Knowledge that Transforms

The decision to become an entrepreneur is considered as an alternative to wage labor. The potential entrepreneur evaluates whether there are positive expected net present benefits of entrepreneurship relative to the expected gains from wage labor. The expected net gain from entrepreneurship depends both on the average income from successful entrepreneurship weighted by the probability of success and the average income from wage labor weighted by the probability of employment. The inclusion of economic factors not only adds to the understanding of entrepreneurship but suggests avenues by which policy makers can encourage entrepreneurship.

The knowledge base for the emerging field of entrepreneurship should be interfunctional and interdisciplinary. Yet the functional discipline of marketing has contributed to the entrepreneurship field in only recent years. And entrepreneurship researchers and writers often address marketing superficially, without an awareness of sophisticated marketing concepts and methods. The objectives of this article are to identify key tangencies at the marketing/entrepreneurship interface, to provide relevant research sources, and to selectively convey illustrative marketing knowledge. Because length constraints prevent In-depth attention to any subject, breadth over depth is our objective. There are three major sections in this paper. First, the marketing/entrepreneurship interface is defined, with attention to various schools of marketing thought and their potential value to the entrepreneurship field. Secondly, unique tangencies with the buyer behavior literature are discussed and venture ideas and their evaluation (product research) are highlighted. Finally, the marketing strategy literature is reviewed as it potentially contributes to new venture development. In addition, other Important interfaces are briefly discussed.

Entrepreneurs’ timeframes for the birth and early development of new ventures offers a new lens for understanding the psychology and social construction of new organizations. This paper reviews the temporal aspects of new venture intentions. A model that features temporal brackets is presented.

Much of the previous research attempting to relate traits of the entrepreneur to new venture creation has failed to demonstrate a definitive linkage. This failure should not impugn the importance of the individual as the most cogent unit of analysis In entrepreneurship research and theory. On the contrary, since most new organizations are Initiated and created by individuals operating alone or in small teams, it should motivate new ways of modeling and testing the human phenomena involved In venture creation. Accordingly, this paper presents a structural model of the initiation of new venture creation which links psychological and behavioral concepts with those of organization theory to explain the initiation of launch activities for new business enterprises.

This paper suggests that entrepreneurship is the process of “emergence.” An organizational behavior perspective on entrepreneurship would focus on the process of organizational emergence. The usefulness of the emergence metaphor is explored through an exploration of two questions that are the focus of much of the research in organizational behavior: “What do persons in organizations do?” (we will explore this question by looking at research and theory on the behaviors of managers), and “Why do they do what they do?” (ditto for motivation). The paper concludes with some implications for using the idea of emergence as a way to connect theories and methodologies from organizational behavior to entrepreneurship.

The number of women starting and owning their own businesses has grown dramatically over the past decade. Concurrent with this trend, there has been an increase in the number of research studies focusing on or including women business owners in their samples. This paper reviews empirical research studies on women business owners and their ventures, classifies the studies in a framework, and summarizes trends emerging from this research. To guide future research, a new perspective on women-owned businesses is proposed and research questions, methods, and implications are discussed.

Psychology can be distinguished from other behavioral sciences by its emphasis on the behavior of the individual person. Behavior, in turn, is influenced by the way in which the external world is represented in the mind, and by the individual's exercise of choice. The article examines the possibility that relatively enduring attributes of the person might affect entrepreneurial activity, describes the social cognitive processes Involved in constructing representations of the external environment, and suggests which motivational variables affect behavioral choices. Although past research on “the psychology of the entrepreneur” has not been productive, a psychological approach based on persons, process, and choice holds promise for the future.