The World Scientific Reference on Entrepreneurship

The following sections are included:

• Contents
• About the Editor-in-Chief
• About the Editors
• List of Contributors

Sustainability, ethics, and entrepreneurship are critical building blocks for harnessing the creation of a new generation of businesses that renew and strengthen rather than deplete or weaken the environment, societies, and natural resources. We noticed that the Rocky Mountain Front Range has become a hotbed for such businesses. With this background in mind, in 2008, the management departments from various universities along the Rockies’ Front Range —i.e., Colorado State University, University of Denver, University of Wyoming, University of Northern Colorado, University of Colorado (Boulder, Denver, & Colorado Springs), Colorado School of Mines, and the United States Air Force Academy—decided to synergize their respective strengths and capabilities in the scholarly areas of sustainability, business ethics, and entrepreneurship by starting the Front Range Management Research Seminars (FRMRS), which were held twice a year.

The base of the pyramid (BOP) represents a massive market, but not a wealthy one and the persistence of profound poverty highlights the universality of social needs and problems that can be addressed through corporate social responsibility (SR) and sustainable business models. MNCs are often called upon to provide goods and services to the BOP, but it remains unclear whether large firms will provide the most social value possible. In this study, we examine the BOP through the lenses of SR and sustainability and conclude that the incentives of large firms from economically dominant countries (EDCs) drive them to follow a SR model globally, while the incentives of entrepreneurs allow them to embrace sustainability as a differentiation strategy in BOP markets.

This study enacts a novel theoretical and methodological approach to uncover and elaborate activist organizations’ strategies for confronting firms with contentious practices. Through the inductive analysis of 778 activist actions against firms, we identify three fundamental strategies and draw from relevant research to develop precise, versatile constructs that explain each one. We use our archetype to reconcile and enhance the validity of the diverse strategies from prior theories, as well as to elaborate how our improved constructs advance these theories’ predictions about activists’ strategic choices or the consequences of such choices. As an explicit form of theorizing, our study contributes a valid, reliable strategic archetype that increases the specificity, consistency, and generalizability of existing scholarship on how activists confront firms and provides a solid guide for future theory building efforts in this realm.

Even as interest in crafting market-based solutions for addressing issues of poverty and economic development across the world has burgeoned in recent times, there has been relatively little systematic understanding of the specific nature of markets within these contexts. In this chapter, we survey the important “schools of thought” that have emerged over the past decade to address this issue and offer an integrative rendering of these different images. In doing so, we provide a more nuanced understanding of the nature of markets for underserved communities, identify trajectories that can be gainfully pursued in future research, and suggest how this work can both advance theory and inform practitioners operating in this domain.

A common view in institutional theory is that, over time, fields and industries will become more settled and stable. Yet, under certain conditions, change and contention are often more frequent and enduring. If contestation is persistent then actors must continuously contend with how to respond to shifting environmental conditions. But what conditions contribute to ongoing industry contestation? We posit that when an industry is characterized by multiple, conflicting normative, cognitive and regulatory orders as well as multiple heterogeneous actors who are endogenous and exogenous to the industry, it will be more susceptible to substantial ongoing contestation. We examine the US marijuana industry in order to understand these dynamics. Specifically, we identify and test the role of five primary drivers of contestation — heterogeneity of actors and practices, regulations, competing institutional logics, institutional voids and competing social belief systems. Our findings suggest that all five sources are crucial to understanding an industry’s development.

Humanity and the environmental processes upon which we rely encounter increasingly frequent and severe disturbances. These threats to the current status quo and to our children’s future opportunities are driving calls for improved practices in how we conduct our business, how we govern our societies and how we manage our natural resources. Recognizing the need to improve readiness and response to these challenges, private1 businesses and public agencies alike are designing initiatives and management plans centered on sustainability. Conservationists seek to sustain natural spaces, ecosystems, and the general health of the environment; a host of governmental agencies and non-governmental organizations (NGOs) state their missions in terms of sustainable social outcomes such as public health, employment of citizenry, and public access to common goods; and businesses strive for sustained survival, growth, and competitive advantage. While the ambition of sustainability is almost ubiquitously embraced, a new question arises, and with it, some challenges: what is sustainability? How do we measure it? What are we trying to achieve?

Water is a critical resource for human organization. In many places of the world there are already severe water challenges set to worsen due to issues such as climate change and increasing urbanization. Despite its importance, the management literature on sustainability has only occasionally focused on the topic of water resources. Furthermore, what is critically missing is an explicit understanding of how local places shape water management practices, and vice versa. To address this gap, our chapter adopts a place-based approach to examine the dynamics of sustainable water management. More specifically, we provide in-depth qualitative insights through a case study of the implementation of a Sustainable Urban Drainage System (SUDS) in a socially-deprived inner area of a mid-sized city in England. Based on case findings we integrate the concept of a place-based enterprise (PBE) (Shrivastava & Kennelly, 2013) into Guthey et al. (2014) framework on understanding the determinants of local “place.” In particular, we identify place-based champions as a critical organizational role within PBEs, and the management of sustainable water resources. We end with a call for future research using a place-based lens in order to better understand how local dynamics shape the emergence of sustainable enterprises and studies that identify how local champions help organizations internalize a place-based perspective.

In this chapter, we explore the challenges and opportunities faced by cleantech entrepreneurship from a knowledge network perspective and propose a model that captures the key elements that influence, and are influenced by the knowledge networks underlying the cleantech sectors. Specifically, we discuss how institutional factors, knowledge characteristics, and entrepreneurial agency interact and co-evolve with the cleantech knowledge networks and influence the creation, transfer, and adoption of new knowledge. Once created, the knowledge networks affect the knowledge flows and, through them, the evolution of knowledge characteristics and institutional factors surrounding a given technology.

How entrepreneurs develop opportunities for sustainable development represents an important question. Current conceptions based on prior knowledge tend to overlook the nature and magnitude of the sustainability problem that the entrepreneur is trying to solve. Using an experimental design, we demonstrate that the moral intensity (MI) of the sustainability issue in question plays an instrumental role in guiding perceptions and inspiring action. MI moderates the relationship between prior knowledge and opportunity intention; participants with prior knowledge intend to pursue an opportunity only to the extent that they faced high level of MI. This finding offers important insights for further theoretical development and empirical research.

This study examines the effect of long-term orientation on new ventures’ engagement in corporate social responsibility (CSR). CSR may generate economic returns in the long run, and thus long-term oriented firms are likely to engage in CSR. Marketing capabilities facilitate economic returns from CSR, suggesting that new ventures with stronger marketing capabilities are more likely to use CSR as an economic instrument. Technological capabilities enable long-term returns through other ways (e.g., radical innovations), suggesting that firms with stronger technological capabilities are less likely to use CSR as an economic instrument. Data collected from multiple sources of 149 new ventures provide supportive evidence for these hypotheses.

What leads to entrepreneurial growth? In addition to all the known variables — skills, resources, opportunity, capital, environment, technology, and so on — are there internal processes that spur performance and success? Drawing on a longitudinal indepth analysis of three fast-growth ventures, this study applied causal loop modeling as a tool to explore for internal processes of growth and performance. We identify several reinforcing processes in these firms — “engines of entrepreneurship” — including feedback loops between performance and resources, pressure to manage resources, and organizational complexity. These engines are highly influenced by whether fundamental shifts occur through endogenous emergence or externallyimposed change. Whereas the former leads to more appropriate focus and a reduction of unnecessary resources that generates higher performance, the latter leads in the opposite direction, as well as causing a negative spiral of decreased capacity that requires increased change that decreases capacity and so on. Thus, emergence through endogenous change appears to increase capacity and decrease instability, thereby fueling morale, performance and growth. Implications for research and practice form the body of the conclusion.

This paper investigates the impact of venture capital (VC) investment on startup inward licensing behavior and the consequences on innovation performance. Drawing on literature on the market for innovation and open innovation, as well as the theories of social capital, and transaction costs, I hypothesize that VC will increase a new venture’s inward licensing for knowledge acquisition and that it will also enhance the utilization of inward licensing for higher innovation performance. The empirical analysis, using the Kauffman Firm Survey (KFS), supports these hypotheses. Furthermore, there is evidence that venture’s allocation of human capital affects the influence of VC investment on inward licensing. Theoretical implications of these findings and future directions for research are addressed.

We provide a novel explanation for why new entrepreneurial entrants choose to locate in clusters despite the intense competition within them. By developing a model of locating in a cluster as a signaling vehicle, we formally demonstrate that high-quality new firms bear the costs of an intensely competitive locale to credibly demonstrate their, otherwise unobserved, resources and capabilities strength. By separating themselves from those who cannot compete, the high-quality entrants are more likely to attract crucial stakeholders. The model integrates organizational economics and organizational capabilities-based literatures in entrepreneurial settings.

Consistent with extant literature, this study empirically validates the argument that the relative level of exploration peaks during early phases of the industry life cycle, while the relative level of exploitation peaks at maturity for entrepreneurial knowledge intensive firms. However, the type of products produced is shown to moderate this relationship. Specifically, (a) the tendency to engage in exploration is greater for entrepreneurial firms producing components to be installed in larger systems than for “solution providers” serving end consumers; and (b) there is less of a decrease in the level of exploration over the industry life cycle for entrepreneurial firms producing components than for solution providers. The contingency of product type extends our understating of the relationship between industry evolution and firm-level exploration.

By considering how in many industries an augmentation in production capacity is necessary to bring about significant growth in sales or eventual profit, this study adds an important footnote to prevailing theories of firm survival and competitiveness in strategic management. First, it distinguishes between attempts for new ventures to grow their production from the outcome of their expansions. Second, this study delineates the role of large absolute versus relative growths in production and their differential implications on young, de novo ventures: the former being conducive to firm survival while the latter being detrimental to it. This prediction is supported empirically by 10 years of archival data from the intra-European passenger airline industry. In particular, many young firms would survive longer over the medium- to long-term if their relative growth is achieved at a lower but more sustainable rate.

The following sections is included:

• Introduction

The following sections is included:

• Introduction

The following sections is included:

• Introduction

The following sections is included:

• Index