Knowledge that Transforms

Research is needed to uncover the sociocultural influences of informal entrepreneurship, or starting a legally unregistered but otherwise legitimate business. Using the institutional logics perspective, we posit that ethnic fractionalization increases the likelihood that entrepreneurs will not register their ventures because it fosters a clan logic and embeddedness in one's ethnic group. Entrepreneurs may not readily access knowledge regarding registration because the ethnic group can provide some of the benefits associated with registration. However, the clan logic is mitigated for entrepreneurs who receive advice from lawyers or businesspeople because these advisors are associated with the state or market logics, respectively, making knowledge of registration more accessible to entrepreneurs. We find support for these arguments using a sample of over 5000 entrepreneurs in 29 countries.

Entrepreneurship research should strive for relevance—the potential to influence the thoughts, decisions, and actions of those who practice entrepreneurship. Despite the Journal of Business Venturing’s (JBV) efforts to foster relevance, submissions often fail to demonstrate their potential for practical usefulness. Addressing this problem involves making practical relevance a guiding principle of research design that complements traditional academic standards for publishing in JBV. It also involves forgoing attempts to make research directly usable by practitioners, who rarely read scholarly journals like JBV, in favor of enhancing its suitability for translation in outlets intended for those audiences. We introduce three design criteria—importance, insight, and impact—to guide the creation of translatable research that honors traditional academic standards. Our discussion touches on what the design criteria mean, how they make research translatable, how scholars can satisfy them, what they look like in exemplar JBV publications, and why they matter now. Indeed, designing research with practical importance, insight, and impact in mind may yield academic contributions more suitable for dissemination beyond academic circles, positioning entrepreneurship research to achieve practical relevance.

This paper examines the effect of small- and medium-sized enterprises' (SMEs') pursuit of Go Green attitudes, characterized by the inclusion of environmental objectives in their strategic planning, on their entrepreneurial growth aspirations (EGAs) through the theory of planned behavior. We theorize that embracing Go Green attitudes can lead to heightened growth intentions; however, the positive relationship between Go Green attitudes and EGAs is weakened in institutional contexts that have more pronounced green subjective norms. Furthermore, the relationship between Go Green attitudes and EGAs is positively mediated by firm innovation, which serves as a behavioral control for SMEs' aspirations to grow their businesses. The empirical results we obtained from investigating a large sample of 16,074 SMEs in 39 economies are consistent with our theorization, and robust against various checks. • Go Green boosts entrepreneurial growth aspirations (EGAs). • The positive affect of Go Green on EGAs is conducted through improved innovation. • Green subjective norms weaken the association between Go Green and EGAs.

Technology startups confront a critical dilemma when attempting to use hype to mobilize resources under conditions of extreme uncertainty. While some scholars argue that high levels of hype play a key role in securing resources to fund startup growth, others caution that the excessive use of hype risks triggering investor skepticism, thereby undermining the extent to which investors judge a startup's claims to be plausible. To assess the validity of these competing conceptions, we analyze 302 artificial intelligence startups across 880 financing rounds using a combination of established econometric methods and emerging machine learning techniques. Our findings reveal the presence of an inverted U-shaped relationship between hype and resource mobilization, wherein investor valuations increase with hype up to a critical threshold, beyond which further hype diminishes valuation outcomes. Moreover, our analysis shows that factors enhancing the comprehensibility and credibility of hype partially offset its diminishing returns, flipping high levels of hype from a liability into an asset that improves startup valuations. Our novel theorization reconciles the performative and pejorative views of hype by demonstrating that hype's impact is contingent upon both its magnitude and the factors influencing investor plausibility judgments. In addition to materially enhancing the methodological toolbox used to assess startup rhetoric under uncertainty, our approach also provides important insights for entrepreneurship research attendant to the strategic management of visionary claims, especially when start-ups attempt to balance investor enthusiasm with realistic expectations in emergent technology sectors.

Research has studied entrepreneurial storytelling as a strategy for generating hype and establishing legitimacy for new ventures. However, it has not examined what the valorization of hype reveals about how the norms of entrepreneurial culture were constructed and justified. Through a conceptual history of hype and its evolving meanings over the last century, we theorize three norms that the concept of hype valorizes: rule-breaking, fetishizing imagined futures, and constructing the agentic entrepreneurial self. Our analysis contributes to the literature on cultural entrepreneurship and entrepreneurialism by complementing the toolkit view of culture and highlighting how hype shapes entrepreneurial culture and ideology.

Despite the ubiquity of private firms, questions concerning the influence of ownermanagement and board governance on strategic decision-making in private firms have received limited attention. To explore these questions, we draw on the performance feedback literature and use longitudinal data from 27,704 U.K. and 7272 Belgian private firms to examine strategic investment in private firms. We find that board oversight increases the likelihood that firms will adjust investment levels in line with predictions by the Behavioral Theory of the Firm (BTOF), as firms with high board oversight increase investment when performance falls below aspirations and reduce it when performance exceeds aspirations. In contrast, low board oversight is associated with deviations from BTOF predictions, as firms with low board oversight tend to reduce investment when performance is below aspirations but increase it even when performance is well above aspirations. These findings suggest that governed (high oversight) and ungoverned (low oversight) private firms follow different decisionmaking logics; governed firms appear to engage in coalition-based decision-making, while decision-making in ungoverned firms appears to be dominated by ownermanagers, whose investment preferences resemble those of risk-averse, undiversified investors. We also find that the relationship between owner-management, performance feedback, and strategic investment is tempered (offset) by board oversight. In sum, our findings indicate boards play a critical role in private firms by promoting collective goals (as identified and enacted by the board) and limiting the influence of owner-manager's personal goals, risk-preferences, and individual economic interests on the firm's response to performance feedback.

Research on social media influencers and entrepreneurship tends to adopt an influencer-as-entrepreneur perspective by examining how influencers leverage social media as entrepreneurial opportunities. However, it remains unclear how entrepreneurs in the audience interpret and leverage influencer content in their entrepreneurial endeavors. Using a two-study approach, Study 1 inductively uncovers that entrepreneurs interpret entrepreneurship influencers' content as para-social mentoring—a one-to-many, mostly unreciprocated mentor-protégé relationship in which media users envision themselves as protégés and perceive media figures as providing individualized career-related and psychosocial support despite knowing that the media figures do not know intimate details about themselves or their circumstances. Our model posits that para-social mentoring between entrepreneurs and entrepreneurship influencers relates to critical entrepreneurship-related outcomes. Using data from 613 entrepreneurs, Study 2 deductively finds general support for the model derived from Study 1. Our study highlights how para-social mentoring operates like a double-edged sword that can benefit entrepreneurs while also exposing them to specific hazards not common in traditional mentoring.

Environmental awareness and concern are implicit in virtually the entire environmental-entrepreneurship literature but typically not explicitly analyzed. To better understand what makes environmental entrepreneurs start their ventures, we need to understand those omnipresent variables. We therefore deconstruct environmental awareness and concern into different aspects, which we manipulate separately in two experimental studies. Our main finding is that key stakeholders' environmental awareness and concern are drivers of environmental entrepreneurship, as they signal to entrepreneurs that stakeholders are ready to support it. We thus identify a way of increasing environmental entrepreneurial intent in order to transform environmental problems into economic opportunities. There is a growing belief among scholars and practitioners that environmental entrepreneurs can play a crucial role in addressing global environmental degradation by developing and providing innovative solutions that lead the way toward a more sustainable business world (Dean and McMullen, 2007; Hockerts and Wüstenhagen, 2010; Johnson and Schaltegger, 2019). A growing literature is investigating the drivers of such entrepreneurship (e.g., Muñoz and Cohen, 2018; Schaltegger, 2002; Shepherd et al., 2013; York et al., 2016), but two drivers — environmental awareness and concern — are typically only implicit in this literature, even though they are underlying most drivers that are investigated explicitly (e.g., Cohen and Winn, 2007; Dean and McMullen, 2007; Markman et al., 2019). Explicitly analyzing the role of environmental awareness and concern is crucial to better understand what makes environmental entrepreneurs start their ventures. In this paper, we deconstruct environmental awareness and concern. The experimental method is ideally suited for that aim (Grégoire et al., 2019; Stevenson et al., 2020; Williams et al., 2019), as it allows us to manipulate several forms of awareness and concern in different experimental groups with slightly different pre-tested articles about an environmental problem. We then measure participants' intent to start a venture that addresses that problem, relative to their intent to start similar ventures that do not address the problem. In this way, we test the effect of the following types of environmental awareness and concern on environmental entrepreneurial intent (EEI): entrepreneurs' personal awareness, awareness of a solution to the problem, and awareness of other entrepreneurs addressing the problem; public awareness; entrepreneurs' own concern; public concern; customers' concern; and investors' concern. The results indicate that especially customers' and investors' awareness of and concern about environmental problems increase entrepreneurs' intent to start environmental ventures. One explanation is that information about stakeholder concern, customers' willingness to buy from environmental ventures, and investors' willingness to invest in them increases the economic feasibility of such ventures and thus their business potential. This is in line with classic entrepreneurship theory, which postulates that entrepreneurship consists in the exploitation of economic opportunities (Shane and Venkataraman, 2000). Information about the environmental problem intended to raise entrepreneurs' own awareness of and concern about the problem have no effect on EEI in our study, which seemingly is in contrast to previous findings that idealistic motives and personal concern are primary drivers of EEI (Phillips, 2013; Shepherd and Patzelt, 2011; York et al., 2016). The findings can be reconciled by recognizing that our study assesses exclusively the overall effects of the experimental manipulations and controls for the potential entrepreneurs' environmental inclination, which we also find to be an important predictor of EEI. By controlling for it, we show that EEI can also be raised by factors external to the focal entrepreneur, in particular the environmental concern of key stakeholders. Our findings thus complete the picture of the drivers of EEI by showing that if environmental awareness and concern are experienced not only by potential environmental entrepreneurs but their stakeholders, entrepreneurs' intent to address the relevant environmental problems rises. It also explains why, despite individual environmental awareness and concern, there is still widespread economic inaction in the face of known environmental problems (Heidbreder et al., 2021; York, 2018). According to our study, more EEI could be induced by a more widespread environmental concern, which encompasses both environmental entrepreneurs and their stakeholders. • We deconstruct environmental awareness and concern in an experimental study. • Stakeholders' awareness and concern drive environmental entrepreneurial intent. • Environmental concern of customers and investors shape entrepreneurial intention.

• Financial inclusion—access to formal banking—positively influences new venture creation among low-income women. • The link between bank account ownership and venture creation weakens for women in highly restrictive gender norm contexts. • Having a bank account boosts women’s money skills, opportunity recognition, and entrepreneurial self-efficacy. • The indirect effects are weaker for women in contexts with high vs. low restrictive gender norms.

Entrepreneurship research is increasingly examining how social class origin shapes entrepreneurial pathways. This growing body of work highlights the enduring advantages and disadvantages entrepreneurs face based on their access to economic, social, and cultural capital acquired through childhood or birth—challenging the popular “rags to riches” narrative that upward mobility is equally attainable for all. To unify and extend this conversation, we develop an integrative framework that explains how entrepreneurs' social class origin influences their mobility. Drawing on an interdisciplinary review of 219 articles, we identify three class-based mechanisms—entrepreneurial finance and skills transfer, entrepreneurial habitus formation, and access to networks and evaluations—through which social class origin shapes entrepreneurial outcomes and, ultimately, social mobility. We conclude by offering three recommendations for future research on social class origin in entrepreneurship, aimed at advancing theory, addressing inequality, and informing inclusive entrepreneurial policy. • We synthesize research on entrepreneurs' social class origin. • Our framework explains how social class origin impacts entrepreneurial outcomes. • We illustrate the role of social class origin in entrepreneurs' social mobility. • We outline an agenda for future research on social class origin and entrepreneurship.