Knowledge that Transforms

Research Summary In this manuscript, we argue that the Entrepreneurs‐as‐Scientists (E‐a‐S) research program requires a fundamental shift from predominantly conceptual development toward an empirical agenda to achieve its normative goal: developing a scalable algorithm that improves entrepreneurial learning and value creation. The E‐a‐S approach prescribes that entrepreneurs learn by articulating causal theories, testing them, updating their beliefs, and revising their theories. We identify three risks of continued emphasis on conceptual development: overlooked complementarities, insufficient attention to boundary conditions, and potential overprescription based on limited evidence. We propose an empirical research agenda, as well as specific topics within it, to ground the E‐a‐S approach in systematic evidence, advancing a research program that is as rigorous in its methods as the entrepreneurial practices it seeks to improve. Managerial Summary This manuscript examines a growing approach that encourages entrepreneurs to think and act like scientists—by clearly articulating assumptions, testing them through experiments, updating beliefs, and refining their strategies. The goal is to develop a reliable, scalable method that improves how entrepreneurs learn and create value. However, current insights and ongoing research projects predominantly focus on conceptual work. We highlight three practical risks of such a focus: missing complementarities, overlooking when the learning method works best, and applying it too broadly without sufficient validation. We suggest that entrepreneurs use this approach flexibly since it was not designed to be a fixed formula. Ongoing research will clarify how to adapt it across contexts, helping entrepreneurs make more informed, disciplined, and effective strategic decisions.

Research Summary Prior studies have often conceptualized entrepreneurial experimentation as an activity over which founders exert a high amount of discretion in decision‐making. However, the locus of control over experimentation programs is dynamic, shifting with varying external stakeholder influence and venture growth. This paper proposes an integrative framework explaining how different stakeholder influence mechanisms function as frictions or enablers, shaping a venture's experimentation program. Resource provision mechanisms determine ventures' capacity for experimentation, while stakeholder strategic orientation and governance mechanisms shape the context within which ventures experiment, influencing how ventures deploy resources toward experiments. We further discuss how a venture's development stage shapes the relative value and impact of these stakeholder influences. Managerial Summary Experimentation and the Lean Startup approach are well‐established methods for navigating the inherent uncertainties of entrepreneurial ventures. While conventional wisdom often portrays founders as exercising substantial discretion over experimentation, this research demonstrates that a venture's experimentation program can be systematically shaped by external stakeholders. Rather than being solely founder‐driven, entrepreneurial experimentation is embedded in a broader stakeholder context that conditions what can be tested, how broadly, and how radically. Stakeholders shape ventures' experimentation by providing and controlling resources, influencing strategic directions, and structuring governance relationships. Strategic attention to which actors influence experimentation, how that influence is exercised, and how its relative importance shifts across venture development stages is important for fostering experimentation and improving venture performance.

Research Summary Using 14,108 Kickstarter crowdfunding campaigns, we examine three strategies to gather support from first‐time versus repeat backers: narrative distinctiveness aligning with backers' expectations of novelty, endorsement from Kickstarter staff, and campaign leadership's reciprocity of funding other campaigns. Staff endorsement is more strongly associated with support from first‐time backers, while campaign leadership's reciprocity is associated primarily with repeat backers. Differences between first‐time and repeat backers are evident in evaluating narrative distinctiveness: narratives distinct from past campaigns correlate positively with repeat backers and greater funding but negatively with first‐time backers. Narratives distinct from live campaigns correlate positively with first‐time backers but are associated with lower funding amounts. Our findings conceptualize differences between first‐time and repeat backers that shape the associations between campaign legitimization strategies and backer support. Managerial Summary This work examines how Kickstarter campaigns should be designed to attract both new people and get support from existing community members. We test whether differences between these two target groups exist in evaluating commonly established “success factors” of campaigns: An endorsement from Kickstarter, the involvement of the campaign founder on the platform, and a campaign text highlighting the campaign's novel contributions. We find differences in all three between both groups and conclude with insights on how managers should design crowdfunding campaigns based on long‐term goals and objectives. We also offer some implications for crowdfunding platforms, such as Kickstarter, in supporting content creators in attracting new backers, which aids with overall platform growth.

Research Summary The entrepreneurship literature has established the benefits of experimentation but has paid comparatively little attention to its costs. We develop a Bayesian model to illustrate the entrepreneurial choice between direct and experimental entry. We argue that performance depends on three mechanisms: information, adaptation, and appropriability. We show that experimental entry is not universally optimal and characterize the conditions under which each mechanism favors or undermines it. We further allow founders to hold biased prior beliefs, showing that greater bias increases the value of experimentation. Extending the baseline model to a multidimensional setting, we show that experimenting across different dimensions leads to a variety of counterintuitive insights. Our analysis produces a series of testable predictions and yields several implications for the broader entrepreneurship literature and practice. Managerial Summary Should every startup run experiments before launching? The lean startup movement says yes—but the answer depends on factors often overlooked by founders and investors. Experimentation creates value when the market is genuinely uncertain and founders' beliefs are far from what customers want. It can backfire when feedback is too noisy to interpret, when pivoting is prohibitively costly, or when releasing an early product may favor imitation. In settings where products have several significant features, which dimensions to experiment in matters as much as whether to experiment at all. Our findings offer guidance to entrepreneurs, investors, and policymakers designing the conditions that make experimentation feasible.

Research Summary Corporate entrepreneurship (CE) requires firms to pursue both exploratory and exploitative innovation, yet limited research explains how intellectual capital (IC) is translated into these distinct outcomes. We develop a contingency model that specifies how and when IC drives exploration and exploitation. We theorize that a firm's capacity for learning and transformation (CLT) functions as a firm‐level learning and transformation capability through which IC can be translated into either exploratory or exploitative innovation. Knowledge breadth strengthens the indirect effect of IC on exploratory innovation via CLT, whereas knowledge depth amplifies the indirect effect on exploitative innovation. We test the model in two complementary field studies. Study 1 employs a time‐lagged design with objective archival data, and Study 2 replicates the findings using survey data. Results consistently support the proposed theoretical model. Managerial Summary Firms operating in fast‐changing and uncertain environments often struggle to balance developing new products with improving existing ones. Our study shows that simply having strong knowledge resources is not enough. What matters is how effectively firms learn from and use that knowledge. We find that firms perform better when they build strong learning capabilities that help them adapt, recombine, and apply knowledge over time. Importantly, the type of knowledge a firm holds shapes this process: broad knowledge supports new product development, while deep, specialized knowledge strengthens improvements to existing products. For managers, this means focusing not only on acquiring knowledge but also on building systems and practices that continuously translate knowledge into action and innovation.

Research Summary Financial resource acquisition is crucial for ventures but hindered by uncertainty. While signaling mitigates this uncertainty, its effectiveness hinges on venture novelty and the narratives used to clarify embedded information. Adopting a configurational lens, we examine the interplay among novelty, signals, and narratives in equity crowdfunding (ECF). Applying qualitative comparative analysis (QCA) to 98 ventures on a UK ECF platform, we reveal multiple equifinal pathways to fundraising success and demonstrate that novelty acts as a critical contingency factor: novel and less‐novel ventures require distinct configurations of signals and narratives, and narratives that clarify signals play a crucial role for novel ventures. Our findings extend research on signaling theory, entrepreneurial narratives, and entrepreneurial finance with a nuanced understanding of the interdependence among novelty, signals, and narratives. Managerial Summary Novel and less‐novel ventures face distinct challenges in convincing investors, and we show that there is no “one‐size‐fits‐all” strategy in fundraising. Our study demonstrates how entrepreneurs can convince investors using signals and/or narratives that align with the novelty of their ventures. For novel ventures, specific and coherent narratives are particularly helpful in clarifying signals that contain complex information. Conversely, less‐novel ventures that refine existing offerings may improve fundraising performance by simply emphasizing signals that demonstrate clear product‐market fit. We therefore suggest that entrepreneurs should view signals and narratives as complementary tools and tailor their fundraising strategies to match their ventures' novelty and achieve fundraising success.

Research Summary We examine how entrepreneur‐expressed humility affects early stage investors' willingness to fund new ventures. In pitching contexts where investors rely on relational cues and implicit prototypes of entrepreneurs, we theorize three distinct pathways through which expressed humility shapes funding decisions. First, building on research regarding interpersonal signals in early stage valuation, we propose that humility fosters perceptions of interpersonal affect and trust and team‐building qualities, increasing investors' willingness to fund. Second, drawing on implicit leadership theories, we argue that humility may trigger negative perceptions regarding the entrepreneur's ability to make rapid and risky decisions. Across a videometric analysis of 140 real‐world pitches and a randomized experiment with French early stage investors, we show that expressed humility elicits both pathways, but investors prioritize positive attributions. Managerial Summary Although humility is often regarded as a positive leadership trait, it contradicts implicit prototypes of successful entrepreneurs, who are typically seen as dominant and assertive. We examine how early stage investors perceive and respond to displays of humility during pitches. We propose that entrepreneur‐expressed humility produces ambiguous effects: It enhances perceptions of interpersonal affect and trust and team‐building qualities, but raises doubts about the entrepreneur's ability to make rapid and risky decisions. Using a videometric analysis of 140 pitches from the French version of Shark Tank and a randomized experiment with venture capital investors, we find evidence for these competing pathways. Overall, investors prioritize the positive attributions of interpersonal skills, suggesting that entrepreneurs benefit from expressing humility when pitching.

Research Summary We explore the impact of new venture team (NVT) stability on long‐run organizational growth. With an instrumental variable design, we leverage a matched employer‐employee dataset of all Danish new ventures from 1981 to 1997. We find strong evidence that NVT stability has a positive effect on organizational growth in employees and that the effect grows stronger over time. We also find that stability is especially impactful for larger teams and for teams with higher education levels. The gains from stability also appear to be driven entirely by mixed‐gender teams. We connect our findings to the literature on NVT dynamics and suggest avenues for future research. Managerial Summary Stability within founding teams is crucial for the longevity and expansion of new ventures. We examine a dataset of Danish startups and find that ventures with stable founding teams demonstrate a 16.1 percentage point higher likelihood of survival and a 20.4% increase in average size after 10 years. This effect is accentuated in larger, more educated, and gender‐diverse teams. For entrepreneurs, these insights underscore the importance of not only assembling a strong initial team but also maintaining its composition to leverage growth opportunities as the business evolves.

Research summary Entrepreneurship unfolds under uncertainty, which complicates entrepreneurs' efforts to align idea, action, and environment to reach product–market fit. To illuminate how entrepreneurs perform such alignment, we complement the theory‐based view and its focus on cognitive uncertainty with a discussion of behavioral uncertainty. We propose that entrepreneurs face four types of uncertainty: (1) uncertainty about the state of their environment (state uncertainty), (2) uncertainty about the interpretation of environmental cues (perception uncertainty), (3) uncertainty about the feasibility of turning an idea into a tangible product (execution uncertainty), and (4) uncertainty about the effect of their action in the environment (effect uncertainty). To mitigate these forms of uncertainty, entrepreneurs engage in idea–environment (entrepreneurs as visionaries), idea–action (entrepreneurs as engineers), and action–environment (entrepreneurs as experimenters) alignment. Each of these alignment strategies is associated with benefits and constraints in mitigating the uncertainty discussed. Our paper thus generates new insights into the nature of uncertainty and its effective mitigation in the quest for product–market fit, a critical precursor of success in entrepreneurship. Managerial summary Entrepreneurship succeeds when product and market are aligned. We map two sources of uncertainty that stand in the way of reaching product–market fit. Agentic uncertainty concerns the entrepreneur: interpreting signals (perception uncertainty) and making the idea work (execution uncertainty). Environmental uncertainty concerns the market: what state the market is in (state uncertainty) and how the market will react to products (effect uncertainty). Entrepreneurs can mitigate these uncertainties via three complementary strategies: (1) idea–environment alignment (“visionary” scanning the environment), (2) idea–action alignment (“engineering” to prove feasibility), and (3) action–environment alignment (“experimenter” testing to learn what sells). Each alignment strategy yields benefits and costs toward reaching product–market fit. In combination, they accelerate product–market fit—a critical driver of success in entrepreneurship.

Research Summary We examine how promotional language (“hype”) in reward‐based crowdfunding is associated with campaign success, and whether those associations vary across sector contexts and with campaign execution burden. Using dictionary‐based text measures from 635 U.S. Kickstarter campaigns across five sectors, we distinguish three novelty‐framing moves: capability/rigor language, excellence/status language, and attitude/affect language. We find no uniform association between aggregate hype and success. Instead, the observed associations vary systematically across rhetorical moves, sectors, and goal levels. Capability/rigor language is positively associated with success in Technology, attitude/affect language is positively associated with success in Entertainment, and excellence/status language is negatively associated with success in Design. Beyond these sector differences, the paper's clearest cross‐cutting pattern is that capability/rigor language becomes more positively associated with success as funding goals increase. Managerial Summary The value of “hype” on Kickstarter depends on what is said, what is being offered, and how ambitious the ask is. In our data, Technology campaigns are more positively associated with success when descriptions emphasize testing, technical specificity, and execution readiness, whereas Entertainment campaigns are more positively associated with attitude/affect language. In contrast, excellence/status claims are associated with lower success in Design. Across contexts, the clearest pattern is that feasibility‐oriented language becomes more positively associated with success as funding goals increase, suggesting that larger asks benefit more from cues of deliverability than from undifferentiated promotional intensity.