Knowledge that Transforms

Despite the increasing interest in studying the concept of resilience in entrepreneurship, existing research often fails to account for stressors that induce entrepreneurs’ need for resilience and coping efforts. By arguing the need to study stress, resilience, and coping together to understand how entrepreneurs build resilience in the face of adversities, we systematically review the entrepreneurship scholarship (125 articles) on these three concepts. By critically appraising these three literatures in light of current thinking in psychology, we then develop a model of the process of building psychological resilience in entrepreneurship and offer a clear pathway for future research.

Entrepreneurial ecosystems have become a prominent concept, yet in its current state, the concept itself represents a paradox. While it draws on a rich intellectual history and provides an opportunity to synthesize different strands of research, it is also under-theorized and the mechanisms that govern ecosystem evolution are not well understood. This paper takes stock of recent advancements in ecosystem scholarship and synthesizes the empirical reality of the causal mechanisms. We use these dynamics to position ecosystems in a broader context, within and beyond the domain of entrepreneurship research, and propose a transdisciplinary research program for ecosystem research and practice.

This article contributes to research on the role of government in entrepreneurship by extending the current focus from government policies to policymakers. Specifically, we examine how entrepreneurs’ identity alignment with regime leaders influences their access to government support in Africa. Drawing from ethnocentrism and neopatrimonialism perspectives, we develop a theoretical model that explains how entrepreneurs’ ethnic and political identity alignment influences their access to government support. We also advance theory by discussing the “dark side” of identity-based government support in Africa. In doing so, we shed some light on the rather complex sociopolitical determinants of resource access in Africa.

It is time for the entrepreneurship field to come to terms with leading-edge artificial intelligence (AI). AI holds great promise to transform entrepreneurship into a more relevant and impactful field, but it must overcome conflicts between the AI-driven research approach and that of the traditional, theory-based research process. We explore these opportunities and challenges and suggest concrete approaches that entrepreneurship researchers can use to harness the power of AI with rigor and enhance research relevance. We conclude that incorporating the power of AI in entrepreneurship research and managing the associated risks offer a new and “grand challenge” for the field.

Entrepreneurs in developing economies try to cope with weak or absent formal institutions—often referred to as “institutional voids”—by relying extensively on intermediary organizations such as business incubators and development organizations or informal institutions such as political, kinship, or family relationships. However, in many African countries, intermediary support is limited and informal institutions are also unreliable, adding risks and costs to doing business and increasing the severity of institutional voids in the surrounding ecosystem. We investigate the practices followed by 47 commercial entrepreneurs in Kenya to “work around” these severe institutional voids to achieve their goals of business creation and growth. We find that severe institutional voids stimulate the hybridization of goals to include social value creation, create a need for a more strategic orchestration of business relationships, and motivate entrepreneurs to proactively cross-brace the institutional infrastructure around them. We contribute by unveiling the important role of entrepreneurs as microinstitutional agents in developing economies and by detailing how commercial and social goals become intertwined in the context of African entrepreneurship.

Investors increasingly use machine learning (ML) algorithms to support their early stage investment decisions. However, it remains unclear if algorithms can make better investment decisions and if so, why. Building on behavioral decision theory, our study compares the investment returns of an algorithm with those of 255 business angels (BAs) investing via an angel investment platform. We explore the influence of human biases and experience on BAs’ returns and find that investors only outperformed the algorithm when they had extensive investment experience and managed to suppress their cognitive biases. These results offer novel insights into the role of cognitive limitations, experience, and the use of algorithms in early stage investing.

Although scaling is a “hot topic” in the practitioner literature, it has largely been ignored (at least explicitly) in the academic literature. This editorial highlights the importance of organizational scaling, which we define as “spreading excellence within an organization as it grows.” Specifically, the entrepreneurship field would benefit greatly from future studies that explain how knowledge management facilitates scaling; how scaling is influenced by founder replacement; and how current scaling influences the drivers of subsequent scaling. We eventually link the scaling of organizations to the scaling of social impact.

This study investigates how venture development programs such as private incubators, university incubators, and accelerators influence the success of participating nanotechnology startups. With the recent growth in such programs, empirical work is needed to compare their impact on participants across programs and with nonparticipants. Using data on firm bankruptcies, liquidation, government grants, and venture capital, we find benefits, but the influence of each venture development program varies greatly. We further investigate the influence of program services and resources to clarify program heterogeneity beyond existing typologies. The results clarify the role of these programs and ecosystem intermediaries.

We posit that entrepreneurs who engage in strategic activities will have high growth aspirations. Our proposed mechanism is that strategic engagements, specifically product innovation, process innovation and internationalization, open entrepreneurial ventures to learning, and thereby greater growth opportunities. Furthermore, these learning effects are reinforced in research-intensive industrial environments. We apply multilevel random slope estimation for individuals from 74 countries, 2001–2015, to derive results consistent with our hypotheses. The findings are robust to potential reverse causality between strategic behavior and growth aspirations, and to selection bias resulting from strategic engagements being only observed for actual entrepreneurs.

Entrepreneurial support organizations (ESOs), such as incubators and accelerators, are now ubiquitous. Despite this proliferation, their impact on entrepreneurs, ventures, and communities remains unclear, while academic research remains disjointed and largely descriptive, limiting understanding of the entrepreneurial support process and the influence of ESOs on it. Conducting a systematic review of 337 peer-reviewed articles involving five ESO forms—incubators, science parks, accelerators, maker spaces, and co-working spaces—we find that the literature’s conception of support is under-socialized such that there is a need for longitudinal, processual, and experimental examination of changes in the rich relationships between entrepreneurs and their ventures, entrepreneurs and other entrepreneurs, entrepreneurs and ESOs, and ESOs and external stakeholders. Conceiving of support as help to become self-sufficient, we offer an alternative, relational approach to research on entrepreneurial support and those organizations seeking to provide it.