Publications

Especially new firms need to be strategic flexible to proactively or reactively adjust to the market and internal demands as they aim to establish themselves. However, new firms vary in their degree of strategic flexibility. In this paper we analyze resource management practices founders can use to increase the strategic flexibility of their firms. We depict how specific resource management practices can augment the strategic flexibility of a new firm in addition to the strategic flexibility resulting from their actual resource base. Scrutinizing innovative resource management practices in various domains, our findings especially underline the importance of specific innovative resource management practices in the financial domain to increase the strategic flexibility.

Research indicates that interactions on social media can reveal remarkably valid predictions about future events. In this study, we show that online legitimacy as a measure of social appreciation based on Twitter content can be used to accurately predict new venture survival. Specifically, we analyze more than 187,000 tweets from 253 new ventures’ Twitter accounts using context-specific machine learning approaches. Our findings suggest that we can correctly discriminate failed ventures from surviving ventures in up to 76% of cases. With this study, we contribute to the ongoing discussion on the importance of building legitimacy online and provide an account of how to use machine learning methodologies in entrepreneurship research.

Recent research suggests that effectuation principles such as flexibility, precommitments, and affordable loss may differ substantially from one another. Responding to the call to clarify the effectuation concept, our study introduces the distinction between promotion‐ and prevention‐focused effectuation principles. It argues that promotion‐focused (prevention‐focused) principles are positively (negatively) associated with a firm's entrepreneurial orientation (EO). It further argues that causation is also promotion‐focused and positively associated with EO. An analysis of 151 Swiss energy small and medium‐sized enterprises supports this account. Thus, our study suggests that some effectuation principles are more similar to causation in their underlying regulatory focus and their relationship with EO than they are to other effectuation principles. We offer several paths for future research on effectuation, causation, and EO that emerge from these findings.

Full Article

Business planning is a popular managerial practice, especially in the SME context. Yet, literature presents diverging perspectives regarding business planning and the role it fulfills for the individuals leading these organizations. To advance research, we focus on evidence regarding factors that determine whether and how individuals engage in business planning. Drawing on human capital concepts and the theory of planned behavior, we scrutinize how education and different prominent work experience types influence business planning behaviors. We use meta-analysis to aggregate data on 8095 observations leading SMEs from 31 independent data sets. We find critical differences in planning behaviors relating to human capital types, as well as to whether individuals engage in substantive planning processes or the specific preparation of a formal business plan. Implications of our findings for research on business planning are discussed.

Heute schon gegründet? So geht Startup!

Startup Navigator – das Erfolgstool nachvollziehbar und systematisch erläutert, mit einem großen Fundus an Bildmaterial aus realen Anwendungsprojekten und Fallstudien. Für alle Gründerinnen und Gründer! Mit praktischem Poster zum Herausnehmen.

Geschäftsideen gibt es wie Sand am Meer. Oft zerbröseln diese aber, wenn man sie an den Markt bringt und sie sich schlicht nicht rechnen. Was unterscheidet aber gute von schlechten Ideen? Erfolgreiche Startups sind keine Magie! Jeder kann mit dem „Startup Navigator“ lernen, wie man erste Konzepte erfolgreich in die Tat umsetzt. Dieses Tool wurde über Jahre an der Universität St.Gallen mit erfahrenen Unternehmerinnen und Unternehmern entwickelt. Bei der Anwendung des Navigators entsteht ein einzigartiges Startup aus den persönlichen Stärken jedes einzelnen Entrepreneurs heraus, der sich das Wissen unternehmerischer Methoden zu eigen macht und seine Idee systematisch wie die Profis entwickelt.

Das Autorenteam aus erfahrenen Praktikern und Forschern hat ein Handbuch für den direkten Einsatz des Startup Navigators geschrieben. Gründerinnen und Gründer, die Methoden des Navigators erfolgreich angewendet haben, führen den Leser anschaulich und unterhaltsam durch die einzelnen Schritte des Startup-Prozesses.

Despite the possibility of burnout resulting from dynamics in firms' upper echelons, little if any work has focused on chief executive officer's (CEO's) burnout and firm performance. Drawing on managerial discretion theory, this article analyzes the influence of CEO burnout on firm performance and the moderating roles of the individual (CEO locus of control), structural power (CEO duality and CEO tenure), and organizational characteristics (size, age, and resource availability) related to managerial discretion. Using a sample of 156 CEOs in Swedish firms, we find a negative association between CEOs who report higher burnout and firm performance. Our results confirm that CEO duality and resource availability ameliorate and firm size exacerbates the negative association between CEO burnout and firm performance. Contrary to our expectations, CEO locus of control, CEO tenure, and firm age do not influence this relationship. We discuss the implications of our research for upper echelons theory and strategic leadership theory.

While failure urges entrepreneurs to learn, it also generates strong emotions that may hinder learning behaviors. Drawing on affective events theory, we develop a model reconciling the countervailing effects of failure. In particular, we focus on failure velocity—rate at which failure events are experienced—to understand entrepreneurs’ learning from failure. Survey data from entrepreneurs in the information technology industry reveals an inverted U‐shaped relationship between failure velocity and learning behaviors. Emotion regulation moderates this relationship. When failure velocity rises beyond an inflection point, its relationship with learning behaviors is more positive for entrepreneurs with higher emotion regulation.

Drawing upon prior research suggesting inertia prevents organizations from learning, we suggest that the relationship between entrepreneurial orientation (EO) and strategic learning (SL) is not as straightforward and linear as has been suggested. The size and age of an organization, considered indicators of inertia, are important factors affecting how EO contributes to the components of SL. Data from 182 software companies confirm the non-linear relationships between EO and the dissemination, interpretation, and implementation components of SL. The results also indicate that the U-shaped association between EO and specific components of SL is more pronounced for larger and established companies than for younger and smaller ones. These findings depart from previous work based on strategic learning from mistakes, and offer a specific understanding of the relationship between EO and the four distinct components of SL. These results suggest that companies should opt to facilitate the individual components of SL as they are affected differently depending on the level of EO, and the age and size of the organization.

Das Lehrbuch präsentiert den aktuellen Stand der internationalen Entrepreneurshipforschung. Von der Geschäftsidee über die Frühphase bis zur Markteinführung und Etablierung zeigen die Autoren, wie neue Geschäftsmodelle entdeckt und entwickelt werden. Außerdem im Fokus: Entrepreneurship im sozialen und wissenschaftlichen Bereich. Geeignet sowohl für die Gründung von Unternehmen und junge, wachsende Unternehmen als auch für etablierte Unternehmen und NPOs.

In der 2. Auflage ergänzt um aktuelle Themen wie Lean-Start-up-Ansatz, Crowdfunding und -sourcing, unternehmerische Ökosysteme, Digitalisierung und Vernetzung wie in der Sharing Economy.

We analyse corporate venture capital (CVC) as a characteristic form of coopetition. In doing so, we apply the network perspective and examine the influence of three important network attributes - namely centrality, subgroups, and structural holes - on a coopetitor's innovativeness and subsequent financial performance. We test our hypotheses with the data from CVC investments of 162 corporations operating in a variety of industries over the course of six years. Our results show that a coopetitor's centrality in the respective CVC network positively affects corporate innovativeness, whereas belonging to a restricted subgroup suppresses innovativeness. In turn, innovativeness is positively related to subsequent financial performance. Thus, by strategically managing its position in a CVC network, coopetitors increase their own innovativeness that lead to superior financial outcomes.

Experience is a critical factor in the success of nascent venture teams. However, homogeneous experience levels within teams may have drawbacks. This study focuses upon the performance effects of heterogeneities in experience type – management, industry, and start-up experience – for nascent venture teams. Using the representative US-based PSED II dataset including 519 nascent venture teams, we find that balanced experience types (heterogeneities in management and start-up experience) among nascent venture team members led to increased early-stage performance (measured as the expected revenue after the first operational year and the progress in terms of entrepreneurial activities pursued within the first five years of operation).

Entrepreneurs who run venture startups parallel to wage employment engage in so-called hybrid entrepreneurship. Not all hybrid entrepreneurs, however, eventually leave the wage employment to become a full-time entrepreneur (second-step entrepreneurship). Significant research has focused on first-step entrepreneurial choice (to engage in a business start-up), but much less has focused on a second-step entrepreneurial choice, which captures the transition to full-time entrepreneurship. The present study, which examines the second-step entrepreneurial choice, reveals a U-shaped relationship between age and the intention to enter full-time entrepreneurship. Interestingly, this contrasts with prior studies on the effects from age in the first-step entrepreneurship choice, demonstrating an inverted U-relationship between age and venture startup.

This paper reviews and integrates research from both within and outside the entrepreneurship field under the label of ‘situated cognition’. Situated cognition is the notion that cognitive activity inherently involves perception and action in the context of a human body situated in a real‐world environment. The review concentrates on three areas of the situated cognition literature that have significant implications for research in entrepreneurial cognition: embedded, grounded and distributed cognition. While these three aspects of cognition differ in terms of foci and core theses, they share the common emphasis of viewing and investigating cognitive processes by going beyond the individual mind and paying attention to the human body, (material) objects and other people. Using the theoretical lens of situated cognition provides new insights into current entrepreneurship phenomena such as co‐creation and interaction in a shared economy based on new technologies.

Although entrepreneurship scholars highlight bootstrapping as a key resource acquisition approach to respond to the inherent resource constraints that nascent ventures face, little is known about what causes nascent ventures to engage in bootstrapping. Theory highlights the environment as an important determinant of bootstrapping activity. Analyzing bootstrapping behavior of 298 nascent ventures, we find that beyond perceived environmental factors, individual characteristics of the nascent entrepreneurs and factors relating to the embeddedness of the entrepreneurs in the environment determine their venture's bootstrapping behavior. In a more fine-grained analysis we gain insights into how these antecedents shape the use of particular bootstrapping strategies. Findings contribute to our understanding of factors driving resource management approaches in nascent ventures.

As the broad link between small and medium-sized firm activity and key policy goals such as employment or economic growth has become generally accepted, the conversation has focused on a more nuanced understanding of the entrepreneurial engines of economic activity. A significant body of research looking at antecedents to venture performance has identified that entrepreneurial talent variables account for meaningful differences in venture performance and that significant heterogeneity exists across performance measures. These are important issues for institutions and policy makers seeking to achieve specific economic goals (e.g., survival or growth of ventures, employment or revenue). Using meta-analysis, we integrate this work to view connections between aspects of entrepreneurial talent and different performance outcomes. Our investigation includes 50,045 firms (K of 183 studies) and summarizes 1002 observations of small and medium-sized firms. Analysis of these data yields an unexpectedly weak connection between education and performance. Furthermore, growth, scale (number of employees) and sales outcomes are significantly related to planning skills, while profit and other financial and qualitative measures are strongly connected with the network surrounding the firm founders. Moreover, we observe that entrepreneurial talent is more relevant in developing economies.