Innovation adoption is challenging at both intra-organizational and interorganizational levels. Several decades of innovation adoption research have identified various barriers at both levels. Intra-organizational barriers are often related to the characteristics of the innovation, adopters, managers, environment, and ecosystem but can also include an incompatibility with an organization’s strategy, structural impediments, organizational resource constraints, a lack of fit of the innovation with an organizational culture and climate, decision making challenges, a lack of integration with an organization’s knowledge management, human resource management practices, dynamic capabilities, and active innovation resistance from customers. Interorganizational barriers include uncertainty with learning and implementation, the distributed nature of the innovation process, differences in production systems, disparities in regulatory systems, variation within local contexts, and the nature of embedded knowledge adopted in diverse organizational contexts.
One of the key missing aspects in understanding innovation adoption is how extant practices within an organizational or interorganizational context enhance or hinder innovation adoption. Although the practices of innovation adoption emerge and evolve dynamically, existing research does not highlight fine-grained practices that lead to its success or failure. A practice lens focuses on people’s recurrent actions and helps to understand social life as an ongoing production that results from these actions. The durability of practices results from the reciprocal interactions between agents and structures that are embedded within daily routines. A practice lens allows us to study practices from three different perspectives. The first perspective, empirically explores how people act in organizational contexts. The second, a theoretical focus investigates the structure of organizational life. This perspective also delves into the relations between the actions that people take over time and in varying contexts. Finally, the third perspective which is a philosophical one focuses on how practices reproduce organizational reality.
By focusing on the unfolding of constellations of everyday activities in relation to other practices within and across time and space, a practice lens hones in on everyday actions. Everyday actions are consequential in producing the structural contours of social life. A practice lens emphasizes what people do repeatedly and how those repetitive actions impact the social world. A practice theory lens also challenges the assumption that things are separable and independent. Instead, it focuses on relationality of mutual constitution to understand how one aspect of the issue creates another aspect. Relationality of mutual constitution is the notion that things such as identities, ideas, institutions, power, and material goods take on meaning only when they are enacted through practices instead of these being innate features of these things Focusing on duality forces us to address the assumptions that underlie the separation.
A practice perspective on innovation adoption highlights the concepts of duality, dynamics, reciprocal interactions, relationality, and distributed agency to inform both the theory and practice of innovation adoption. Understanding these concepts enables a practice lens for successful adoption of innovations that impact organizational and societal outcomes, such as economic development, productivity enhancement, entrepreneurship, sustainability, equity, health, and other economic, social, and environmental changes.
Article
A Practice-Based View of Innovation Adoption
Rangapriya Kannan and Paola Perez-Aleman
Article
Artificial Intelligence and Entrepreneurship Research
Martin Obschonka and Christian Fisch
Advances in Artificial Intelligence (AI) are intensively shaping businesses and the economy as a whole, and AI-related research is exploding in many domains of business and management research. In contrast, AI has received relatively little attention within the domain of entrepreneurship research, while many entrepreneurship scholars agree that AI will likely shape entrepreneurship research in deep, disruptive ways.
When summarizing both the existing entrepreneurship literature on AI and potential avenues for future research, the growing relevance of AI for entrepreneurship research manifests itself along two dimensions. First, AI applications in the real world establish a distinct research topic (e.g., whether and how entrepreneurs and entrepreneurial ventures use and develop AI-based technologies, or how AI can function as an external enabler that generates and enhances entrepreneurial outcomes). In other words, AI is changing the research object in entrepreneurship research.
The second dimension refers to drawing on AI-based research methods, such as big data techniques or AI-based forecasting methods. Such AI-based methods open several avenues for researchers to gain new, influential insights into entrepreneurs and entrepreneurial ventures that are more difficult to assess using traditional methods. In other words, AI is changing the research methods. Given that, so far, human intelligence could not fully uncover and comprehend the secrets behind the entrepreneurial process that is so deeply embedded in uncertainty and opportunity, AI-supported research methods might achieve new breakthrough discoveries.
We conclude that the field needs to embrace AI as a topic and research method more enthusiastically while maintaining the essential research standards and scientific rigor that guarantee the field’s well-being, reputation, and impact.
Article
The Arts and the Art and Science of Management Teaching
Joan V. Gallos
The arts have played a major role in the development of management theory, practice, and education; and artists’ competencies like creativity, inventiveness, aesthetic appreciation, and a design mindset are increasingly vital for individual and organizational success in a competitive global world. The arts have long been used in teaching to: (a) explore human nature and social structures; (b) facilitate cognitive, socioemotional, and behavioral growth; (c) translate theory into action; (d) provide opportunities for professional development; and (e) enhance individual and systemic creativity and capacities for change. Use of literature and films are curricular mainstays. A review of the history of the arts in management teaching and learning illustrates how the arts have expanded our ways of knowing and defining managerial and leadership effectiveness—and the competencies and training necessary for them.
The scholarship of management teaching is large, primarily ‘how-to’ teaching designs and the assessments of them. There is a clear need to expand the research on how and why the arts are and can be used more effectively to educate professionals, enable business growth and new product development, facilitate collaboration and team building, and bring innovative solutions to complex ideas. Research priorities include: the systematic assessments of the state of arts-based management teaching and learning; explorations of stakeholder attitudes and of environmental forces contributing to current educational models and practices; analyses of the learning impact of various pedagogical methods and designs; examining the unique role of the arts in professional education and, especially, in teaching for effective action; mining critical research from education, psychology, creativity studies, and other relevant disciplines to strengthen management teaching and learning; and probing how to teach complex skills like innovative thinking and creativity. Research on new roles and uses for the arts provide a foundation for a creative revisiting of 21st-century management education and training.
Article
Arts Entrepreneurship: Education, Theory, and Practice
Joe Roberts
There are no clear definitions of entrepreneurship and art. It is therefore difficult to explain and theorize arts entrepreneurship education. Here, what artists think about these issues in the United States, India, and Mexico is explored. Suggestions made by artists were examined and included in the proposed arts entrepreneurship education theory. Artists stated that they do experience lack of business skills that arts entrepreneurship education can help them acquire. These business and aesthetic skill sets are needed to make a living as an artist. The Coleman Fellows Program provided an opportunity to test the arts entrepreneurship theory constructs being proposed. The results from these tests are included the article.
The 2017 annual Strategic National Arts Alumni study reported that artists continue to suffer from several skill gaps. Of these, financial, business management, and entrepreneurship skills were identified as the main gaps that continue to plague artists. This is troubling because numerous educational and training efforts have been underway to address these and other skill gaps since at least the early 2000s. However, they have not closed these skill gaps. A modified arts entrepreneurship education theory is proposed in order to do so. Artists who acquire these skills should have a higher probability of success making a living practicing their art form. The article proposes three arts entrepreneurship education theory constructs, namely collaborative pedagogies utilizing the modules infusion method, entrepreneurial universities where these pedagogies can be tested and improved, and effectively managing the commodification of arts. Supporting evidence is provided for the three constructs, along with examples of the modules of entrepreneurship content for infusion. Implications and recommendations for future arts entrepreneurship education programs are provided and discussed.
Article
Blame: Stakeholder Judgments That Impact Organizations and Entrepreneurs
Varkey Titus and Izuchukwu Mbaraonye
Blame is a feature of everyday life, whether or not that blame is directed toward an individual for a willful act of moral transgression, an entrepreneur for taking reckless action that puts the venture and its employees at risk, or a company for the violation of some social norm. Blame identifies morally wrong behavior and has the power to pressure individuals to adhere to a set of norms. More broadly, blame is worthy of scholarly consideration because it is a reality for organizations and the individuals who lead them.
Blame is multifaceted because it entails psychological, social, and legal issues. Historically, psychological theories of blame emphasized the rational and prescriptive—how blame attribution processes ought to occur to produce an accurate blame attribution, for example. Over time, psychological theories started to incorporate nonrational elements—such as how socially attractive the potentially blameworthy is, whether the blameworthy engage in “positive” or “negative” actions that are unrelated to the blameworthy act, and so forth. Blame becomes more complicated when it moves from a specific individual (e.g., an entrepreneur) to an aggregate group (a venture) or an abstract entity (a corporation). The aggregation of blame creates an apportionment problem in that it is unclear who within a group ought to be blamed. This complication is further illustrated in the court of law. For instance, courts in the United States have struggled to consistently judge cases of corporate criminal liability due, in part, to the difficulty of knowing how to assign blame to an abstract entity. Part of the challenge relates to establishing a criminal “state of mind” to a corporation, and the broader question whether a corporation can even have such a state of mind (or if that state of mind resides in its leaders, employees, etc.).
Management research on blame is limited. Existing work examines blames-shifting tactics, such as scapegoating, wherein organizations place blame on specific organizational actors who may or may not have any direct connection to the blameworthy event. Importantly, blame attributions can flow both ways: employees may sometimes blame the broader organization, despite the employees’ involvement in the blameworthy act.
Given the complexities of blame, entrepreneurs face unique blame-related challenges at different points of their venture’s life cycle. At early stages of the life cycle, blameworthy acts are unlikely to have significant societal impact, and attributions are relatively simple due to the minimal number of actors involved in the venture. As the venture grows, the impact of a blameworthy act grows in magnitude, as does the difficulty of accurately apportioning blame for the act among the numerous actors involved. If the venture eventually adopts a formal corporate structure, it also adopts corporate characteristics such as dispersed decision-making processes, a board of directors that are meant to provide some level of oversight, and so forth. This formal corporate structure introduces the challenge of establishing a “state of mind” for a blameworthy act. Ultimately, blame affects entrepreneurs, their ventures, and the corporations that eventually grow from them, and is worth further scholarly investigation.
Article
Bootstrapping: Complementary Lines of Inquiry in Entrepreneurship
Matthew Rutherford and Duygu Phillips
Bootstrapping is a term, a construct, and a paradigm that has attracted substantial attention from both popular press writers and scholarly researchers. In the scholarly community bootstrapping research is concerned, broadly, with studying the phenomenon of startups in resource poor environments. While this would describe virtually all startups, bootstrapping is most focused upon those resource-starved startups that elected to use only the resources existing internally to the firm or founder(s). That is, in bootstrapped firms, no financing has been attained from individuals or entities outside the firm. In practice, bootstrapping is understood as (a) launching a business with no external debt or equity, and (b) finding creative ways to manage a business launched with no external debt or equity.
Most entrepreneurs bootstrap at founding. It is estimated that few (20%) take on external debt at startup; and far fewer (5%) launch with external equity. Examples of techniques employed because of the decision to bootstrap include using credit cards, drawing upon home equity and sweat equity, taking loans from family, and investing salary from one’s “day job.” There are fundamental reasons for this, both from a demand side and a supply side.
From the demand side entrepreneurs, on average, are autonomous and therefore have a preference for control and a general aversion to external forms of capital, both debt and equity. On the supply side, because of extreme asymmetric information that exists between financiers and entrepreneurs, financiers often cannot accurately gauge the underlying quality of the entrepreneur/venture and are therefore reluctant to provide capital to them.
With regard to outcomes of bootstrapping, though, the research is equivocal. Ceteris paribus, it appears that there is no significant difference in performance between bootstrappers and non-bootstrappers; however, contingencies likely exist. For example, non-bootstrappers are likely more prone to failure because they often take more risks. Therefore, while a few heavily financed ventures may achieve lofty success, many fail in dramatic fashion. By contrast, bootstrappers are often more cautious and therefore these firms demonstrate less variance in outcomes.
Understanding of both antecedents and outcomes of bootstrapping has grown since the introduction of the construct in the late 1980s. Because of this expanded understanding, the construct has evolved from phenomenological roots to one more grounded in theory. That said, there remain ambiguities around bootstrapping, not the least of which is the existence of myriad definitions and resultant operationalizations. Partially because of these varied conceptualizations, the scholarship on bootstrapping has been somewhat fragmented and challenging to decipher. This fragmented accumulation has led to not only a literature with vivid applications and examples, but also one with little universal logic. This fact has made it somewhat difficult for a field to advance.
However, insights from existing theory (e.g., signaling, cultural entrepreneurship) as well as the relatively recent development of closely related bases (e.g., effectuation, bricolage) can complement and advance bootstrapping by adding theoretical breadth and depth. When understood alongside these related lines of research in entrepreneurship, researchers are better equipped to create, catalog, and accumulate knowledge regarding bootstrapping. In turn, educators will be more effective in communicating how entrepreneurs are able to launch in resource poor environments, and ultimately achieve success.
Article
Competitive Dynamics in Strategic Management
Claudio Giachetti and Giovanni Battista Dagnino
Competitive dynamics inquiry originates from a sequence of attacks and counterattacks among firms in an industry. Firms attack and respond to attacks of rivals in order to strengthen or defend their competitive position within their competitive space. Competitive dynamics research is thus centered on the analysis of how the firm’s actions affect rivals’ reactions and performance. Actually, the nature of competitive dynamics research is the open recognition that firm strategies are “dynamic”: Strategic actions initiated by one firm may trigger a series of actions among rival firms. The new competitive environment in many industries has generated the inception of furious competition, emphasizing flexibility, speed, and innovation in response to fast-changing technological and institutional conditions and temporary competitive advantages.
The key constructs and the intellectual roots of competitive dynamics (i.e., Schumpeter’s theory of creative destruction and industrial organization economics and related oligopoly theories) offer some practical examples of industry and firm cases where competitive dynamics have found their main applications.
The relevant underpinnings of the awareness–motivation–capability (AMC) framework provide an integrative model of the key behavioral drivers that shape a competitive actions and responses framework (i.e., the factors influencing the firm’s awareness of the context; the factors inducing or impeding the motivation of firms to respond to competitors’ action; and the capability-based factors affecting the firm’s ability to undertake actions), the three key attributes (i.e., the specific actions of firms in the industry, the firm’s competitive interdependence, and the antecedents and performance implications of firms’ competitive actions and reactions), and the three main levels of analysis used in competitive dynamics literature (i.e., action-level studies, business-level studies, and corporate-level studies).
Some insights regarding the relationship between dynamic competition and the sources of temporary competitive advantage, coopetition dynamics, as well as the kind of accelerated competition epitomizing early 21st-century digital dynamics settings update the traditional competitive dynamics flavor, as they are connected with firms’ strategic interaction and the pursuit of temporary advantages.
Article
Content and Text Analysis Methods for Organizational Research
Rhonda K. Reger and Paula A. Kincaid
Content analysis is to words (and other unstructured data) as statistics is to numbers (also called structured data)—an umbrella term encompassing a range of analytic techniques. Content analyses range from purely qualitative analyses, often used in grounded theorizing and case-based research to reduce interview data into theoretically meaningful categories, to highly quantitative analyses that use concept dictionaries to convert words and phrases into numerical tables for further quantitative analysis. Common specialized types of qualitative content analysis include methods associated with grounded theorizing, narrative analysis, discourse analysis, rhetorical analysis, semiotic analysis, interpretative phenomenological analysis, and conversation analysis. Major quantitative content analyses include dictionary-based approaches, topic modeling, and natural language processing. Though specific steps for specific types of content analysis vary, a prototypical content analysis requires eight steps beginning with defining coding units and ending with assessing the trustworthiness, reliability, and validity of the overall coding. Furthermore, while most content analysis evaluates textual data, some studies also analyze visual data such as gestures, videos and pictures, and verbal data such as tone.
Content analysis has several advantages over other data collection and analysis methods. Content analysis provides a flexible set of tools that are suitable for many research questions where quantitative data are unavailable. Many forms of content analysis provide a replicable methodology to access individual and collective structures and processes. Moreover, content analysis of documents and videos that organizational actors produce in the normal course of their work provides unobtrusive ways to study sociocognitive concepts and processes in context, and thus avoids some of the most serious concerns associated with other commonly used methods. Content analysis requires significant researcher judgment such that inadvertent biasing of results is a common concern. On balance, content analysis is a promising activity for the rigorous exploration of many important but difficult-to-study issues that are not easily studied via other methods. For these reasons, content analysis is burgeoning in business and management research as researchers seek to study complex and subtle phenomena.
Article
Corporate Entrepreneurship: A Research Perspective
Donald F. Kuratko and Jeffrey G. Covin
The theoretical and empirical knowledge on corporate entrepreneurship (ce) has evolved in the research domain over the last 50 years, beginning very slowly and growing in importance in that time. Because of this evolution and expansion in CE research, the theoretical and empirical knowledge about CE and the entrepreneurial behavior on which it is based has progressed to a point where a greater understanding of the concept can be presented.
Many of the elements essential to constructing a theoretically grounded understanding of the domains of CE have been identified. An examination of the field reveals that there are three research domains that have developed over the years: corporate venturing (either internal or external), strategic entrepreneurship, and entrepreneurial orientation.
In examining the evolution of CE research across five decades, the focus of CE research has varied over the years. The very early research published in the 1970s focused more on how teams could establish entrepreneurial activities inside established organizations; however, this early research was sparse because CE was not widely acknowledged nor sought in existing organizations. The 1980s saw some research into entrepreneurial behavior inside established organizations that explained how such activity could simply not exist in the structure and operations of existing corporations. Opposed to that thinking, many more researchers demonstrated that the idea of corporate entrepreneurial activity could be conceived as a process of organizational renewal. In the 1990s, researchers began to develop more comprehensive examinations of CE that focused on re-energizing companies and therefore increasing its abilities to develop innovations. The first and second decades of the 21st century witnessed a more sophisticated refinement of research topics in CE.
In addition to research specific to the development of the three main domains of CE (corporate venturing, entrepreneurial orientation, and strategic entrepreneurship), there has been research on more specific areas of interest in CE including the implementation of CE, management levels, the individual corporate entrepreneur, models and metrics of CE, a deeper examination of internal corporate ventures, the international domain, firm size, family firms, ethics, and corporate venture capital. These areas illustrate the developmental expansion of interest in CE across different domains.
Even with the continued expansion in the research on CE, there is so much that is still not understood nor researched well enough to fully advance the theoretical and empirical knowledge on CE. With the growing climate of disruption through external antecedents such as COVID-19, the entrepreneurial behavior of individuals within organizations becomes paramount and warrants a deeper understanding. Newer research questions on CE are emerging and further theoretical exploration should be the work of ongoing scholarly efforts.
Article
Corporate Governance in Business and Management
Erik E. Lehmann
Corporate governance is a recent concept that encompasses the costs caused by managerial misbehavior. It is concerned with how organizations in general, and corporations in particular, produce value and how that value is distributed among the members of the corporation, its stakeholders. The interrelation of value production and value distribution links the ubiquitous technological aspect (the production of value) with the moral and ethical dimension (the distribution of value). Corporate governance is concerned with this link in general, but more specifically with the moral and ethical dimensions of distributing the generated value among the stakeholders. Value in firms is created by firm-specific investments, and the motivation and coordination of value-enhancing activities and investment is protected by the power concentrated at the pyramidal top of the organization. In modern companies, it is the CEO and the top management who decide how to create value and how to distribute it among the relevant stakeholders. Due to asymmetric information and the imperfect nature of markets and contracts, adverse selection and moral hazard problems occur, where delegated (selected) managers could act in their own interest at the costs of other relevant stakeholders.
Corporate governance can be understood as a two-tailed concept. The first aspect is about identifying the (most) relevant stakeholder(s), separating theory and practice into two different and conflicting streams: the stakeholder value approach and the shareholder value approach. The second aspect of the concept is about providing and analyzing different mechanisms, reducing the costs induced by moral hazard and adverse selection effects, and balancing out the motivation and coordination problems of the relevant stakeholders. Corporate governance is an interdisciplinary concept encompassing academic fields such as finance, economics, accounting, law, taxation, and psychology, among others.
As countries differ according to their institutions (i.e., legal and political systems, norms, and rules), firms differ according to their size, age, dominant shareholders, or industries. Thus, concepts in corporate governance differ along these dimensions as well. And while the underlying characteristics vary in time, continuously or as a result of an exogenous shock, concepts in corporate governance are dynamic and static, offering a challenging field of interest for academics, policymakers, and firm managers.
Article
Corporate Governance in Entrepreneurial Firms
Julio De Castro, Jose Lejarraga, and Qiong Wu
Corporate governance unfolds in entrepreneurial firms, giving rise to concerns about the coordination and control of resources. Understanding corporate governance in entrepreneurial firms (CGEF) is important because of the challenges of liability of newness and smallness and issues of transition. In particular, two issues affect these firms: a diluted separation between ownership and control and the role played by boards of directors. As a result, most of the literature on CGEF revolves around the interrelations between these governance mechanisms and how they affect the outcomes of entrepreneurially driven firms. This combination of factors present in entrepreneurial firms gives rise to new theoretical perspectives that enrich the corporate governance literature.
Article
Corporate Social Entrepreneurship
Elisa Alt
Corporate social entrepreneurship (CSE) is a subject of growing interest for scholars in the areas of corporate entrepreneurship, social entrepreneurship, and corporate social responsibility as it has the potential of engaging corporations in activities that transform traditional practices, advance corporate purpose, and promote positive social change. CSE consists of identifying, evaluating, and exploiting entrepreneurial opportunities that address social and environmental problems through market means from within corporations. Dual value creation—the simultaneous pursuit of social and economic value creation—is a core element of CSE, however, in organizations that have not been originally designed for this purpose. As an umbrella concept, CSE embraces similar terms such as social intrapreneurship and sustainable corporate entrepreneurship. CSE often starts autonomously through managers and employees acting as social intrapreneurs, until initiatives are accepted and integrated into the firm’s concept of strategy. CSE introduces a societal concern to corporate entrepreneurship, contextualizes social entrepreneurship in corporations, and advances entrepreneurial approaches to corporate social responsibility—all of which are topics that remain relatively unexplored and that offer vibrant opportunities for future research.
Article
Crowdfunding for Entrepreneurs
Vincenzo Butticè and Massimo G. Colombo
Fundraising has proved difficult for many entrepreneurs and ventures in the early stages of their businesses because of significant information asymmetries with investors and a lack of collateral. In an attempt to overcome such difficulties, since the early 2010s, some entrepreneurs have come to rely on the Internet in order to directly seek funding from the general public, or the “crowd.” The practice of collecting small amounts of capital from the “crowd” of Internet users is called crowdfunding.
Crowdfunding research is a relative newcomer to the discipline of entrepreneurial finance. However, the availability of easy-to-access data, the diffusion of this funding channel among entrepreneurs, and increasing policy attention have made crowdfunding one of the most investigated areas of research in entrepreneurial finance. The literature has discussed crowdfunding as more than a simple mean of financing. Crowdfunding also allows entrepreneurs to develop a virtual community of followers, which provides a valuable source of information with which to test and improve early versions of innovative products. Moreover, crowdfunding represents a method of gaining information about market response to a given product and the size of demand for that product, and is a powerful marketing instrument that can be used to increase brand awareness and to promote the arts, social initiatives, and financial inclusion.
However, crowdfunding also entails a number of pitfalls for entrepreneurs. In order to collect financial resources from the crowd, entrepreneurs are required to share sensitive information online. This includes information about the entrepreneurial initiative, the team, and the business model they are using. The provision of this information may facilitate product counterfeiting, or the appropriation of the value of the idea by other firms or entrepreneurs. Moreover, crowdfunding entails the risk of social stigma if the funding campaign results in a failure, because information about the performance of the crowdfunding campaign usually remains accessible online. Finally, crowdfunding entails additional challenges related to the management of the crowd of backers after the campaign, since several backers will be active providers of feedback and will interact with the entrepreneurs through direct communication. Despite these disadvantages crowdfunding has become a widely used funding source for entrepreneurs looking for financing for sustainable projects, creative initiatives, and innovative ideas.
Article
Design Thinking in Business and Management: Research History, Themes, and Opportunities
Jarryd Daymond and Eric Knight
Design thinking is a human-centered, innovation-focused problem-solving approach that employs various tools and methods for creative purposes. It is a dynamic process and often prioritizes the needs and experiences of people while considering both technical and economic aspects of a solution. The prominence of design thinking in practice has seen its use move beyond product development teams to take a more central role in shaping how organizations approach problems, develop strategies, build capabilities, and drive cultural change. It is common for organizations to employ executives with a specific focus on design, and traditionally “nondesign” organizations increasingly build, buy, or borrow design capabilities. The utility of design thinking stretches beyond organizational outcomes, with educators and employers recognizing that understanding and proficiency in design thinking is a valuable and transferrable skill. A rich scholarly tradition in design sciences and engineering underpins design thinking. These traditions provide the foundational understandings of problem definition and need-finding, information gathering and analysis, and creative expression and ideation, from which design thinking gained prominence. Although not often acknowledged in contemporary scholarship, design thinking research builds on these traditions and offers unique perspectives on the practice of design thinking and its theoretical underpinnings: The cognitive perspective focuses on how unique ways of thinking shape the practice of design thinking; the instrumental perspective attends to how design thinking is done, including the methods or tools used in design thinking; and the organizational-level perspective concerns the implementation of design thinking in organizations and its influence on organizational culture and capabilities. While the various research traditions preceding design thinking are receiving greater attention in contemporary research, rich insights from these established fields offer deep theoretical knowledge to develop several promising research areas. These avenues for future research include how design thinking can inform the redevelopment of services and customer experiences, tackle societal challenges, and build capabilities to benefit communities and society more generally.
Article
Entrepreneur Coachability
Matthew R. Marvel
Entrepreneur coachability is the degree to which an entrepreneur seeks, carefully considers, and integrates feedback to improve a venture’s performance. There is increasing evidence that entrepreneur coachability is important for attracting the social and financial resources necessary for venture growth. Although entrepreneur coachability has emerged as an especially relevant construct for practitioners, start-up ecosystem leaders, and scholars alike, research on this entrepreneurial behavior is in its infancy. What appears to be a consistent finding across studies is that some entrepreneurs are more coachable than others, which affects downstream outcomes—particularly resource acquisition. However, there are sizable theoretical and empirical gaps that limit our understanding about the value of coachability to entrepreneurship research. As a body of literature develops, it is useful to take inventory of the work that has been accomplished thus far and to build from the lessons learned to identify insightful new directions. The topic of entrepreneur coachability has interdisciplinary appeal, and there is a surge of entrepreneur coaching taking place across start-up ecosystems. Research on coaching is diverse, and scholarship has developed across the academic domains of athletics, marketing, workplace coaching, and entrepreneurship. To identify progress to date, promising research gaps, and paths for future exploration, the literature on entrepreneur coachability is critically reviewed. To consider the future development of entrepreneur coachability scholarship, a research agenda is organized by the antecedents of entrepreneurship coachability, outcomes of entrepreneur coachability, and how entrepreneur–coach fit affects learning and development. Future scholarship is needed to more fully explore the antecedents, mechanisms, and/or consequences of entrepreneur coachability. The pursuit and development of this research stream represent fertile ground for meaningful contributions to entrepreneurship theory and practice.
Article
Entrepreneurial Finance and Governance
Pierluigi Martino, Greg Bell, Abdul A. Rasheed, and Cristiano Bellavitis
Entrepreneurial finance includes a wide array of sources of capital, such as venture capital, angel investors, equity, and debt finance, along with new forms of financing through crowdfunding and initial coin offerings. Providers of funds to entrepreneurial ventures, whether they are venture capitalists, angel investors, debt holders, or participants in crowdfunding face similar agency problems, such as moral hazard and adverse selection. There are considerable differences across investors in terms of their objectives, risk-bearing capacity, and time horizons, as well as in their motivation and ability to monitor the firms in which they invest. These differences give rise to governance challenges associated with each source of entrepreneurial finance.
Article
Entrepreneurial Grit: Insights and Applications for New Ventures
Marcus Wolfe
The pursuit of entrepreneurship is often characterized by high levels of struggle and adversity, and even those who ultimately succeed in their entrepreneurial endeavors routinely experience failures and setbacks along the way. Therefore, it is likely that individuals who are more skilled at coping with, and conquering, such obstacles in their quest for success are more apt to enter, and be successful at, entrepreneurial careers. While several factors contribute to an individual’s ability to persevere through adversity and to continue to work to accomplish long-term goals, individual grit has garnered an increasing level of attention as a key element in such persistence, particularly in entrepreneurial contexts. Grit, conceptualized as an individual’s passion and perseverance in the pursuit of accomplishing long-term goals, can play several roles in the entrepreneurial process. While grit is a potential outcome of entrepreneurial passion, it also has important associations with several key entrepreneurial outcomes. For instance, given that entrepreneurship is linked with risk-taking, grit is an asset for individuals who chase entrepreneurial opportunities. Higher levels of risk incur a greater likelihood of failure, and the ability to persist with entrepreneurial initiatives in the face of failures is potentially bolstered by high levels of grit. Furthermore, persistence against adversity can often translate into improved venture performance as a result of entrepreneurs’ continued, focused efforts at developing and improving their new venture. Furthermore, grit may play an even more important role for individuals who face heightened levels of adversity during their entrepreneurial careers. Women and younger individuals often experience unique challenges that their counterparts who are men or older do not have to face. Therefore, having high levels of grit may be an advantage in women and youth. While the relationship between grit and entrepreneurship has gained considerable momentum as a topic of scholarly interest, there are important avenues available for future research to further develop understanding of the topic.
Article
Entrepreneurial Identity
Blake Mathias
Society has long considered entrepreneurs a distinct breed of people characterized by their unique willingness to act on opportunities. And yet, our recent understanding of entrepreneurship has greatly evolved to show entrepreneurs reflect a diverse and eclectic group who, though unique, emerge among all ethnicities, personalities, and walks of life. Simply, anyone can “become an entrepreneur” or “act entrepreneurially.” Entrepreneurial identity reflects the study of who entrepreneurs are and what they do. Identities can emerge through individuals’ distinct personal experiences, common roles, or shared social groups. And although identity matters for all individuals, it is especially important to entrepreneurs because they, in large part, shape organizations. The founder’s identity influences the mission, values, and strategic direction of new ventures. Even long after the founders are gone, the imprint of their identity on the organization often endures. Therefore, the study of entrepreneurial identity is critical not only to the entrepreneurs themselves but has a profound and lasting impact on most organizations, shaping how and why organizational members engage in their work.
Article
Entrepreneurial Opportunity: Bedrock in Entrepreneurship Research
Matthew S. Wood
Entrepreneurial opportunity represents individuals taking action to introduce new products, services, or ways of organizing. The opportunity concept has interdisciplinary appeal and in the field of entrepreneurship it has been elevated to a defining feature, representing bedrock in entrepreneurship research. Hence, researchers have investigated the emergence and pursuit of opportunity and it has become a topic of lively debate, stemming from competing theoretical approaches designed to represent the phenomenon. Insights gleaned from these discussions and related empirical studies highlight the opportunity concept as a valuable umbrella construct that meaningfully integrates key elements of the entrepreneurial journey. It coherently ties, for example, cognitive attention and belief formation to entrepreneurial action in ways that account for the various elements that influence entrepreneurs’ contemplations of bringing forward something new. This is a generative process that encapsulates entrepreneurs initially coming up with opportunity ideas and then evaluating those ideas for viability. The beliefs generated in the evaluation of opportunity ideas drive entrepreneurial action. There are a host of elements that influence this process and by capturing them, researchers have codified entrepreneurial opportunity as a phenomenon that involves the integration of entrepreneurs’ motivations and goals with the ideas and concepts they generate, and the actions they deploy to bring their concepts to fruition. This understanding presents intriguing arenas for future research, such as work that takes an adaptive and multiple opportunity perspective along with studies that address time and timing as embedded in entrepreneurial opportunity.
Article
Entrepreneurial Passion
Charles Y. Murnieks and Melissa S. Cardon
Starting a new venture is an incredibly difficult undertaking. Challenges and roadblocks arise at every juncture. To succeed, entrepreneurs need to persist through these obstacles and fight through hardships. They need personal motivation to drive their ventures forward, and perhaps more importantly, they need to inspire the stakeholders who work with them to continue to support their ventures as well. Entrepreneurial passion is one of the key elements that can catalyze all these processes.
Entrepreneurial passion is experienced through strong emotions and motivations that are intertwined closely with an individual’s entrepreneurial identity. Entrepreneurial passion originates from engagement with self-defining activities over time; entrepreneurs are not born with passion, they develop it. The emerging research surrounding entrepreneurial passion indicates it can have powerful effects, both positive and negative. Regarding the positive, entrepreneurial passion drives beneficial cognitive and behavioral outcomes such as creativity, commitment, and effort. Regarding the negative, entrepreneurial passion can also drive rigidity and burnout. Moreover, research shows that entrepreneurial passion can be contagious; it has the power to infuse stakeholders surrounding entrepreneurs and attract new venture investors to provide early-stage funding.
The construct of team entrepreneurial passion is also discussed. Unlike individual-level passions, team entrepreneurial passion reflects the level of shared intense positive feelings for a collective team identity. Across all the types of passion discussed in this article, the key elements that distinguish entrepreneurial passion as unique and distinct from related psychological constructs, such as motivation, affect, and enthusiasm, are highlighted.
