Knowledge that Transforms

Entrepreneurial fear of failure is a ubiquitous yet aversive experience with critical implications for entrepreneurial action and well-being. To understand how entrepreneurs can effectively cope with fear-inducing obstacles, we hypothesize and experimentally test the extent to which self-compassion, cultivated through Loving-Kindness Meditation (LKM), counteracts entrepreneurs’ fear of failure when facing a threatening venture obstacle. Compared to an active control group, entrepreneurs exposed to a brief guided LKM showed higher self-compassion, which, in turn, was associated with lower fear reactivity. We offer novel contributions to entrepreneurship theory and practice by highlighting the role of meditation and self-compassion in building entrepreneurial resilience.

Calls for greater contextualization have been powerful in motivating research and knowledge creation about entrepreneurship. However, unless counter-balanced with attempts to identify the field’s conceptual core, these efforts have the potential to devolve into hyper-contextualization, exposing the field to fragmentation, loss of consensus, and possible disintegration. We identify five elements of entrepreneurial agency common across eight subcommunities of entrepreneurship but emphasized differently in each. By conceiving of entrepreneurship as structural transformation, we explain why some agents succeed at transforming social structures via entrepreneurial action. We conclude with some first steps toward the development of a unified theory of entrepreneurial agency.

We explore how digital technologies are helping address grand challenges to tackle climate change and promote sustainable development. With digital technologies, entrepreneurial organizations have adopted innovative approaches to tackle seemingly intractable societal challenges. We refer to these broadly as digital sustainability activities. By focusing on the digital toolbox employed by pioneering organizations, we propose a research agenda that generates novel questions for entrepreneurship, business models, and ecosystems as well as new ways of thinking about trust and institutional logics. We believe that digital sustainability can spur empirical advances in entrepreneurship, innovation, and strategy with potential for positive impact on society.

We review new venture creation process research in leading journals over the past 30 years, applying a broad view of “process.” While we find a rich and varied literature with significant quantitative and qualitative growth, the review reveals considerable room for future contributions in this important area of entrepreneurship research. In an agenda building on review results, exemplary articles, and theory development advice from other sources, we discuss several types of such future contributions. We hope that our efforts can inspire emerging scholars, colleagues, research leaders, and institutional actors to contribute to a bright future for this core domain of entrepreneurship research.

This article explores the ways artificial intelligence (AI) may impact new venture processes, practices and outcomes. We examine how such technology will augment and replace tasks associated with idea production, selling, and scaling. These changes entail new ways of working, and we consider implications for the organizational design of entrepreneurial ventures. While AI can enhance entrepreneurial activities, liabilities stem from this technological leverage. We advance a research agenda that draws attention towards negative social and economic implications of AI, particularly for more traditional small firms at risk of disintermediation in an AI economy.

Over the past three decades, research on entrepreneurial identity (EI) has grown particularly rapidly, yet in seemingly disparate directions. To lend structure to this fragmented field of inquiry, our systematic integrative review maps and integrates EI research based on antecedents, content, outcomes as well as their relationships. In so doing, we reveal that the field revolves around two primary conceptualizations of EI as Property or Process. We suggest future avenues for examining the interplay between EI and temporal, socio-cognitive, and spatial contexts, and for investigating and theorizing overlooked mechanisms of reconstructing and losing EI.

This article applies an intersectional lens to analyze the lived experience of 11 women migrant entrepreneurs based in the UK. We adopt structuration as our ontology to analyze intersectionality in entrepreneurship at the interplay of macro-level structures and micro-level agency, addressing tensions between determinism and subjectivism. Findings show that women migrant entrepreneurs are trailing wives who experience constrained agency which influences their entrepreneurial activities. By highlighting the specific issues faced by entrepreneurs situated at the intersection of the oppressive structures of patriarchy and outsidership, we advance the intersectional agenda in entrepreneurship research and policymaking.

The prediction-control (PC) space offers a theoretical framework for the entrepreneurial method and shows how it can foster the development of a middle class of business, defined as ventures that grow and endure over time, but don’t necessarily grow very large in size. Analogous to the middle class in history fostered by the scientific method, the middle class of business is likely to provide spaces of non-churn and non-change requisite for the cocreation of robust communities and new ends worth achieving for human well-being. Such new ends are also likely to be crucial to tackling the problems of the 21st century and beyond.

Crowdfunded microlending research implies that both communal and agentic characteristics are valued. These characteristics, however, are often viewed as being at odds with one another due to their association with gender stereotypes. Drawing upon expectancy violation theory and research on gender stereotypes, we theorize that gender-counterstereotypical facial expressions of emotion provide a means for entrepreneurs to project “missing” agentic or communal characteristics. Leveraging computer-aided facial expression analysis to analyze entrepreneur photographs from 43,210 microloan appeals, we show that women benefit from stereotypically masculine facial expressions of anger and disgust, whereas men benefit from stereotypically feminine facial expressions of sadness and happiness.

This article responds to Welter’s (2011) call to pay more attention to the diversity of entrepreneurship in theorizing contexts by examining how places come to be understood as entrepreneurial. We draw briefly and selectively on ideas from a quirky set of disciplines, looking at how topics such as narratives and language, memories of the past, built environments, and constellations of power among groups of people interact to shape the emergence and decline of “everyday entrepreneurship places.” Our discussion illustrates some useful cues our research might draw on to challenge and improve theoretical understanding of place in entrepreneurship.