Entrepreneurship Scholars Research Articles

Who is the entrepreneurial educator? A transferability perspective to tease out antecedents needed to form a signature pedagogy

Purpose Entrepreneurial education (EE) has grown rapidly and become important for how we prepare future generations for work. However, a less addressed piece of the puzzle is: who is the entrepreneurial educator? In this paper, our aim draws upon Palmer’s (1998) idea of wholeness, where we seek to connect the two problem spaces of the role diversity of entrepreneurial educators and how the educator is closely tied to the evolutionary development of the domain in constructing signature pedagogies that could cater for the issue of a low capitalization rate.Design/methodology/approach We problematize on a conceptual level the entry-level personas that have been addressed in prior literature by using the processes of transferability and evolutionary theory to tease out how variability among educators could create antecedents to form a signature pedagogy.Findings We recognize four archetypes: the experienced entrepreneur, the entrepreneurship scholar, the academic scholar and the pedagogical expert. Our problematization on the variance of the four archetypes provides a fertile ground to engage in addressing “the elephants in the room” in EE, the capitalization rate of graduates and the importance of developing a signature pedagogy, acknowledged in other domains, to enhance legitimacy.Originality/value The paper provides a nuanced outlook on who is teaching in the entrepreneurial classroom and problematizes from an evolutionary perspective the potential future paths to continue staying relevant for society as well as justifying our presence as a legit domain in academia.

Policy entrepreneurship for transformative governance

AbstractScholarship is growing on societal transitions, describing radical societal change involving multiple sectors and scales, and transformative governance, describing how public, private, and civil society actors use tools of policy to pursue this fundamental change, aiming to build resiliency and sustainability. Much of this literature has a systems‐level focus and does not closely examine how governance participants, working individually or collectively, can steer a jurisdiction toward or away from transformativeness. This paper offers a corrective, integrating policy entrepreneurship scholarship with transformative governance research to advance understanding of how human agency underpins societal change. Drawing on accounts from 50 interviewees across eight case studies of US cities grappling with flooding hazards, we show how policy entrepreneurship can boost the political and economic resources that city officials rely upon to help propel radical shifts towards greater social, economic, and environmental equity.

Microentrepreneurs in the gig economy: who they are, what they do, and why they do it

PurposeGig microentrepreneurs are individuals who have embraced short-term gigs as an entrepreneurial agency for both financial and social livelihood. Based on surveys in 2020 and 2023, the research reported here presents a comprehensive, empirical portrait of two cohorts of gig microentrepreneurs. This portrait captures the similarities and differences of gig microentrepreneurs in terms of offline and online business models and the nature of gig work. Recognizing that there is not a “typical” gig microentrepreneur will help ensure that this gig business model continues to evolve without boundaries in terms of demographics, motivations and behavior and will enable marketing and entrepreneurship scholars to better assist in entrepreneurial growth and development. The purpose of this paper is to gain a better understanding of the gig microentrepreneur regardless of the nature of the gig work.Design/methodology/approachThe research involved two separate surveys in the USA. The first survey took place in July 2020, and the second survey took place in April 2023 after major changes had taken place in the economy and in society (e.g. the COVID pandemic). Both surveys used samples generated by Dynata, an online consumer panel company with access to more than 70 million consumers worldwide who have agreed to participate as panel members.FindingsThe surveys provided answers to questions about the demographic and behavioral aspects of gig microentrepreneurs, including who they are, the number and type of gig activities in which they participate, the financial livelihood generated from gig income, the social livelihood inherent in gig work and dissatisfaction with being a microentrepreneur in the gig economy. These findings produced insights into why individuals engage in gig activities and the positive and negative impacts of that engagement. Based on the findings, nuances and trends within the gig economy and among gig microentrepreneurs are identified and discussed.Research limitations/implicationsThe research limitations include lack of generalizability outside of the USA, use of panel data and survivor bias.Practical implicationsConsumers, gig microentrepreneurs, companies and government agencies can benefit from the growth in the gig economy. The vast array of gig activities in which gig microentrepreneurs engage clearly shows the need for an on-demand workforce. There are both economic and societal benefits to having a labor-force that can meet a breadth of demands with varying timeframes.Social implicationsWhether gig microentrepreneurs are engaging in gig work to augment their income because of economic insecurity or for intrinsic reasons, the motivations and behaviors of the gig microentrepreneurs are indicative of the talent and resources needed to keep the US economy moving forward positively.Originality/valueAs noted by several scholars conducting research on the gig economy, little is known about gig microentrepreneurs – who they are, what they do and why they do it. Current research on the gig economy tends to focus on online platform companies. This research offers an exploratory look at microentrepreneurs who engage in gig activities both online and offline without geographic or technological boundaries.

The Impact of Strategic Orientations on the Born Globals’ Export Performance: An Ambidexterity Approach

According to international entrepreneurship scholars, the success of Born Globals (BGs) depends on their capacity to develop an organizational ambidexterity perspective, i.e. a dual function of simultaneous knowledge exploration and exploitation. In this respect, it has been pointed out that ambidexterity can be associated with the ability to balance the development of different strategic orientations (SOs), namely, entrepreneurial orientation (EO), market orientation (MO), and learning orientation (LO). While several authors have investigated the impact of MO, EO and LO on BGs’ performance, the results of such research are often inconsistent. Based on the resource orchestration view, we assume that the combined – rather than the single – contribution of resources and capabilities provided by EO, MO, and LO, ultimately result in a superior export performance. Such an indicator is typically adopted to evaluate international performance, especially for micro and small companies. More specifically, the study aims to verify the significance of dyadic (namely, MO*EO, EO*LO, and MO*LO) and triadic (MO*EO* LO) interactions of the SO typologies on BGs’ export performance. Moreover, the paper aspires to verify if some of these interactions are more relevant than others. We test our hypotheses on a sample of 100 Italian hi-tech BGs located inside a technological cluster near Rome through a longitudinal analysis. Our findings show that all the investigated interactions positively and significantly impact on the BGs’ export performances, independently of the adopted measurement variable. However, a certain type of hierarchy emerges among the different impacts of the investigated interactions among the three SO typologies.

International entrepreneurship in innovative SMEs: Examining the connection between CEOs’ dynamic managerial capabilities, business model innovation and export performance

International entrepreneurship scholars aim to understand how small and medium-sized enterprises (SMEs) achieve long-term competitive advantage and international success. This paper examines how business model innovation (BMI) helps entrepreneurial and innovative SMEs in improving export performance suggesting that changes in value creation, value delivery, and value capture are required to target international customers effectively. Additionally, drawing on the dynamic managerial capabilities literature, we look at the role of CEOs’ managerial capabilities on BMI. A quantitative study using partial least squares structural equation model (PLS-SEM) was conducted on 189 innovative Spanish SMEs operating in business-to-business (B2B) international markets. Our findings provide new insights into the underexplored relationship between BMI and export performance generating new evidence regarding the mechanisms through which innovative SMEs may improve export performance. We also highlight the positive relevance of CEOs’ managerial social capital (external connectivity) and managerial cognition (empowering leadership) to foster BMI. Finally, managerial implications and future research directions are proposed.

To profit or not to profit: Founder identity at the intersection of religion and entrepreneurship

For more than a century, discussion of the connections between religion and entrepreneurship has pointed to what we would now label questions of identity. Our study of 25 participants in a program in Northern Kenya that aimed to introduce and stimulate capitalist entrepreneurship within extremely poor pastoralist communities shows that differences in participants' religious social identities strongly shaped whether or not they adopted new roles and role identities as capitalist entrepreneurs. This process also shifted the domains in which their religious and collectivist social identities were salient and helped to explain the emergence of important and contested changes in social and economic relations. We contribute to the development of founder identity theory by building research at the intersection of entrepreneurship and religion and at the intersection of entrepreneurship and poverty alleviation.

Time Perspective and Entrepreneurs’ Alertness

Entrepreneurship scholars have much to gain from including time perspective in developing theory about entrepreneurs’ alertness. In this study, interviews with 22 French entrepreneurs revealed associations between their alertness and past-positive, present-hedonistic, and future time perspectives. Complementarily, a sample of 376 U.S. entrepreneurs provided evidence that their present-hedonistic and future time perspectives impacted their alertness; we found mixed support for the relationship between past-positive time perspective and entrepreneurial alertness. A replication analysis with 764 U.K. entrepreneurs corroborated support for our hypotheses.

Do the Prevalent Entrepreneurial Ecosystem Factors Drive the Choice of Business Models? A Mixed-methods Study Involving Social Entrepreneurs in India

While social entrepreneurship scholars in the past have focused much on the building blocks of robust social entrepreneurship business models and sustainability factors including supportive ecosystem elements, it is not clear ‘what’ categories of the interactive ecosystem in which social entrepreneurs are located influence the choice of business models even before they operationalize their social ventures. Accordingly, this study espouses a mixed-method research design to address this issue. The authors collected data from 24 and 112 social entrepreneurs in two study phases, respectively. Four support factors—business, market, financial and policy were considered important by social entrepreneurs in India that they believe influenced their choice of business models. While policy and financial support factors were considered most important by social entrepreneurs with a pure social mission/impact orientation, market and business support were considered significant influential factors by social entrepreneurs with a profit orientation. Social entrepreneurs who sought a balance between social and economic missions, however, considered the presence of financial and market support to be crucial for choosing a relevant business model. To the best of our knowledge, this is the first study that investigates the inherent priori influence of prevalent ecosystem factors on social business model selection. It uniquely brings out an empirical association between ecosystem factors and business model preferences, affirming that factors pivotal to choice also underpin sustainability. Moreover, this study also unveils an interactive framework encompassing entrepreneur traits and their orientations, ecosystem factors, feedback and performance. Offering multiple actionable implications, this study offers key insights for policy decision-makers and practitioners.

Ideas for bridging the academic-policy divide at the nexus of gender and entrepreneurship

PurposeInspired by the “responsibility turn” in the broader organization/management literature, the overarching aim of this article is to help scholars working at the gender × entrepreneurship intersection produce research with a higher likelihood of being accessed, appreciated and acted upon by policy- practitioners. Consistent with this aim, we hope that our paper contributes to an increased use of academic-practitioner collaborations as a means of producing such research.Design/methodology/approachWe selected Cunliffe and Pavlovich’s (2022) recently formulated “public organization/management studies” (public OMS) approach as our guiding methodology. We implemented this approach by forming a co-authorship team comprised of a policy professional and an entrepreneurship scholar and then engaging in a democratic, collaborative and mutually respectful process of knowledge cogeneration.FindingsOur paper is comprised of four distinct sets of ideas. We start by describing who policy-practitioners are and what they want from academic research in general. We follow this with a comprehensive set of priorities for policy-oriented research at the gender × entrepreneurship nexus, accompanied by references to academic studies that offer initial insight into the identified priorities. We then offer suggestions for the separate and joint actions that scholars and policy-practitioners can take to increase policy-relevant research on gender and entrepreneurship. We end with a description and critical reflection on our application of the public OMS approach.Originality/valueThe ideas presented in our article offer an original response to recent work that has critiqued the policy implications (or lack thereof) within prior research at the gender × entrepreneurship nexus (Foss et al., 2019). Our ideas also complement and extend existing recommendations for strengthening the practical contributions of academic scholarship at this intersection (Nelson, 2020). An especially unique aspect is our description of – and critical reflection upon – how we applied the public OMS approach to bridge the academic-policy divide.

Business Plan

Purpose: The purpose of this study is to present a complete business plan for the launch of" Saman Al Dar," a special product leveled at offering customers an authentic taste of Emirati cuisine. The plan encompasses numerous aspects, involving team structure, legit compliance, marketing strategies, fiscal protrusions, and ethical considerations.
 Methodology: The methodology involved in casting this business plan comprehended thorough request exploration to understand consumer preferences and request trends in the UAE food assiduity. The plan also incorporates rudiments of request blend proposition, Porter's competitive strategies, and SWOT analysis to develop a robust program for success. Also, a detailed analysis of cost, profit aqueducts, and return generation was conducted to insure fiscal viability.
 Findings: The finding of this study disclose a clear roadmap for founding Saman Al Dar successfully. Fiscal protrusions indicate encouraging profit generation implicit, especially with operative marketing and division strategies in position. Key findings carry the identification of target customer seeking authentic Emirati flavors, the significance of strategic marketing across different channels involving social media, and the significance of legit compliance and ethical practices in the food assiduity.
 Unique Contribution to Theory, Practice and Policy: This business plan contributes to proposition, practice, and procedure in several ways. The operation of request blend proposition, Porter's competitive strategies, and SWOT Analysis demonstrates their applicability and connection in the environment of entrepreneurial gambles in the food assiduity. Scholars of entrepreneurship can work these rulings to enrich their understanding of business planning and program perpetration. Likewise, policymakers can exercise the rulings to inform the evolution of a legit environment that fosters entrepreneurship, especially in the hospitality region, by ensuring regulatory frameworks that support invention and compliance while securing consumer interests. Also, entrepreneurs can profit from the perceptivity provided in this study, as the ideas and strategies offered are directly workable to their own business trials. In conclusion, this business plan for Saman Al Dar represents a holistic path to founding a special product in the UAE food request. By incorporating rigid exploration, strategic planning, and ethical considerations, it lays the foundation for a prosperous entrepreneurial adventure that not only delivers value to customers but also contributes to the wider academic and policy discourse surrounding entrepreneurship in the hospitality region.

Hip hop entrepreneurship: the poetics of the Hip Hop Mogul

ABSTRACT Scholars of entrepreneurship, business, and economics have been reluctant to consider Hip Hop as a viable means for research and theory-building. Oddly enough, through the 1970s – a period that was generally characterized by stagnation and high unemployment – Hip Hop captivated audiences around the globe, creating innovative and diverse market opportunities for a host of different communities. The term ‘Hip Hop Mogul’ emerged to describe artists whose commercial viability appealed to varied sensibilities and disparate public spheres. Who are these Hip Hop Moguls? What are the interests of these Hip Hop Moguls? Drawing on lyrical content from a sample of Hip Hop Moguls (n = 15), we examine the discursive frameworks that make-up Moguldom, its politics, and its ways of being. Ultimately, our findings shed light on the different ways that marginalized communities negotiate antagonistic economic relations and disrupt traditional business paradigms.

Social enterprise performance: A Systematic Review

The surge in the growth of social entrepreneurship scholarship and its evolution concerning social enterprise management and performance results in the extant literature demands a comprehensive study from a holistic viewpoint. In order to close this gap, the current study undertakes a thorough review of empirical research. The results revealed the following: (1) Performance assessment of social enterprises should blend both financial and social performance to reflect their “total wealth”. (2) Behavioural factors of social entrepreneurs have a positive impact on social enterprise performance, in which entrepreneurial orientation and social orientation are the most prevalent characteristics. (3) To manifest the performance and efficacy of social enterprises, it is crucial to apply a combination of bricolage, effectuation, and causality logic. Bricolage guarantees community commitment and social innovation; the effectuation approach is to overcome resource constraints, and causation is important for a successful organisation. (4) A country's institutions, such as government laws, value systems, and shared social knowledge, exercise their significant effect through the social entrepreneurship journey. This review is expected to deepen understanding of the effects of entrepreneur’s behaviours, processes, and external institutions on the performance of social enterprises; and set the stage for interested scholars to undertake in their future inquiries.

Re-Centering Race in Emancipatory Entrepreneurship: Black Female Tech Founders, Money, and Meaning in a Detroit-Based Incubator Program

This study is an anthropological inquiry into the perceptions and attitudes of Black female tech entrepreneurs towards capitalism in the context of an incubator program in Detroit, USA. Drawing upon ethnographic data from the STEM Entrepreneurial Excellence Program (STEEP), the study reveals the intricate relationships that Black female founders maintain with money and capitalism. These complexities manifest in moral quandaries related to fundraising and distrust in outsourcing financial management, emanating from a long-standing scepticism towards capitalism and intertwined with historical traumas. The research emphasizes the significance of comprehending minority entrepreneurs’ historical inequalities and lived experiences with capitalism to discern their diverse attitudes and performances in entrepreneurship – an aspect frequently neglected in entrepreneurship scholarship. By examining the intersection of race, gender, and entrepreneurship, the essay contributes valuable insights into the nuanced dynamics shaping entrepreneurial experiences of Black women in the technology sector.

From Negative Emotions to Personal Growth: Failure and Re‐entry into Entrepreneurship

AbstractThis study explores how entrepreneurs’ extent of experience of business failure affects the level of negative emotional response (NER) they experience, moderating the level of personal growth that occurs after business failure. Contrary to common assumption, the study finds no significant relationship between the extent of failure experience and the level of NER. The results show that many entrepreneurs demonstrate personal growth following business failure, however, the extent of failure experience and the level of NER. This interaction moderates the level of personal growth for the entrepreneur and suggests that high levels of failure experience interfere with the level of personal growth obtained. The study contributes to theory by providing insights into the processes and consequences of entrepreneurial failure. In particular, the study brings together key threads of debate on personal growth and failure to develop and test conceptual arguments, and further explores the way entrepreneurship scholars think about emotion, business failure and its impact on the individual and society.

From atoms to bits: Resource mobilization of non-digital, hybrid, and digital cleantech startups

Climate change is one of the most critical challenges to tackle in this century, where innovations developed and commercialized by cleantech startups are crucial contributors to achieve emission reduction targets. Entrepreneurship scholars have long presumed that resource mobilization is essential for startups to transit successfully through the conception and commercialization life cycle stages. Yet, we have a limited understanding of how resource mobilization varies across the three startups types of non-digital, hybrid – an intermediate type of non-digital and digital startups –, and digital cleantech startups. Drawing on insights from 16 semi-structured interviews with startups, investors, and industry experts in the U.S. cleantech industry, as well as secondary data, this study provides a novel framework that identifies the resource mobilization approaches of cleantech startups disentangled by the three startup types. The findings indicate that non-digital cleantech startups face the most severe resource mobilization challenges, followed by hybrid and digital cleantech startups, respectively. The study contributes to the literature on resource mobilization of cleantech startups and digital entrepreneurship. It also outlines implications for startups and venture capital investors as practitioners as well as for policymakers.

Beyond the paradigm of literacy – Developing a research agenda in entrepreneurship

Illiteracy, the lack of ability to read and write, affects how people engage with entrepreneurship and the possible outcomes of entrepreneurial actions. Yet entrepreneurship as a discipline has paid little direct attention to illiterate entrepreneurs. We offer a glimpse of what recognition of illiteracy in entrepreneurship research might enable, and how it can challenge researchers to reach beyond our existing knowledge horizons to develop a future of impactful, integrative, and inclusive entrepreneurship scholarship.

Introduction

Welcome to Volume 24, No. 4 of Enterprise and Society. There is a slight deviation from tradition for this issue this year. As is well-known, the final issue of the year typically carries both the Presidential Address, delivered at the annual meeting in the spring, as well as summaries by all Krooss Prize finalists. Those of you able to attend the annual meeting in Detroit in March 2023 will have been spellbound by Dan Wadhwani’s Presidential Address, which wove together strands of his rich historical entrepreneurship scholarship with threads of his own fascinating family story. Converting such a personal address, combined with the continuous uncovering of materials, has involved intricate ongoing work. Dan and I have agreed to hold his address back to give him the opportunity to write the piece he really wants to write. Personally, I cannot wait to read it.

A multi-voiced account of family entrepreneuring research: expanding the agenda of family entrepreneurship

PurposeThis conceptual, multi-voiced paper aims to collectively explore and theorize family entrepreneuring, which is a research stream dedicated to investigating the emergence and becoming of entrepreneurial phenomena in business families and family firms.Design/methodology/approachBecause of the novelty of this research stream, the authors asked 20 scholars in entrepreneurship and family business to reflect on topics, methods and issues that should be addressed to move this field forward.FindingsAuthors highlight key challenges and point to new research directions for understanding family entrepreneuring in relation to issues such as agency, processualism and context.Originality/valueThis study offers a compilation of multiple perspectives and leverage recent developments in the fields of entrepreneurship and family business to advance research on family entrepreneuring.

Examining entrepreneurial successes and failures during the COVID-19 pandemic (2019–2023)

PurposeWhen entrepreneurship scholars and policy makers turned their attention to entrepreneurial ventures during the COVID-19 pandemic (2019–2023), its full effects on entrepreneurial firms and systems presented radically challenging questions and unresolved puzzles. In this paper, the authors shed light on these questions and puzzles with a large-scale empirical examination of the pandemic's overall effects on entrepreneurs, entrepreneurial firms, entrepreneurial environments and responses with a view toward success and failure over time.Design/methodology/approachThe authors adopt a broad exploratory approach and examine different perspectives to develop a deeper understanding of the COVID-19 pandemic's effects on entrepreneurs, entrepreneurial firms, entrepreneurial environments and responses especially regarding the success and failure of entrepreneurial ventures during the pandemic. Thus, the authors built a dataset with 10 survey waves from 2020 to 2021, with an average of 7,000 Brazilian entrepreneurial ventures (SMEs) in each wave of the survey. The authors used this data to examine their performance and survival.FindingsThe findings suggest that the increase of the COVID-19 virus contagion per se did not severely affect entrepreneurial ventures' performance and survival. However, the worsening of the COVID-19 pandemic did weaken entrepreneurial ventures' performance and survival. Moreover, the findings suggest that entrepreneur education has an inverted U-shaped relationship with entrepreneurial ventures performance. Indigenous, Brown and Black entrepreneurs experienced decreased entrepreneurial ventures survival compared to White entrepreneurs. While entrepreneurial ventures that adopted digital technologies and had access to loans increased their performance and survival during the COVID-19 pandemic, those who failed in these aspects experienced negative performance and survival effects. Thus, although the COVID-19 pandemic severely impacted many entrepreneurial ventures and even forced some to close, others survived and even prospered during the environmental shock.Originality/valueThe paper sheds light on a little understood topic: entrepreneurial venture success and failure in the COVID-19 pandemic.

Bricolage and beyond: Bringing modern entrepreneurship theories to bear on policy entrepreneurship

AbstractWho makes policy change happen, and how? Public policy scholars now take more seriously the role of agency in the policy process, and in particular the role of policy entrepreneurship, a contested term built mostly from classical, economic conceptions of entrepreneurship from the mid‐20th century. In this study, we introduce policy scholars to modern theories of entrepreneurship from sociology and management scholarship, including cultural entrepreneurship, effectuation, bricolage, and entrepreneurial assembly. We show that theories connect more easily with major theories of the policy process more easily than classical theories do and argue policy scholars should make room for multiple policy entrepreneurship archetypes. We also give three examples—organizational imprinting, the small firm effect, and survivorship bias—of the readymade research agenda modern entrepreneurship theories offer to policy entrepreneurship scholars. Finally, we show how these theories help policy scholars build bridges to other political science subfields.