Journal of Developmental Entrepreneurship

The scholarship of entrepreneurship has identified the significance of institutional and social factors in accounting for entrepreneurial activity and firm innovation, especially in emerging economies and transitional societies. However, the lion’s share of the existent literature focuses on entrepreneurs’ characteristics and psychological traits and firms’ structures and strategies. In this study, I develop a relatively comprehensive analytic framework to study the interactive relationships between economic actors’ institutional trust, risk-taking activities and their risk-sharing with social and political actors in shaping firm innovativeness. By analyzing a nationally representative sample of Chinese private companies, I find that entrepreneurs’ legal confidence, risk-taking and risk-sharing activities are positively associated with firm innovativeness, respectively. Entrepreneurs’ risk-taking and risk-sharing activities can substitute for the role of entrepreneurs’ trust in China’s legal system in shaping firm innovativeness. Entrepreneurs’ social ties serve as the most salient factor that modulates the association between entrepreneurs’ institutional trust and innovative activities.

Entrepreneurship contributes significantly to economic growth and female entrepreneurs are strongly involved because their economic contribution is steadily increasing. However, research also reveals that female entrepreneurs face more financial barriers when compared to their male counterparts. Therefore, it is of prime importance to understand better female entrepreneurs’ behavior regarding financing. The purpose of this research was to explore gender differences related to financing with an intention to uncover why such differences exist. An empirical study involving a sample of 946 entrepreneurs from Canada and the United States was conducted to examine the issue. Results revealed that female entrepreneurs start their ventures with less capital than males, have a lesser tendency than males to obtain a bank loan and have a perception of being more in debt than their male counterparts are. Moreover, both variables depicting the smaller size of female-owned ventures and the intrinsic motivations expressed by female entrepreneurs acted as explanatory factors for the lower proportion of bank loans in the case of female-owned venture startups.

Why does South Africa underperform on benchmarks for nascent entrepreneurship? We use a contextualization framework to evaluate articles on entrepreneurship in South Africa, which appear in seven leading global entrepreneurship journals for the period 1986–2017. The literature is then discussed using a six-dimension contextualization framework. The historical and institutional dimensions of the contextualization framework unveil the path-dependent nature of entrepreneurial choice for Black South Africans. Understanding entrepreneurship in South Africa requires research designs that focus on where and when entrepreneurship developed in the country to render meaningful the why of entrepreneurial choices made by Black South Africans. This study illustrates the idiosyncratic nature of South Africa and its social, political and economic transitions, and how these have affected entrepreneurship development, particularly among previously disadvantaged Black South Africans. The nature of the South African case has broader impact and importance for developing and transitional economies.

Through the methodology of auto-ethnographical case study, this research includes a review of the entrepreneurial nature of the current U.S. workforce and explores the experiences and insights of a micro-entrepreneur to identify challenges faced by many freelance, gig workers, and other micro-entrepreneurs in the current economy. The study consolidates the challenges faced by the micro-entrepreneur into four key areas: formulating and executing strategy, constructing a value web, utilizing mentors and negotiating ambiguity in business. These unique challenges center on the start-up, development and operation of a small business, and are used to provide curricular and pedagogical recommendations for higher education to better serve this burgeoning sector of the workforce.

Entrepreneurship education (EE) has grown exponentially over the past three decades, providing myriad benefits to society. Interestingly though, despite such benefits, scholarly research has rarely focused on who is likely to seek EE. Drawing on Azjen’s theory of planned behavior as well as previous research in education seeking, the current study investigates how individuals’ personality, attitudes and perceived norms affect EE intentions. Results indicate that entrepreneurial norms and attitudes toward both the morality of business and the instrumentality of education are positively associated with EE intentions. Further, results suggest that extraversion and openness to experience are positively associated, whereas conscientiousness is negatively associated with EE intentions. Interestingly, the desire to start one’s own business mediates these effects generally, but mediation analyses also imply that extraversion, openness to experience and instrumentality of education have direct effects on EE intentions regardless of one’s desire to start a business. As such, encouraging these individuals to seek EE may result in a previously unrecognized source of students for EE programs as well as potential business creation that would otherwise not occur. Implications of our study are discussed.

The study provides the impact of social capital on credit choices and growth of household businesses in Vietnam by using a data sample of 3,813 observations. Social capital is considered at different levels: micro for human capital and macro for social networks. It concludes that although both levels of social capital influence credit choices of household businesses, the micro level of social capital plays an important role in improving the household business’s growth, including asset and income growth. The study develops a broader view about the use of resources and financing choices in household businesses in Vietnam. Accordingly, it highlights the importance of social capital from multiple aspects — the household business itself, human capital, social networks and government — on the development of Vietnamese household businesses.

The aim of this paper is to evaluate the relationship between informality, innovation and firm survival. To do so, a study of a cluster of electrical fittings firms in Pakistan is reported. Reporting bivariate and multivariate probit models to analyze two surveys conducted between 2008 and 2017, the finding is that there is a significant relationship between informality and the extent of innovation, firm survival and firm performance. Informality has an adverse negative effect on firm-level innovation, firm survival and firm performance. Given that formal enterprises in this cluster are better performing in terms of innovation, survival and employment growth than informal businesses, the paper concludes by discussing the theoretical, policy and research implications.