Institutional theory is a prominent perspective in contemporary organizational research. It encompasses a large, diverse body of theoretical and empirical work connected by a common emphasis on cultural understandings and shared expectations. Institutional theory is often used to explain the adoption and spread of formal organizational structures, including written policies, standard practices, and new forms of organization. Tracing its roots to the writings of Max Weber on legitimacy and authority, the perspective originated in the 1950s and 1960s with the work of Talcott Parsons, Philip Selznick, and Alvin Gouldner on organization–environment relations. It subsequently underwent a “cognitive turn” in the 1970s, with an emphasis on taken-for-granted habits and assumptions, and became commonly known as “neo-institutionalism” in organizational studies. Recently, work based on the perspective has shifted from a focus on processes involved in producing isomorphism to a focus on institutional change, exemplified by studies of the emergence of new laws and regulations, products, services, and occupations. The expansion of the theoretical framework has contributed to its long-term vitality, though a number of challenges to its development remain, including resolving inconsistencies in the different models of decision-making and action (homo economicus vs. homo sociologicus) that underpin institutional analysis and improving our understanding of the intersection of socio-cultural forces and entrepreneurial agency.
Article
Institutional Theory in Organization Studies
Robert J. David, Pamela S. Tolbert, and Johnny Boghossian
Article
International Initial Public Offerings
Christina Maria Muehr and Thomas Lindner
An initial public offering (IPO) is the process within which private firms offer their shares to the public by form of a new stock issuance for the first time. IPOs have strong economic significance and performance fluctuations, which affect both firms and public markets. What is more, acquiring capital on a stock exchange outside of the firm’s home country comes with substantial benefits, including access to a greater and more diversified pool of resources and investors, more liquid markets, the opportunity to raise capital at a lower cost of capital, and increased capital retention for future investments. On the contrary, it also introduces multiple challenges, including higher underwriting, professional, and initial listing fees or lower analyst coverage, trading volume, and trading liquidity.
Integrating and building on literature emerging from multiple domains, including international business (IB), accounting, finance, entrepreneurship, management, and economics, international IPO research clusters around seven central themes: corporate governance, upper echelon, social partners, internationalization activities, institutions, technology, and market activities. Each of these themes employs unique theoretical perspectives and findings, which are at the forefront of advancements in international IPO research from its early beginnings and altogether provide a deep understanding with some potential avenues of future enquiries within the field.
Article
Micro-Foundations of Institutional Logic Shifts: Entrepreneurial Action in Response to Crises
Trenton Alma Williams
Institutional logics shape how actors interpret and organize their environment. Institutional logics include society’s structural, normative, and symbolic influences that provide organizations and individuals with norms, values, assumptions, and rules that guide decision-making and action. While institutional logics influence individuals and organizations, they do not exist/form in a vacuum, but rather are instantiated in the practices and patterned behaviors of actors who act as carriers of logics in specific contexts. Given the dynamic interaction between institutional logics and individual/organizational actors, research has begun to explore the micro-level processes that influence institutional logic changes to help explain how and why those who are shaped by an institution enact changes in the very context in which they are embedded. Thus, the formation and changing of institutional logics involve precipitating action—which can include entrepreneurial action. Entrepreneurial action—especially in moments of crisis (e.g., when there is a disruptive event, natural disaster, or external feature that disturbs the status quo), can function as a micro-foundation for institutional logic shifts. An entrepreneurship model of dominant logic shifts therefore reveals how crises induce sensemaking activities that can influence shifts in how actor’s see the world, which in turn motivates the pursuit of entrepreneurial opportunities. Significant disruptions, such as environmental jolts, have a triggering effect in enabling individuals to problematize previously held beliefs and logics, allowing them to temporarily “step out of” status quo institutional logics. With prior beliefs and logics problematized, individual decision-makers become open to seeing new interpretations of their surroundings as it is and as it could be. Therefore, actors shift their dominant way of seeing the world (e.g., dominant logic) and then enact this new logic through ventures that, ultimately, can shift and alter institutional-level logics. Therefore, an entrepreneurship model of dominant logic shifts serves as an explanation for how broader institutional logics may shift as a result of the interaction between entrepreneurial action and the environment following a major disruption.
Article
National Systems of Innovation
Erik E. Lehmann and Julian Schenkenhofer
The pursuit of economic growth stands out as one of the main imperatives within modern economies. Nevertheless, economies differ considerably in their competitiveness. Theories on the endogeneity of growth agree on the value of knowledge creation and innovativeness to determine a country’s capability to achieve a sustained performance and to adapt to the dynamics of changing environments and faster information flows. To this effect, national institutional regimes shape nation-specific contexts and embed individuals and firms. The resulting incentive structures shape the attitudes and behavior of individuals and firms alike, whose interactions contribute to the accumulation and flow of knowledge among the nodes of their networks. National systems of innovation (NSIs) therefore embody a concept that aims to analyze the national innovation performance of economies. It rests its rationale in the variation of national institutions that shape the diffusion of technologies through the process of shared knowledge creation and the development of learning routines. Both public and private institutions are thought to interact in a given nation-specific institutional context that essentially affects incentive schemes and resource allocation of the involved economic agents in creating, sharing, distributing, absorbing, and commercializing knowledge. To this effect, public policy plays a key role in the NSI through building bridges between these actors, reducing information asymmetries, and providing them with resources from others within the system. The different actors contributing to the creation and diffusion of knowledge within the system are needed to exchange information and provide the engine for sustained economic growth. Universities, research institutes, companies and the individual entrepreneur are in charge of shaping their economic system in a way that resource and skill complementarities are exploited to the mutual benefit.
Article
New Venture Legitimacy
Greg Fisher
Starting an entrepreneurial endeavor is an uncertain and ambiguous project. This uncertainty and ambiguity make it difficult for entrepreneurs to generate much needed resources and support. In order to address this difficulty, a new venture needs to establish legitimacy, which entails being perceived as desirable, proper, or appropriate within the socially constructed system of norms, values, beliefs, and definitions within which it operates. New venture legitimacy is generated from various sources and hence has three broad dimensions—a cognitive, a moral, and a pragmatic dimension. The cognitive dimension accounts for the extent to which the activities and purpose of a venture are understood by key audiences and how knowledge about that venture spreads. The moral dimension reflects the extent to which a venture is perceived to be doing the right thing. The pragmatic dimension accounts for the extent to which a new venture serves the interests of critical constituents. All three of these dimensions factor into a legitimacy assessment of a new venture. Legitimacy is important for new ventures because it helps them overcome their liabilities of newness, allowing them to mobilize resources and engage in transactions, thereby increasing their chances of survival and success.
Although legitimacy matters for almost all new ventures, it is most critical if an entrepreneur engages in activities that are new and novel, such as establishing a new industry or market or creating a new product or technology. In these circumstances, it is most important for entrepreneurs to strategically establish and manage a new venture’s legitimacy. The strategic establishment and management of new venture legitimacy may entail arranging venture elements to conform with the existing environment, selecting key environments in which to operate, manipulating elements of the external environment to align with venture activities, or creating a whole new social context to accommodate a new venture. Enacting each of these new venture legitimation strategies may necessitate employing identity, associative, and organizational mechanisms. Identity mechanisms include cultural tools and identity claims such as images, symbols, and language by entrepreneurs to enhance new venture legitimacy. Associative mechanisms reflect the formation of relationships and connections with other individuals and entities to establish new venture legitimacy. Organizational mechanisms account for manipulating the organization and structure of a new venture and the achievement of success measures by that venture to attain legitimacy. Ultimately all of this is done so that various external parties, with different logics and perspectives, will evaluate a new venture as legitimate and be prepared to provide that venture with resources and support.
Article
Open Innovation
Jennifer Kuan
Open Innovation, published in 2003, was a ground-breaking work by Henry Chesbrough that placed technology and innovation at the center of attention for managers of large firms. The term open innovation refers to the ways in which firms can generate and commercialize innovation by engaging outside entities. The ideas have attracted the notice of scholars, spawning annual world conferences and a large literature in technology and innovation management (including numerous journal special issues) that documents diverse examples of innovations and the often novel business models needed to make the most of those innovations. The role of business models in open innovation is the focus of Open Business Models, Chesbrough’s 2006 follow-up to Open Innovation. Managers have likewise flocked to Chesbrough’s approach, as the hundreds of thousands of hits from an online search using the term open innovation can attest. Surveys show that the majority of large firms were engaging in open innovation practices in 2017, compared to only 20% in 2003 when Open Innovation was published.
Article
Optimal Distinctiveness
Karl Taeuscher
Optimal distinctiveness research is a rapidly growing area of scholarship that integrates key theoretical insights from strategic management and institutional theory. Strategic management research highlights differentiation as a key driver of competitive advantage and superior performance, while institutional theory emphasizes conformity as a central driver of organizational legitimacy and resource acquisition. Optimal distinctiveness research synthesizes these two perspectives and explores the tension that arises from conflicting pressures for differentiation (distinctiveness) and conformity (similarity). This emerging body of research departs from traditional positioning research in strategic management—which primarily explored corporations’ strategic positions within mature industries—by attending to a variety of competitive settings (e.g., newly emerging market categories, online marketplaces), forms of differentiation (e.g., based on product features, narratives, or category affiliations), levels of analysis (e.g., business level, product level), and performance outcomes (e.g., customer demand, resource acquisition, audience evaluations). By advancing understanding about a broad array of phenomena, optimal distinctiveness research has profound implications for strategic management, entrepreneurship, and organization studies.
A central concern in this rapidly growing body of research is to understand how positions on the continuum between similarity and distinctiveness affect performance outcomes. Early optimal distinctiveness research showed that organizations often benefit from positioning themselves near the middle of this continuum, where the relationship between their distinctiveness and performance resembles an inverted U-shape. Over time, however, scholars spotlighted various contingencies that shape the distinctiveness–performance relationship, pointing to important boundary conditions under which organizations derive the most desirable (i.e., optimal) outcomes through low or high levels of distinctiveness. Extant research also shows that organizations can strategically alleviate the tension between differentiation and conformity by, for instance, buffering legitimacy in alternative ways or by differentiating on dimensions that do not impose any related conformity pressures. Scholarship further explores the sources of heterogeneity in organizations’ distinctiveness, including the conditions and strategic considerations that lead organizations to pursue distinctiveness. Toward this aim, extant research particularly emphasizes organizations’ strategic efforts to attain optimal distinctiveness through storytelling and other symbolic forms of differentiation and conformity. Collectively, these explorations help to understand why, when, and how organizations pursue distinctiveness and how distinctiveness shapes varied performance outcomes.
Article
Organizational Neuroscience
Sebastiano Massaro and Dorotea Baljević
Organizational neuroscience—a novel scholarly domain using neuroscience to inform management and organizational research, and vice versa—is flourishing. Still missing, however, is a comprehensive coverage of organizational neuroscience as a self-standing scientific field. A foundational account of the potential that neuroscience holds to advance management and organizational research is currently a gap. The gap can be addressed with a review of the main methods, systematizing the existing scholarly literature in the field including entrepreneurship, strategic management, and organizational behavior, among others.
Article
Qualitative Comparative Analysis in Business and Management Research
Johannes Meuer and Peer C. Fiss
During the last decade, qualitative comparative analysis (QCA) has become an increasingly popular research approach in the management and business literature. As an approach, QCA consists of both a set of analytical techniques and a conceptual perspective, and the origins of QCA as an analytical technique lie outside the management and business literature. In the 1980s, Charles Ragin, a sociologist and political scientist, developed a systematic, comparative methodology as an alternative to qualitative, case-oriented approaches and to quantitative, variable-oriented approaches. Whereas the analytical technique of QCA was developed outside the management literature, the conceptual perspective underlying QCA has a long history in the management literature, in particular in the form of contingency and configurational theory that have played an important role in management theories since the late 1960s.
Until the 2000s, management researchers only sporadically used QCA as an analytical technique. Between 2007 and 2008, a series of seminal articles in leading management journals laid the conceptual, methodological, and empirical foundations for QCA as a promising research approach in business and management. These articles led to a “first” wave of QCA research in management. During the first wave—occurring between approximately 2008 and 2014—researchers successfully published QCA-based studies in leading management journals and triggered important methodological debates, ultimately leading to a revival of the configurational perspective in the management literature.
Following the first wave, a “second” wave—between 2014 and 2018—saw a rapid increase in QCA publications across several subfields in management research, the development of methodological applications of QCA, and an expansion of scholarly debates around the nature, opportunities, and future of QCA as a research approach. The second wave of QCA research in business and management concluded with researchers’ taking stock of the plethora of empirical studies using QCA for identifying best practice guidelines and advocating for the rise of a “neo-configurational” perspective, a perspective drawing on set-theoretic logic, causal complexity, and counterfactual analysis.
Nowadays, QCA is an established approach in some research areas (e.g., organization theory, strategic management) and is diffusing into several adjacent areas (e.g., entrepreneurship, marketing, and accounting), a situation that promises new opportunities for advancing the analytical technique of QCA as well as configurational thinking and theorizing in the business and management literature. To advance the analytical foundations of QCA, researchers may, for example, advance robustness tests for QCA or focus on issues of endogeneity and omitted variables in QCA. To advance the conceptual foundations of QCA, researchers may, for example, clarify the links between configurational theory and related theoretical perspectives, such as systems theory or complexity theory, or develop theories on the temporal dynamics of configurations and configurational change. Ultimately, after a decade of growing use and interest in QCA and given the unique strengths of this approach for addressing questions relevant to management research, QCA will continue to influence research in business and management.
Article
Regulatory Shocks: Forms, Dynamics, and Consequences
Nydia MacGregor and Tammy L. Madsen
Regulatory shocks, either by imposing regulations or easing them (deregulation), yield abrupt and fundamental changes to the institutional rules governing competition and, in turn, the opportunity sets available to firms. Formally, a regulatory shock occurs when jurisdictions replace one regulatory system for another. General forms of regulation include economic and social regulation but recent work offers a more fine-grained classification based on the content of regulations: regulation for competition, regulation of cap and trade, regulation by information, and soft law or experimental governance. These categories shed light on the types of rules and policies that change at the moment of a regulatory shock. As a result, they advance our understanding of the nature, scope, magnitude, and consequences of transformative shifts in rules systems governing industries. In addition to differences in the content of reforms, the assorted forms of regulatory change vary in the extent to which they disrupt an industry’s state of equilibrium or semi-equilibrium. These differences contribute to diverse temporal patterns or dynamics, an area ripe for further study. For example, a regulatory shock to an industry may be followed by rapid adjustment and, in turn, a new equilibrium state. Alternatively, the effects of a regulatory shock may be more enduring, contributing to ongoing dynamics and prolonging an industry’s convergence to new equilibrium state. As such, regulatory shocks can both stimulate ongoing heterogeneity or promote coherence within and among industries, sectors, organizational fields, and nation states. It follows that examining the content, scope, and magnitude of regulatory shocks is key to understanding their impact.
Since conforming to industry regulation (deregulation) increases economic returns, firms attempt to align their policies and behaviors with the institutional rules governing an industry. Thus, regulatory shocks stimulate the evaluation of strategic choices and, in turn, impact the competitive positions of firms and the composition of industries. Following a shock, at least two generic cohorts of firms emerge: incumbents, which are firms that operated in the industry before the change, and entrants, which start up after the change. To sustain a position, entrants must build capabilities from scratch whereas incumbents must replace or modify the practices they developed in the prior regulatory era. Not surprisingly, the ensuing competitive dynamics strongly influence the distribution of profits observed in an industry and the duration of firms’ profit advantages.
Our review highlights some of the prominent areas of research inquiry regarding regulatory shocks but many areas remain underexplored. Future work may benefit by considering regulatory shocks as embedded in a self-reinforcing system rather than simply an exogenous inflection in an industry’s evolutionary trajectory. Opportunities also exist for studying how the interplay of industry actors with actors external to an industry (political, social) affects the temporal and competitive consequences of regulatory shocks.
Article
Risk in Strategic Management
George M. Puia and Mark D. Potts
Although risk is an essential element of the business landscape and one of the more widely researched topics in business, there is noticeably less scholarship on strategic risk. Business risk literature tends to only delineate characteristics of risk that are operational rather than strategic in nature. The current operational risk paradigm focuses primarily on only two dimensions of risk: the probability of its occurrence and the severity of its outcomes. In contrast, literature in the natural and social sciences exhibits greater dimensionality in the risk lexicon, including temporal risk dimensions absent from academic business discussions. Additionally, descriptions of operational risk included minimal linkage to strategic outcomes that could constrain or enable resources, markets, or competition.
When working with a multidimensional model of risk, one can adjust the process of environmental scanning and risk assessment in ways that were potentially more measurable. Given the temporal dimensions of risk, risk management cannot always function proactively. In risk environments with short risk horizons, rapid risk acceleration, or limited risk reaction time, firms must utilize dynamic capabilities.
The literature proposes multiple approaches to managing risk that are often focused on single challenges or solutions. By combining a strategic management focus with a multidimensional model of strategic risk, one can match risk management protocols to specific strategic challenges. Lastly, one of more powerful dimensions of risky events is their ability to differentially affect competitors, changing the basis of competition. Risk need not solely be viewed as defending against potential losses; many risky occurrences may represent new strategic opportunities.
Article
The Role of Human Agency in Entrepreneurship
Keith M. Hmieleski
Human agency stands as a foundational element of entrepreneurship, embodying individuals’ proactive ability to shape their destinies, innovate, and navigate the complexities of new venture creation and development. Rooted in social cognitive theory, this concept underscores the interactive interplay between personal characteristics, behaviors, and environmental influences in driving entrepreneurial endeavors. Within this framework, agentic personal characteristics, comprising both socially admired attributes (e.g., entrepreneurial self-efficacy, dispositional positive affect, grit, and locus of control) and socially deviant features (e.g., narcissism, Machiavellianism, and psychopathy) provide the motivational force and resilience needed to tackle entrepreneurial endeavors. These personal characteristics are associated with engagement in a range of agentic behaviors (e.g., improvisation, transformational leadership, learning, and personal initiative) that embody entrepreneurial action exhibited by business founders as they work to effectively shape and adapt their ventures. Situational factors (e.g., institutional forces, political barriers, and industry-specific dynamics), in turn, can positively or negatively impact the expression of agentic personal characteristics and behaviors. Thus, understanding human agency in entrepreneurship necessitates a holistic examination of the intertwined dynamics between personal characteristics, behaviors, and contextual factors. Despite significant strides in comprehending human agency in entrepreneurship, numerous avenues for exploration remain. These include investigating gender disparities in agentic versus communal orientations among entrepreneurs, the impacts of artificial intelligence on entrepreneurial agency, trajectories of entrepreneurial agency over time, strategies for fostering collective agency in new venture teams, and exploring the darker (or unproductive) aspects of entrepreneurial agency. Developing a deeper understanding of human agency in the realm of entrepreneurship not only enriches the comprehension of the new venture creation and development process but also lays the groundwork for crafting more impactful strategies, policies, interventions, and educational initiatives to cultivate and leverage the full potential of business founders and their ventures.
Article
Social Capital and Founder, Team, and Firm Networks in Entrepreneurship
Ha Hoang
Entrepreneurial activity is facilitated by the ties that connect founders and their venture to a broader network of actors. This insight on the value of social capital has been enriched by a large body of research that builds on core concepts of network content, governance, and structure. Network content refers to the resources, information and social support that is exchanged or flows between actors. Governance encompasses the mechanisms that organize and regulate the exchange. Network structure refers to broader patterns created from the relationships between actors. With these building blocks, key findings that have emerged over 30 years of research can be organized into two domains: how networks influence entrepreneurial outcomes and how networks develop over the entrepreneurial process. Core findings regarding the performance consequences of social capital underscore its benefits while identifying limitations due to decreasing returns to growing and maintaining a large network or to contingencies tied to the stage of the venture’s growth. Our understanding of the sources of network evolution and the resulting patterns have also developed significantly. As a motor of network change, scholars have emphasized the goal-oriented behavior of the entrepreneur, but recognize social relationships also engender mutual concern, obligation, and emotional attachment. From a focus on founder and founding team ties to start-up, small firm networks, the literature now spans multiple levels and accounts for contextual variation between industries and institutional environments. Advances within each of these domains of inquiry have led to rich insights and greater conceptual complexity. Future research opportunities will arise that leverage cross-fertilization of the process and performance research streams.
Article
Social Entrepreneurship
Sophie Bacq and Jill R. Kickul
Social entrepreneurship is an ever-growing and ever-changing field. Known as the process of identifying, evaluating, and exploiting opportunities aiming at social value creation by means of commercial, market-based activities and of the use of a wide range of resources, social entrepreneurship combines market elements with a societal purpose. An overview of the evolution of social entrepreneurship as a field of research from its origins in the 1980s to date, and analysis of the themes presented at The Annual Social Entrepreneurship Conference over more than a decade, show how the core components of social entrepreneurship remained as the field evolved—social value creation, business model, and social entrepreneurial intentions, with the addition of nuances and complexities over time. These trends demonstrate the importance—and unique opportunities—for social entrepreneurship researchers to pursue further research on scaling, impact measurement, and systems change. Social entrepreneurship bears the promise and potential to revisit, and potentially challenge, the theoretical assumptions made in traditional entrepreneurship and management scholarship, embracing a multiplicity of salient stakeholders, other levels of analysis, or the relevance of community.
Article
Socioemotional Aspects of Entrepreneurship for the Classroom
Alexander Bolinger and Mark Bolinger
There is currently great enthusiasm for entrepreneurship education and the economic benefits that entrepreneurial activity can generate for individuals, organizations, and communities. Beyond economic outcomes, however, there is a variety of social and emotional costs and benefits of engaging in entrepreneurship that may not be evident to students nor emphasized in entrepreneurship courses. The socioemotional costs of entrepreneurship are consequential: on the one hand, entrepreneurs who pour their time and energy into new ventures can incur costs (e.g., ruptured personal and professional relationships, decreased life satisfaction and well-being, or strong negative reactions such as grief) that can often be as or more personally disruptive and enduring than economic costs. On the other hand, the social and emotional benefits of an entrepreneurial lifestyle are often cited as intrinsically satisfying and as primary motivations for initiating and sustaining entrepreneurial activity.
The socioemotional aspects of entrepreneurship are often poorly understood by students, but highlighting these hidden dimensions of entrepreneurial activity can inform their understanding and actions as prospective entrepreneurs. For instance, entrepreneurial passion, the experience of positive emotions as a function of engaging in activities that fulfill one’s entrepreneurial identity, and social capital, whereby entrepreneurs build meaningful relationships with co-owners, customers, suppliers, and other stakeholders, are two specific socioemotional benefits of entrepreneurship. There are also several potential socioemotional costs of entrepreneurial activity. For instance, entrepreneurship can involve negative emotional responses such as grief and lost identity from failure. Even when an entrepreneur does not fail, the stress of entrepreneurial activity can lead to sleep deprivation and disruptions to both personal and professional connections. Then, entrepreneurs can identify so closely and feel so invested that they experience counterproductive forms of obsessive passion that consume their identities and impair their well-being.
Article
Strategic Groups in Business
Briance Mascarenhas and Megan Mascarenhas
A strategic group is defined as a set of firms within an industry pursuing a similar strategy. The strategic group concept emerged with much promise over 40 years ago. Research on strategic groups over time in a broad variety of settings has sought to clarify their theoretical and empirical properties. These research findings are gradually being translated into practical managerial guidance, so that the strategic group concept can be understood, operationalized, and used productively by managers.
Two main approaches exist for identifying strategic groups—a ground-up approach, using disaggregated data, and a top-down, using cognition. Once identified, managerial insights can be derived from clarifying a strategic group’s profile. Firm membership in a group helps to uncover immediate and more distant types of competitors. Group profitability differences reveal the more rewarding and less attractive areas within an industry, as well as identify the lower-return groups from where firm exits are likely to occur. Group dynamics reflect competitive and cooperative behavior within and between groups. Several promising areas for future research on strategic groups to improve understanding and practice of strategy.
Article
The Kaleidoscope Career Model
Sherry E. Sullivan and Shawn M. Carraher
The kaleidoscope career model (KCM) was developed by Mainiero and Sullivan in 2006 based on data from interviews, focus groups, and three surveys of over 3,000 professionals working in the United States. The metaphor of a kaleidoscope was used to describe how an individual’s career alters in response to alternating needs for authenticity, balance, and challenge within a changing internal and external life context. As a kaleidoscope produces changing patterns when its tube is rotated and its glass chips fall into new arrangements, the KCM describes how individuals change the pattern of their careers by rotating the varied aspects of their lives to arrange their work–nonwork roles and relationships in new ways. Individuals examine the choices and options available to create the best fit among various work demands, constraints, and opportunities given their personal values and interests.
The ABCs of the KCM are authenticity, balance, and challenge. Authenticity is an individual’s need to make choices that reflect their true self. People seek alignment between their values and their behaviors. Balance is an individual’s need to achieve an equilibrium between the work and nonwork aspects of life. Nonwork life aspects are defined broadly to include not only spouse/partners and children but also parents, siblings, elderly relatives, friends, the community, personal interests, and hobbies. Challenge is an individual’s need for stimulating work that is high in responsibility, control, and/or autonomy. Challenge includes career advancement, often measured as intrinsic or extrinsic success. All three parameters are always active throughout the life span, and all influence decision-making. One parameter, however, usually takes priority; this parameter has greater influence in shaping an individual’s career decisions or transitions at that point in time. Over an individual’s life, the three parameters shift, with one parameter moving to the foreground and intensifying in strength as it takes priority at that time. The other two parameters will lessen in intensity, receding into the background, but they remain active.
Article
Tracking the Entrepreneurial Process with the Panel Study of Entrepreneurial Dynamics (PSED) Protocol
Paul D. Reynolds
In the early 1990s business creation was receiving a great deal of attention after it was clear that new firms were a major source of job creation. There was not, however, reliable data on the prevalence of persons participating in firm creation, what they would do to implement new ventures, or the proportion of start-up efforts that became profitable businesses. This hiatus led to the development of longitudinal studies of the entrepreneurial process; 14 projects have now been implemented in 12 countries.
The Panel Study of Entrepreneurial Dynamics (PSED) protocol was designed to provide estimates of the prevalence of individuals involved in business creation and the presence of pre-profit, start-up ventures; data on the major activities undertaken to implement a new firm; and track the proportion that completed the transition from start-up to profitable new firm. A number of challenges were involved in implementing the research program, including the development of efficient procedures for identifying representative samples of nascent entrepreneurs and criteria for determining the dates of entry into the start-up process, the transition to a profitable business, and disengagement from the initiative.
Data collection is a three-stage process. The initial stage is identifying nascent entrepreneurs in a representative sample of adults. The second are detailed interviews on the start-up team and activity related to creating a new venture. The third stage is follow-up interviews completed to determine the outcome of the start-up efforts. A large number of scholars have been involved in development of the interviews and the PSED data sets have considerable information on the perspectives, activities, and strategies of those involved in the start-up process.
Since the initial data sets were made available 15 years ago, there has been considerable research utilizing PSED data sets. One major finding, however, is that the firm creation process is much more diverse and complicated than had been expected. There are substantial research opportunities to be explored. A review of the major features of the PSED protocol and a summary of the existing data sets provides background that will facilitate additional analysis of the firm creation process. Four data sets (Australia, Sweden, and U.S. PSED I & II) are now in the public domain. Critical features of the start-up process have been consolidated and harmonized in a five-cohort, four country data set which is also available.
Article
University Technology Commercialization
Kathleen R. Allen
For decades researchers have studied various aspects of the technology transfer and commercialization process in universities in hopes of discovering effective methods for enabling more research to leave the university as technologies that benefit society. However, this effort has fallen short, as only a very small percentage of applied research finds its way to the marketplace through licenses to large companies or to new ventures. Furthermore, the reasons for this failure have yet to be completely explained.
In some respects, this appears to be an ontological problem. In their effort to understand the phenomenon of university commercialization, researchers tend to reduce the process into its component parts and study each part in isolation. The result is conclusions that ignore a host of variables that interact with the part being studied and frameworks that describe a linear process from invention to market rather than a complex system. To understand how individuals in the technology commercialization system make strategic choices around outcomes, studies have been successful in identifying some units of analysis (the tech transfer office, the laboratory, the investment community, the entrepreneurship community); but they have been less effective at integrating the commercialization process, contexts, behaviors, and potential outcomes to explain the forces and reciprocal interactions that might alter those outcomes.
The technology commercialization process that leads to new technology products and entrepreneurial ventures needs to be viewed as a complex adaptive system that operates under conditions of risk and uncertainty with nonlinear inputs and outputs such that the system is in a constant state of change and reorganization. There is no overall project manager managing tasks and relationships; therefore, the individuals in the system act independently and codependently. No single individual is aware of what is going on in any other part of the system at any point in time, and each individual has a different agenda with different metrics on which their performance is judged. What this means is that a small number of decision makers in the university commercialization system can have a disproportionate impact on the effectiveness and success of the entire system and its research outcomes.
Critics of reductionist research propose that understanding complex adaptive systems, such as university technology commercialization, requires a different mode of thinking—systems thinking—which looks at the interrelationships and dependencies among all the parts of the system. Combined with real options reasoning, which enables resilience in the system to mitigate uncertainty and improve decision-making, it may hold the key to better understanding the complexity of the university technology commercialization process and why it has not been as effective as it could be.
