Abstract
Immigrant entrepreneurs face many challenges in the various early phases of their companies’ existence. These challenges are often referred to as “the liability of newness”. While some of these challenges are common to all entrepreneurs, the immigrant entrepreneur has an additional set of challenges. This article describes those challenges in the immigrant entrepreneurial experience in the Swedish agri-food industry. A qualitative research design is used. Interviews were conducted with 25 immigrant entrepreneurs who planned a business, had started a business, or had exited a business. Various websites and tax reports provided secondary data. The research, which covered a two-year time frame, identifies the strategies and actions the immigrant entrepreneurs adopted and used to try to overcome those challenges. The following strategies and actions were identified: use of business support, virtual embeddedness, family and ethnic groups, entrepreneurial experience, and niche markets. The companies in which the entrepreneurs recognized the gravity of those challenges early in their life cycle were more likely to survive beyond the start-up phase. The article, which also reviews much of the current literature on immigrant entrepreneurship, has implications for business support advisory services and policymakers who are involved in the effort to achieve economic (and social-cultural) integration of immigrants into their host countries.
Highlights
When new companies enter new markets, they face what scholars refer to as “the liability of newness”
The demand for locally produced food, value-added food products, and ethnic food is increasing in developed countries, immigrant entrepreneurs in the agri-food industry still face the liability of newness [60]
To avoid the left truncation problem in our sample selection, we focused on the start-up process and start-up activities of 25 planned and new immigrant entrepreneurships in Sweden
Summary
When new companies enter new markets, they face what scholars refer to as “the liability of newness”. According to the Swedish Agency for Economic and Regional Growth (Tillväxtverket), immigrants have founded 20% of the new companies in Sweden These companies are the immigrant entrepreneurs’ main source of income [9]. In many OECD countries, the rate of survival for immigrant companies is far lower than that of native-owned companies This is true even when investigation establishes that some immigrant entrepreneurs have a stronger entrepreneurial spirit than their native-born counterparts [16]. According to Aldrich and Yang [27], researchers who aim to test the liability of newness hypothesis encounter a statistical problem called “left truncation” that, in this context, occurs when the organizations studied are already established This process of selecting organizations for research necessarily eliminates fragile organizations that do not survive the start-up phase. What challenges do immigrant entrepreneurs perceive during the entrepreneurial process, and what strategies are applied to eliminate or overcome these challenges? Our specific focus is immigrant entrepreneurship in the agri-food industry [29,30,33,34]
Sign-in/Register to view highlights & summary Talk to us
Join us for a 30 min session where you can share your feedback and ask us any queries you have
Schedule a callDisclaimer: All third-party content on this website/platform is and will remain the property of their respective owners and is provided on "as is" basis without any warranties, express or implied. Use of third-party content does not indicate any affiliation, sponsorship with or endorsement by them. Any references to third-party content is to identify the corresponding services and shall be considered fair use under The CopyrightLaw.
