‘best practice’). This suggests that they are more homogeneous, fungible, equifinal, and substitutable than is usually assumed. In moderately dynamic markets, dynamic capabilities resemble the traditional conception of routines. They are detailed, analytic, stable processes with predictable outcomes. In contrast, in high‐velocity markets, they are simple, highly experiential and fragile processes with unpredictable outcomes. Finally, well‐known learning mechanisms guide the evolution of dynamic capabilities. In moderately dynamic markets, the evolutionary emphasis is on variation. In high‐velocity markets, it is on selection. At the level of RBV, we conclude that traditional RBV misidentifies the locus of long‐term competitive advantage in dynamic markets, overemphasizes the strategic logic of leverage, and reaches a boundary condition in high‐velocity markets. Copyright © 2000 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.
This paper focuses on dynamic capabilities and, more generally, the resource-based view of the firm. We argue that dynamic capabilities are a set of specific and identifiable processes such as product development, strategic decision making, and alliancing. They are neither vague nor tautological. Although dynamic capabilities are idiosyncratic in their details and path dependent in their emergence, they have significant commonalities across firms (popularly termed ‘best practice’). This suggests that they are more homogeneous, fungible, equifinal, and substitutable than is usually assumed. In moderately dynamic markets, dynamic capabilities resemble the traditional conception of routines. They are detailed, analytic, stable processes with predictable outcomes. In contrast, in high-velocity markets, they are simple, highly experiential and fragile processes with unpredictable outcomes. Finally, well-known learning mechanisms guide the evolution of dynamic capabilities. In moderately dynamic markets, the evolutionary emphasis is on variation. In high-velocity markets, it is on selection. At the level of RBV, we conclude that traditional RBV misidentifies the locus of long-term competitive advantage in dynamic markets, overemphasizes the strategic logic of leverage, and reaches a boundary condition in high-velocity markets. Copyright © 2000 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.
Despite a century's worth of research, arguments surrounding the question of whether far transfer occurs have made little progress toward resolution. The authors argue the reason for this confusion is a failure to specify various dimensions along which transfer can occur, resulting in comparisons of "apples and oranges." They provide a framework that describes 9 relevant dimensions and show that the literature can productively be classified along these dimensions, with each study situated at the intersection of Various dimensions. Estimation of a single effect size for far transfer is misguided in view of this complexity. The past 100 years of research shows that evidence for transfer under some conditions is substantial, but critical conditions for many key questions are untested.
This paper focuses on dynamic capabilities and, more generally, the resource-based view of the firm. We argue that dynamic capabilities are a set of specific and identifiable processes such as product development, strategic decision making, and alliancing. They are neither vague nor tautological. Although dynamic capabilities are idiosyncratic in their details and path dependent in their emergence, they have significant commonalities across firms (popularly termed 'best practice'). This suggests that they are more homogeneous, fungible, equifinal and substitutable than is usually assumed. In moderately dynamic markets, dynamic capabilities resemble the traditional conception of routines. They are detailed, analytic stable processes with predictable outcomes. In contrast, in high-velocity markets, they are simple, highly experiential and fragile processes with unpredictable outcomes. Finally, well-known learning mechanisms guide the evolution of dynamic capabilities. In moderately dynamic markets, the evolutionary emphasis is on variation. In high-velocity markets, it is on selection. At the level of REV, we conclude that traditional REV misidentifies the locus of long-term competitive advantage in dynamic markers, overemphasizes the strategic logic of leverage, and reaches a boundary condition in high-velocity markets. Copyright (C) 2000 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.
Many decisions are based on beliefs concerning the likelihood of uncertain events such as the outcome of an election, the guilt of a defendant, or the future value of the dollar. Occasionally, beliefs concerning uncertain events are expressed in numerical form as odds or subjective probabilities. In general, the heuristics are quite useful, but sometimes they lead to severe and systematic errors. The subjective assessment of probability resembles the subjective assessment of physical quantities such as distance or size. These judgments are all based on data of limited validity, which are processed according to heuristic rules. However, the reliance on this rule leads to systematic errors in the estimation of distance. This chapter describes three heuristics that are employed in making judgments under uncertainty. The first is representativeness, which is usually employed when people are asked to judge the probability that an object or event belongs to a class or event. The second is the availability of instances or scenarios, which is often employed when people are asked to assess the frequency of a class or the plausibility of a particular development, and the third is adjustment from an anchor, which is usually employed in numerical prediction when a relevant value is available.
This research focuses on the degree of similiarity between pre-ownership experience and the work requirements of the present venture as a moderator of the relationship between pre-ownership experience and venture performance. Multiple itme scales are developed to assess two dimensions of business similarity: (1) talk environment similarity, and (2) skills/abilities similarity. The results indicate a positive main effect for task enviroment similarity and a curvilinear moderation effect for skill/abilities similarity. Qualitative interviews are used to help better explain the results.
Some geographical locations have characteristics that create opportunities for de novo enterprises, but not all new firms can access the benefits presented by a potential location. The ability of new firms to appropriate benefit and avoid risk depends on the resources that entrepreneurs can marshal for their enterprise. This article develops a model of the interplay between the attributes of de novo entrants and their founding locations. The model assumes that de novo entrants tend to appear in the region where their founders live, but that founders choose among locations within their regions.The test of the model, using data on all de novo entrants in the Canadian manufacturing sector during 1984-98, reveals that entrants with greater resource and capability endowments are more likely to locate in areas with an agglomeration of similar firms, but this effect reverses at high endowment levels. Additionally, larger entrants are less likely to locate in areas characterized by intense local competition and potential entry deterrence, while smaller and well-endowed entrants tend to locate in areas where entry barriers are lower and asset turnover higher. These findings suggest that entrants choose locations strategically within their founding regions.They also indicate that the strategic imperatives of de novo entrants differ significantly from those of geographically diversifying firms, and thus suggest amendments to theories of location choice when modeling the decisions of new ventures.
This article considers the potential and actual role of different forms of entrepreneur to urban and rural economic development. In particular, they identify the importance of the 'habitual' entrepreneur who sets up a series of businesses, either in parallel or in sequence, rather than as a one-off event, in the economic life of a community. They suggest that the success of such owners is a significant factor in start-up programmes and so the relevance for many local economic development strategies is explored. Their recommendation is that policy makers and practitioners should target resources not at businesses but at entrepreneurs.
Within the same company, several factories, all essentially producing the same products the same way, often differ widely in productivity and profitability. Twelve factories belonging to three companies were studied to discover the impact of managerial policies on productivity. The factories' total factor productivity was measured monthly over several years and related to managerial policies.
Miller, Cardinal, and Glick (1997) challenged the conclusions in Golden (1992b), which examined the use of retrospective data in strategic management research. Further, the authors suggest that my findings have led many other researchers to avoid the use of retrospective data. The present note suggests recent researchers have not entirely avoided retrospective data but have perhaps added precautions when using such data. I also suggest that Miller and colleagues did not fully represent important aspects of my research and inappropriately compare my study with others.
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 processes to firm foundings. The firm-founding experience of potential founders impacts organizational foundings by influencing expectations of the liability of newness. We test our explanation on the set of inventions patented by the Massachusetts Institute of Technology over the period 1980-1996 by examining the effect of inventors' career experiences on the likelihood that an invention will be commercialized through the founding of a new organization.
While some previous studies have found that the role of founders' collective experiences is paramount in resolving problems inherent in startups, others have failed to substantiate this. This study claims that this incongruence is attributable to a failure to consider organizational processes in which founders' experiences translate into organizational assets through information distribution and interpretation. Using the data from the Panel Study of Entrepreneurial Dynamics, this study demonstrates that startups reach their break-even point faster when their founders have had work experience in the same industry, and that this effect becomes stronger when these firms commit more resources to information distribution and interpretation.
“Creative” is a word with many uses. Sometimes it is used to describe the potential of persons to produce creative works whether or not they have produced any work as yet. Sometimes it is used to describe everyday behaviors as, for example, when a nursery school curriculum is said to encourage creative activities, such as drawing or storytelling. In this chapter, I will restrict the meaning of the term in two ways. First, I will be concerned solely with creative productivity, that is, with creativity expressed in the actual production of creative works and not with the unexpressed potential for producing such works. Second, I will be concerned only with creative acts at the highest level, that is, with the best and most valued works of artists, scientists, and scholars.
This study explores organizational growth in technology-based ventures. We relate characteristics of the founding top-management team, strategy, and environment to the sales growth of newly founded U.S. semiconductor firms. The results indicate significant main and interaction effects for the founding top-management team and market stage on firm growth. In contrast, the technical innovation of firm strategy and marketplace competition were not significant. Finally, the founding top-management team and market-stage effects were increasingly large over time. Overall, these results indicate that both environmental determinism and strategic choice operate on young firms. These findings also suggest chaos-theory linkages to positive-feedback models and sensitive dependence of organizational growth on founding conditions.
This paper investigates whether – consistent with theories of entrepreneurial learning by doing and resource acquisition – serial entrepreneurs' performance follows a rising trajectory over successive venturing spells. Or whether – consistent with theories of selective learning from failure and hubris – serial entrepreneurs perform better after experiencing a bad spell (and worse after experiencing a good spell). We test competing hypotheses about serial entrepreneurs' performance trajectories using Panel Study of Income Dynamics (PSID) data, which track the dynamic performance of a sample of American serial entrepreneurs for up to one-quarter of a century. The findings show that serial entrepreneurs obtain temporary benefits from spells of venturing which eventually die away. This implies that venturing generates benefits which spill over from one venture into subsequent ones, and it can provide a rationale for public policies which encourage re-entries by entrepreneurs, even if those entrepreneurs performed poorly in their first ventures.
Using a study of the relationship between bureaucratic work environments and individual rates of entrepreneurship, I revisit a fundamental premise of sociological approaches to entrepreneurship, namely, that the social context shapes the likelihood of entrepreneurial activity, above and beyond any effects of individual characteristics. Establishing such contextual effects empirically is complicated by the possibility that unobserved individual traits influence both the contexts in which people are observed and their likelihood of becoming entrepreneurs. This paper presents the first systematic study of the effects of bureaucracy on entrepreneurship that accounts for such unobserved sorting processes. Analyses of data on labor market attachments and transitions to entrepreneurship in Denmark between 1990 and 1997 show that people who work for large and old firms are less likely to become entrepreneurs, net of a host of observable individual characteristics. Moreover, there is strong evidence to suggest that this negative effect of bureaucracy does not spuriously reflect self-selection by nascent entrepreneurs into different types of firms. An important implication of this finding is that the structure of organizational populations affects the supply of nascent entrepreneurs, as well as the availability of entrepreneurial opportunities.
Although previous studies have examined the rewards available to individuals inside entrepreneurial firms, entrepreneurial experience may provide rewards that are independent of the entrepreneurial context. Building on human capital theory, this study provides theoretical explanations for the effects of experience at a start-up on earnings across an individual's career and then examines these implications in the context of California's semiconductor industry. Comparing the career trajectories of employees who join start-ups with a matched control group of comparable workers without start-up experience, I perform a counterfactual analysis and find that start-up experience in this context has a persistent positive effect on earnings that extend outside the entrepreneurial environment. The results from the matched sample are consistent with the development and revelation of valuable general human capital through entrepreneurial experience and suggest that the rewards to entrepreneurship are not limited to just the rewards available inside entrepreneurial firms.
This paper was accepted by Lee Fleming, entrepreneurship and innovation.
In this paper I use the psychological literature on grief to explore the emotion oi business failure, suggesting that the loss of a business from failure can cause the self-employed to feel grief—a negative emotional response interfering with the ability to leam from the events surrounding that loss. I discuss how a dual process of grief recovery maximizes the leaming from business failure.
Use of progress functions in strategic planning has led to the principle that firms can expect continuous cost improvements with cumulative output. But finding policies that result in continuous cost improvements requires a better understanding of the dynamics underlying firms' progress functions. This paper draws on more than 200 empirical and theoretical studies of progress functions in industrial engineering, economics, and management. Factors causing progress fall into four categories that vary in origin (exogenous or endogenous) and in type (autonomous or induced).
Organizations learn from other organizations. However, the observations available to them are typically a biased sample. The organizations that can be observed at any point in time are the survivors of a selective process that has eliminated a large fraction of the underlying population. In addition, there is a strong tendency to focus on successful organizations in books and the business press. As a result, the available sample of organizations usually undersamples failure. This paper shows that such undersampling of failure can contribute to a variety of false beliefs about effective management. Simply by observing existing organizations, laymen may get a misleading picture of the determinants of corporate performance. In particular, risky practices, even if they are unrelated to performance in the full population of organizations, may seem to be positively related to performance in a sample of survivors. I argue that this bias frequently implies that the organizational theories of managers and other observers of organizations will be systematically biased. Observations of existing organizations will show that unreliable, uninformed practices and practices that involve concentrated resource allocation are superior to reliable, informed practices or practices that involve diversified resource allocation. I show that this implies that observations of existing organizations will produce compelling but potentially misleading evidence for the significance several common managerial practices.
Why do some organizations learn at faster rates than others? Why do organizations "forget"? Could productivity gains acquired in one part of an organization be transferred to another? These are among the questions addressed in Organizational Learning: Creating, Retaining and Transferring Knowledge. Since its original publication in 1999, this book has set the standard for research and analysis in the field. This fully updated and expanded edition showcases the most current research and insights, featuring a new chapter that provides a theoretical framework for analyzing organizational learning and presents evidence about how the organizational context affects learning processes and outcomes. Drawing from a wide array of studies across the spectrum of management, economics, sociology, and psychology, Organizational Learning explores the dynamics of learning curves in organizations, with particular emphasis on how individuals and groups generate, share, reinforce, and sometimes forget knowledge. With an increased emphasis on service organizations, including healthcare, Linda Argote demonstrates that organizations vary dramatically in the rates at which they learn-with profound implications for productivity, performance, and managerial and strategic decision making. © Springer Science+Business Media New York 2013. All rights are reserved.
There is empirical evidence that established firms often have difficulty adapting to radical technological change. Although prior work in the evolutionary tradition emphasizes the inertial forces associated with the local nature of learning processes, little theoretical attention has been devoted in this tradition to understanding how managerial cognition affects the adaptive intelligence of organizations. Through an in-depth case study of the response of the Polaroid Corporation to the ongoing shift from analog to digital imaging, we expand upon this work by examining the relationship between managers' understanding of the world and the accumu- lation of organizational capabilities. The Polaroid story clearly illustrates the importance of managerial cognitive representations in directing search processes in a new learning environ- ment, the evolutionary trajectory of organizational capabilities, and ultimately processes of organizational adaptation. Copyright © 2000 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.
Drawing on work from behavioral learning theory in psychology, this study examines the influence of prior organizational acquisition experience on the performance of acquisitions. This theory, which examines both the conditions preceding organization events and organizational responses, predicts that experience effects may range from positive to negative. Consistent with this theory, data from 449 acquisitions show an overall U-shaped relationship between organization acquisition experience and acquisition performance. In addition, the more similar a firm's acquisition targets are to its prior targets, the better they perform. These findings suggest that relatively inexperienced acquirers, after making their first acquisition, inappropriately generalize acquisition experience to subsequent dissimilar acquisitions, while more experienced acquirers appropriately discriminate between their acquisitions. Behavioral learning theory, then, may enhance understanding of organization experience effects.
In this position paper, we report the findings of interviews with four medical doctors regarding the use of internet search by doctors and patients in support of the treatment process; we particularly focus on opportunities for collaboration between doctors and patients in clinical information retrieval scenarios.
Organizational routines—multi-actor, interlocking, reciprocally-triggered sequences of actions—are a major source of the reliability and speed of organizational performance. Without routines, organizations would lose efficiency as structures for collective action. But these frequently repeated action sequences can also occasionally give rise to serious suboptimality, hampering performance when they are automatically transferred onto inappropriate situations.
While the knowledgeable design and redesign of routines presents a likely lever for those wishing to enhance organizational performance, the lever remains difficult to grasp because routines are hard to observe, analyze, and describe. This paper argues that new work in psychology on “procedural” memory may help explain how routines arise, stabilize and change. Procedural memory has close links to notions of individual skill and habit. It is memory for how things are done that is relatively automatic and inarticulate, and it encompasses both cognitive and motor activities.
We report an experiment in which paired subjects developed interlocked task performance patterns that display the chief characteristics of organizational routines. We show evidence from their behavior supporting the claim that individuals store their components of organizational routines in procedural memory. If routines are stored as distributed procedural memories, this may be the source of distinctive properties reported by observers of organizational routines. The paper concludes with implications for both research and practice.
Though often considered a critical factor in predicting venture success, past research into the effects of founder experience has often produced mixed results. What factors influence founders’ decisions to use, or not use, experience they possess? This study examines the role job dissatisfaction might play in a founder's decision to leverage multiple types of experience (sector, entrepreneurial, role model and education) on external (sales performance) and internal (founder intrinsic satisfaction) outcomes. Greater dissatisfaction was associated with decreased likelihood of founders building on sector experience. While dissatisfaction influenced the use of experience, greater experience levels did not consistently account for higher levels of venture sales performance. Moreover, no differences were found in founders’ intrinsic satisfaction, regardless of sales performance. The differing results in the two outcome measures suggest potential differences in the goals and consequent actions of entrepreneurs in the study. By examining multiple types of experience, and what might moderate founders’ use of that experience, these findings provide additional insights into the entrepreneurial process.
This study investigated 3 broad classes of individual-differences variables (job-search motives, competencies, and constraints) as predictors of job-search intensity among 292 unemployed job seekers. Also assessed was the relationship between job-search intensity and reemployment success in a longitudinal context. Results show significant relationships between the predictors employment commitment, financial hardship, job-search self-efficacy, and motivation control and the outcome job-search intensity. Support was not found for a relationship between perceived job-search constraints and job-search intensity. Motivation control was highlighted as the only lagged predictor of job-search intensity over time for those who were continuously unemployed. Job-search intensity predicted Time 2 reemployment status for the sample as a whole, but not reemployment quality for those who found jobs over the study's duration. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2012 APA, all rights reserved)
This chapter discusses the interrelationships between task structure, encoding and retrieval processes, and the prior knowledge of the learner, as these factors relate to transfer. It presents a distinction between perceived similarity of the training and transfer situations, based on salient common features of their representations, and objective structural similarity, based on the actual nature of the task components determining appropriate responses. Transfer is affected by both types of similarity. Perceived similarity determines whether transfer is attempted, whereas objective structural similarity determines whether transfer is positive or negative. The encoding of the training task fosters subsequent transfer to the extent that the learner acquires rules that are applicable to a range of superficially different tasks with structural commonalities. If the transfer task evokes similar goals and processing mechanisms, or has salient surface resemblances to the training task, these common components then serve as the basis for retrieval of the acquired knowledge in the transfer context. Several factors that influence learning and retention merit more extensive investigation in relation to transfer. One such factor is the role of context and contrast in determining the learner's representation of the training task.