Knowledge that Transforms

This essay contrasts a perspective that places an excessive focus on technology businesses and growth with a view of entrepreneurship that embraces its heterogeneity. We challenge a taken–for–granted belief that only certain kinds of entrepreneurship might lead to wealth and job creation and additionally suggest that these two outcomes (wealth and job creation) need to be placed within a broader context of reasons, purposes, and values for why and how entrepreneurship emerges. We suggest that a wider and nondiscriminatory perspective on what constitutes entrepreneurship will lead to better theory and more insights that are relevant to the phenomenon.

The explosion of crowdfunding within entrepreneurial circles is attracting increased academic interest in the nature of crowdfunding, its antecedents, and its consequences. In an effort to help researchers concentrate their inquiry on the most promising questions and theories involving crowdfunding, we surveyed key thought leaders within the entrepreneurship field—the Entrepreneurship Theory and Practice editorial review board—regarding what inquiry they believe is needed. Their responses offer implications for crowdfunding research. For example, cross–disciplinary work is one approach that board members believe holds high potential. In response, we outline a cross–disciplinary research agenda that can inform scholarly efforts.

Entrepreneurial ecosystems have emerged as a popular concept to explain the persistence of high–growth entrepreneurship within regions. However, as a theoretical concept ecosystems remain underdeveloped, making it difficult to understand their structure and influence on the entrepreneurship process. The article argues that ecosystems are composed of 10 cultural, social, and material attributes that provide benefits and resources to entrepreneurs and that the relationships between these attributes reproduce the ecosystem. This model is illustrated with case studies of Waterloo, Ontario, and Calgary, Alberta, Canada. The cases demonstrate the variety of different configurations that ecosystems can take.

This article tests the model proposed by Mair and Noboa (2006) who identify four antecedents which they suggest predict social entrepreneurial intentions. The study extends the model by including prior experience with social problems as an additional variable. Findings show that prior experience predicts social entrepreneurial intentions. This effect is mediated by the antecedents suggested by Mair and Noboa. Social entrepreneurial self–efficacy has both the largest impact on intentions as well as being itself most responsive to prior experience. Lastly, the study shows that the amount of optional social entrepreneurship electives students enroll in is predicted by social entrepreneurial intentions.

Opportunities are a core construct in the field of entrepreneurship. Despite recent advances suggesting the separation of ideas from opportunities, the field still suffers from conceptual deficiencies. This article builds on this distinction and leverages insights from creativity and innovation management literature to propose a framework that allows tracing the evolution of a venture from first insight to exploitation. It discusses real–time/longitudinal and retrospective measurement techniques from the fields of entrepreneurship, creativity, and innovation management to empirically capture the framework. Several research questions for future studies are provided, concluding with a discussion of implications for research and practice.

Upper echelon theory highlights the importance of top management teams in large and established firms; however, effects are not always clear outside of this context. Due to the unique nature of new ventures, the composition of entrepreneurial teams and its effects on performance is worthy of investigation. Accordingly, we meta–analyze the effect of three characteristics of entrepreneurial team composition (i.e., aggregated, heterogeneity, team size) on new venture performance. Our meta–analysis, which includes 55 empirical samples and 8,892 observations, finds significant and unique effects of entrepreneurial team characteristics on new ventures. Based on our findings, we derive avenues for future research.

In this paper, we focus attention on serial crowdfunders, that is, entrepreneurs who repeatedly turn to crowdfunding to finance their projects. We argue that serial crowdfunders take advantage of the social contacts with those that backed their previous campaigns. This internal social capital developed within the platform, which is not available to “normal” serial entrepreneurs, makes serial crowdfunders’ campaigns more successful than those launched by novice crowdfunders. However, this type of social capital is a substitute for the internal social capital built by backing other campaigns, and has a limited lifespan. Econometric results on a sample of 31,389 Kickstarter campaigns confirm our contentions. Implications for research, practice, and policy are discussed.

New digital technologies have transformed the nature of uncertainty inherent in entrepreneurial processes and outcomes as well as the ways of dealing with such uncertainty. This has raised important questions at the intersection of digital technologies and entrepreneurship—on digital entrepreneurship. We consider two broad implications—less bounded entrepreneurial processes and outcomes and less predefined locus of entrepreneurial agency—and advance a research agenda that calls for the explicit theorizing of concepts related to digital technologies. In articulating the promise and value of such a digital technology perspective, we consider how it would build on and enrich existing entrepreneurship theories.

Although there has been abundant research on the positive personality and environmental qualities that stimulate entrepreneurship, we argue that negative personal circumstances of an economic, sociocultural, cognitive, and physical/ emotional nature may have an equally powerful role to play in getting people to become effective entrepreneurs. These challenges create conditions and experiences that motivate particular adaptive requirements which in turn foster outcomes such as work discipline, risk tolerance, social and network skills, and creativity.

We investigate the effect of innovativeness on crowdfunding outcomes. Because crowdfunding campaigns characterized by greater incremental innovativeness are more comprehensible and generate more user value for typical crowdfunders, incremental innovativeness may result in more favorable funding outcomes. By comparison, campaigns that feature greater radical innovativeness are riskier to develop, harder for crowdfunders to understand and result in less favorable funding outcomes. This negative effect of radical innovativeness may be mitigated by incremental innovativeness, which may help crowdfunders to understand and appreciate radical innovativeness more. A sample of 334 Kickstarter campaigns provides support for our hypotheses.