Knowledge that Transforms

Family ties are an important conduit of resources for entrepreneurs, but both positive and negative outcomes can arise. Building upon a family embeddedness perspective, we develop hypotheses about curvilinear relationships between the proportion of family ties in entrepreneurs’ networks and venture growth. We test them on entrepreneurs from China, France, Russia, and the United States. These effects appear to be related to the type of entrepreneurs’ social network (business advice, emotional support, and business resources). Our results confirm effects specific to each network: an inverted U–shape for advice and emotional support networks but a U–shape for the business resource network, measuring what proportion of kin in each entrepreneurial network type is valuable to or, conversely, undermines new venture growth.

Social entrepreneurs have a dominant social mission and generate revenue to ensure financial viability. However, most research treats the extent to which social entrepreneurs actually adhere to social and economic mission as a black box. Performing higher order confirmatory factor analysis on a sample of social enterprises (N∼270), this study identifies dimensions and validates measures for understanding and delineating social and economic missions, and shows how the two constructs relate to each other. The theoretical untangling and the empirical validation of social and economic missions as distinct constructs—and multiple potential constellations of attached relative importance—opens up opportunities for quantitative hypothesis–testing research in social entrepreneurship.

Microloans garnered from crowdfunding provide an important source of financial capital for nascent entrepreneurs. Drawing on cognitive evaluation theory, we assess how linguistic cues known to affect underlying motivation can frame entrepreneurial narratives either as a business opportunity or as an opportunity to help others. We examine how this framing affects fundraising outcomes in the context of prosocial lending and conduct our analysis on a sample of microloans made to over 36,000 entrepreneurs in 51 countries via an online crowdfunding platform. We find that lenders respond positively to narratives highlighting the venture as an opportunity to help others, and less positively when the narrative is framed as a business opportunity.

While there is a substantial body of literature exploring the influence of business incubation upon early stage firms, this debate remains almost entirely gender blind. This article challenges this assumption by adopting a feminist perspective to reveal business incubation as a gendered process shaping the identity work undertaken by women seeking legitimacy as technology venturers. In so doing, we critically evaluate prevailing normative analyses of the business incubation process and entrepreneurial legitimation. To illustrate this argument, we draw upon empirical evidence which reveals technology incubation as a legitimating induction process encouraging women to reproduce masculinized representations of the normative technology entrepreneur.

New financing alternatives, such as microfinance, crowdfunding, and peer–to–peer lending, have expanded rapidly. To date, few studies have investigated the antecedents and consequences of these financing mechanisms. This special issue provides an academic foundation for understanding new financial options that entrepreneurs can now use to start and grow ventures. In the introductory article, we integrate strands of the literature on emerging innovations in entrepreneurial finance and provide a framework for a systematic approach to new research questions. We conclude with a discussion of the six papers in the special issue and demonstrate how they contribute to the framework.

The availability of capital for microenterprises has grown rapidly due to microfinancing platforms such as Kiva. The investment decisions of microlenders are challenged due to the limited information about the microenterprises’ characteristics and behavioral intentions. Extending signaling theory, we suggest that microenterprises’ narratives on microfinancing platforms are an important means to signal valuable characteristics and behavioral intentions to prospective lenders. Results indicate that microenterprises, which signal autonomy, competitive aggressiveness, and risk–taking, are more likely to receive funding, and to receive it more quickly. Microenterprises that signal conscientiousness, courage, empathy, and warmth are less likely to get funded. Rhetorical signaling proactiveness, conscientiousness, courage, warmth, or zeal is negatively associated with loan repayment.

What makes some entrepreneurs persist in their venture efforts while others quit? Self–efficacy has robustly been found to drive persistence, yet recent work suggests that affect, in particular entrepreneurial passion, may also enhance persistence. We empirically examine the possibility that the long–standing relationship between self–efficacy and persistence might be mediated by entrepreneurial passion. Using data from 129 entrepreneurs, we find that the self–efficacy to persistence relationship is mediated by passion for inventing and for founding but not by passion for developing firms. The passion of entrepreneurs appears to help explain the relationship between entrepreneurial self–efficacy and sustained entrepreneurial action.

This analysis demonstrates the relevance and robustness of the theory of planned behavior in the prediction of business start–up intentions and subsequent behavior based on longitudinal survey data (2011 and 2012; n = 969) from the adult population in Austria and Finland. By doing so, the study addresses two weaknesses in current research: the limited scope of samples used in the majority of prior studies and the scarcity of investigations studying the translation of entrepreneurial intentions into behavior. The paper discusses conceptual and methodological issues related to studying the intention–behavior relationship and outlines avenues for future research.