Knowledge that Transforms

Prior research highlights how entrepreneurs depend on resourceful actions to overcome constraints in value-creation situations. Yet, most resourcefulness research has examined its external manifestations. To complement this, I examine the cognitive and embodied sensemaking process that underpins resourceful actions. Using an autoethnography of a 1430-mile mountain bike ride across South Africa, I distill a microfoundational sensemaking perspective underpinning resourcefulness, highlighting how actors who confront resource-constrained situations find creative ways to overcome such constraints to move forward in their endeavors. Furthermore, I specify how resourcefulness is impacted by priming, learning, and contagion within a challenging context.

We develop a recombinant framework of technological information disclosure by integrating the insights of the recombinant innovation perspective and the crowdfunding literature. We propose that the technological information disclosed in a technology project’s crowdfunding description can boil down to two recombinant features, that is, the number of disclosed technological domains ( N) and the interdependence thereof ( K). We further posit that the N and K of disclosed technological information about a project have distinct implications for crowdfunders’ perceived usefulness and complexity of the project’s rewards, thus affecting crowdfunding performance in distinct ways. That is, N has an inverted U-shaped effect on crowdfunding performance, while K has a monotonically negative effect on crowdfunding performance. Such effects of N and K of disclosed technological domains are further moderated by crowdfunders’ knowledge about the disclosed technological domains. Evidence from the field data from Kickstarters.com and a scenario-based study support our predictions.

Metric conjoint studies are a popular research design in the entrepreneurship domain. For these studies, test-retest reliabilities of ρ > .70 or higher are an often-cited reliability criterion. Despite their widespread use, however, there is little rigorous analysis of whether test-retest reliability in metric conjoint studies relates to model efficacy. Informed by a systematic literature review, we conducted two Monte Carlo simulations to evaluate the effects of various determinants of test-retest reliability in conjoint experiments. We then illustrate a workflow for entrepreneurship researchers employing conjoint designs to better evaluate—and communicate—confidence in statistical models estimated from conjoint data.

Using three theory-based performance criteria as decision attributes, we conducted a conjoint analysis experiment with 105 social venture founder-CEOs to examine their decisions to exit their firms voluntarily. Multilevel regression analysis of founders’ choices revealed that various exit preferences were chosen that did not support theoretical prescriptions. While achieving desired social impact was the main influence on founder exit choices, the heterogeneity of exit preferences led us to parcel them into four distinct groups: idealists, traditionalists, realists, and pragmatists. We discuss our contributions to the entrepreneurial exit and social entrepreneurship research literature and list the implications of our results for practice.

Investing in sectors that a firm has never invested in before is fundamentally a form of entrepreneurial experimentation and an integral part of wealth creation. We consider how the broader market conditions and sociocognitive cues jointly affect venture capital (VC) firms’ investment decisions in new industries that are unrelated to their past experience. Although VCs are more likely to enter an unrelated new industry when the overall market is hot, they also take sociocognitive cues from their own social contacts and news media. Using the population of U.S. VC investments between 1990 and 2016, we find support for our predictions.

Psychological mediators underlie many entrepreneurship phenomena. Unfolding psychological mechanisms enhances our understanding of theoretical relationships in entrepreneurship. This paper first reviews the current state of entrepreneurship studies examining psychological mediators and identifies the hurdles that push researchers away from employing randomized experiments to unfold the causal relationships underlying mediation. To alleviate these hurdles, we then propose parsimonious yet rigorous experimental designs that make experiments testing psychological mediators in entrepreneurship feasible and cost efficient. In addition, when manipulating the mediator is not feasible, we theorize and identify two remedies a single experiment can use to examine the causal chain underlying mediation.

This paper develops a new concept, entrepreneurial political activity based on corporate political activity to understand when an entrepreneur, representing both the firm and the individual simultaneously, will engage in political activity. The case of petty traders in Kumasi, Ghana generates grounded theory of entrepreneurial political activity. Faced with an existential threat, informal entrepreneurs had to decide whether to try to influence government policy by engaging in political activity. Findings from over 200 interviews demonstrated entrepreneurs carefully considered the state’s willingness to allow for the extra-legal economic activity in the informal economy to continue, and if they had trust in the leadership of the collective action before engaging in political action. Policy saliency motivating action was determined by growth orientation and dependency on the venture for household survival, both driven by the entrepreneur’s social role in the social system.

How do top management teams (TMTs) play a role in new ventures’ business model implementation? Drawing on group process theory and the organizational culture literature, this study investigates the impact of TMT processes on new ventures’ business model implementation and how organizational culture moderates such relationships. We propose a positive effect of TMT agreement seeking but a negative effect of TMT interpersonal conflict on business model implementation. Furthermore, we theorize that the roles of these two TMT processes are contingent on organizational culture. Specifically, we posit that the benefit of TMT agreement seeking is amplified by flexibility orientation culture but reduced by control orientation culture. Conversely, the harm from TMT interpersonal conflict is weakened by the flexibility orientation culture but amplified by the control orientation culture. Using two waves of matched survey data collected from 896 TMT members in 224 Chinese new technology-based ventures, the results provide strong support for these hypotheses. Our findings yield actionable guidelines for new ventures pursuing business model implementation and superior performance.

We integrate research on family-owned firms (FOFs) and the Behavioral Theory of the Firm (BTOF) to study wrongdoing—a specific dimension of corporate social responsibility (CSR) associated with destructive risk—in family- versus nonfamily-owned firms (NFOFs). We argue that FOFs are likely to respond differently from NFOFs to risks because in addition to concern for economic costs and benefits, FOFs are uniquely concerned with the socioemotional wealth (SEW) accruing from the noneconomic costs and benefits of their actions. Furthermore, we argue that the differences in behavior are dependent upon whether the nature of risk associated with a behavior is destructive, as in the case of wrongdoing, versus productive, as in the case of other previously examined behaviors such as research and development [R&D] investment, diversification, or internationalization. Our analyses, based on 17,022 observations from a sample of 1,900 publicly traded U.S. firms from 1999 to 2016, provide robust empirical support for these predictions, showing that FOFs commit less wrongdoing than their nonfamily counterparts and respond to performance relative to aspirations regarding wrongdoing in a way that varies from their responses regarding other behaviors examined in prior studies. We thereby advance the literatures on BTOF and FOFs by explaining how family owners’ decisions change depending on the type of risk associated with their behavior— destructive versus productive, and by integrating the additional aspiration related to SEW into BTOF predictions to tell a more complete story of organizational wrongdoing from the BTOF perspective. By focusing on wrongdoing as a specific dimension of CSR, our findings also have implications for CSR research as they show that the relative importance of social responsibilities shifts according to the type of risks (and trade-offs) associated with those responsibilities.

Our study extends and enhances entrepreneurial action theory (EAT) by considering the strategic advantage or disadvantage of impulsive action. To date, EAT has largely sidestepped the role of dispositional impulsivity, limiting its veridicality and inclusivity. Popularized notions of celebrity entrepreneurs and an increasingly large body of empirical research on the prevalence of impulsivity have inspired a reassessment of what drives entrepreneurs. Looking beyond both the anecdotes and well-established prevalence of impulsivity, we develop and illustrate a novel theory concerning the fate of impulsive nascent entrepreneurs who are wired for nondeliberative, less-calculative action. We use an agent-based model and conduct simulation-based experiments involving 2.7 million virtual entrepreneurs to identify and explicate the specific conditions under which impulsivity does or does not generate strategic advantage. Accordingly, we contribute a broader and deeper theorization of EAT, taking notable steps toward the inclusion of nontraditional entrepreneurs and the varied impacts of impulsive action in this domain’s evolving conception of new venture emergence.