Journal of Developmental Entrepreneurship

This research tests the postulates of the theory of guided preparation in a sample of micro, small and medium-sized enterprises operating in a business development center in Linares, Chile. These centers are non-profit organizations administered by the Chilean Ministry of Economy’s technical cooperation service (SERCOTEC). This study explores the relationship between the services provided by business development centers and the effect perceived by entrepreneurs on the overall development of their businesses. It uses a sample of 343 companies registered in the Neoserra software database between 2018 and 2021. Using structural equation modeling, the data show how these companies are affected by the provided services. Implications are drawn for theory, policy and practice.

The entrepreneurship proclivities of the deaf and hard-of-hearing community are under-researched or often grouped together into the broad disability literature. This study represents the first effort in developing a framework for deaf entrepreneurship. It departs from prior work by employing a mixed method study to examine the drivers, career motivations and prevalence of entrepreneurial activity of the deaf community in the United States. Building on the nascent entrepreneurship disability literature, this research develops and tests a deaf entrepreneurship framework. Results indicate that entrepreneurship in the deaf community is limited, primarily driven by push-oriented motivations–tightly linked to unique contextual factors. It also finds that the dynamics of entrepreneurship in the deaf community differ substantially from the existing disability entrepreneurship literature revealing the need for different policies. Implications for theory and policy along with directions for future research are discussed.

Generally, crisis situations entail economic hardship for entrepreneurs and their businesses. As such, historical crisis events may be accompanied by government policy to lessen the adverse effects for business owners and their employees. By analyzing a sample of 139,006 U.S. businesses that received Paycheck Protection Program (PPP) loans of $150,000 or more from the United States Treasury, we empirically show that female, racial and ethnic minority business owners will be at a disadvantage in receiving loan forgiveness relative to their peers. These findings advance the literature by highlighting post funding gender, racial and ethnic disparities in accessing venture resources. Practically, the results highlight how governmental intervention during a historical shock may disproportionately increase constraints on female, racial and ethnic minority business owners.

All other parts of the entrepreneurial ecosystem in any country are governed by the political and legal aspects of the system. This study examines the integrated effect of the entrepreneurial ecosystem’s political-legal subsystem on the performance of MSEs based on system theory and the mediating role of entrepreneurial competence, based on a resource-based view. There has been no detailed examination of the entrepreneurial ecosystem of MSEs in Africa in general, and Ethiopia in particular. Although the political-legal aspects of the entrepreneurial ecosystem have a major effect on both entrepreneurial competency and MSE’s performance, the relationship between entrepreneurial competencies and MSE performance was found to be insignificant. The role of entrepreneurial competency in mediating the relationships between policy and business performance and other business environments and business performance was shown to be insignificant. The study suggests that the policies designed by the government for MSEs should be flexible enough to affect other aspects of the entrepreneurial environment, such as the economic and social dimensions. Finally, additional studies in the field are encouraged to clarify the discrepancies in the findings concerning the relationships between entrepreneurial competencies and the performance of SMEs.

This study examines the role of product innovation capability in mediating the effect of market sensing capability on marketing performance. The sample data consist of 338 SMEs in the food product industry in Central Java, Indonesia. A model consisting of five hypotheses was proposed and tested. The statistical tests cover the following variables: market sensing capability, product innovation capability, competitive advantage and marketing performance. Structural Equation Modeling was used in the model and hypotheses testing. The results show that the five hypotheses have a positive and significant effect. Product innovation capability has the greatest influence on marketing performance, suggesting its important role in improving marketing performance. The results suggest that in increasing product innovation capability, SMEs must perpetually create and offer new ideas by considering market trends. Second, SMEs must be innovative in creating new food products in terms of both taste and packaging. Third, SMEs need to be the first to offer new products. Finally, SMEs must utilize the advancement of technology to develop food products and their variations.

Research presents the informal economy as a fading phenomenon mainly confined to the peripheries of mainstream economics. However, such views overlook its transformative effect on the social and economic spheres of many regions of the developing world through employment creation. Drawing from a new dataset combining World Bank, International Monetary Fund (IMF) and Africa Index databases, this study examines the effect of country-level variables (informal economy size, economic and sustainable development) on economic and social change in twenty sub-Saharan African nations. Results reveal that informal work and informal business sustain livelihoods by providing income that helps tackle poverty, malnutrition and mortality rates. This has implications for academic research and policy making because it induces debate on the need to balance economic and social change with policy initiatives.

This study explores how certain institutional dimensions influence entrepreneurial allocations in Nigeria and its sectorial heterogeneity. We apply unconditional fixed-effect Tobit regression estimators on a combined dataset extracted from various sources over the period 2011-2015. Our findings suggest that property rights and oil rents strongly encourage young entrepreneurs to be innovative, while a number of business procedures and the rule of law discourage them from being innovative. The findings suggest that some of the institutions are complementary to one another in improving entrepreneurial innovativeness. Interactions between them are positive and significant. Sectorial results reveal that property rights, government effectiveness and oil rents significantly enhance entrepreneurial innovativeness, whereas government size reduces innovativeness among young entrepreneurs in the manufacturing sector. In the IT sector, property rights, control of corruption, regulatory quality and government effectiveness increase entrepreneurial innovativeness. Government size, business procedures and the rule of law reduce innovativeness. Overall, the institutions appear to have stronger and bigger effects in the IT sector than they do in the manufacturing sector. Policy implications include the need for institutional reforms targeting productive entrepreneurship to focus more on making business regulation and procedures more competition-friendly and less cumbersome and strengthening the quality of anti-graft and property right institutions.