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The purpose of this paper is to identify the early stage network engagement strategies that new ventures use to gain traction in interaction in the development of network capability.

Using 24 new ventures in the micro-brewing industry in Ireland, Belgium and the USA as an empirical base, the authors use an inductive case study approach owing to the exploratory nature of the research aim and the lack of prior literature in the area.

The findings suggest five early stage network engagement process strategies in network capability development: business-to-business network prospecting; co-branding/co-promoting activities; from maker-mindset to adapting; social media platforming; and recognition and activation of network role.

The findings are limited to the micro-brewery sector at one point in time, although in multiple country contexts. Analyzing other sectors and taking a temporal view of strategizing, analyzing the sector at another time point, would show how dynamics in engagement change as the actors acquire new experiences from interaction.

The potential to gain from network resources and the paucity of these resources in new ventures makes early stage engagement strategizing for network capability development an attractive business strategy for new firms. All firms are born within a social network that has economic importance. Identifying the five early stage network engagement strategies can mitigate the challenge for the new venture in moving from the initial social network to collaborating within wider business networks to gain access to resources, technology and customers.

Strategizing in new venture contexts is a relatively new stream of research for the industrial marketing and purchasing group. This paper adds to the growing body of literature that places interaction, relationships and networks at the heart of strategy making and provides important insights for new ventures, which may lead to earlier and greater success for the firms. The authors respond to calls for increased research addressing capability development in a new venture context and for research to take a more interactive perspective on new venture processes.

The purpose of this paper is to begin to explore the strategic priorities of unicorn ventures as pursuers of market disruption. This study approaches this task by drawing on the positive deviance concept for studying outliers with the intent of understanding the strategic priorities of these ventures.

This is a comparison study of the priorities of 75 unicorn ventures, 37 early-stage ventures and 45 Fortune 500 organizations. The authors use computer-aided text analysis to conduct within-sample and between-sample means comparison tests of 12,487 newswires from 2022.

Where early-stage ventures emphasize their mission, and Fortune 500 companies emphasize financial results, unicorn ventures, occupy the middle of the spectrum, balancing their priorities between pursuing market disruption and achieving financial results. These high-growth outliers indicate their priorities by using significantly less positive tone, affective and prosocial language, and focusing less on corporate social responsibility initiatives, compared to early-stage ventures (and using more of this language compared to Fortune 500 ventures). An additional finding emphasizes that public Fortune 500 companies focus significantly more on money than their topic of interest.

This work has implications for understanding the strategic priorities of entrepreneurial ventures in different development stages. The results suggest that unicorn ventures actively work to balance their startup mission, which allows them to experience high-growth and achieve market disruption, with the financial demands of venture capital investors. This novel conclusion demonstrates the value of using positively deviant outlier cases, such as unicorn ventures, as a viable sample for studying market disruption.

This study focuses on the lived experiences of early-stage women founders in a venture accelerator context. In particular, this work explores how gender shapes entrepreneurial self-efficacy (ESE) development in early-stage female founders in the venture accelerator context.

A qualitative, feminist-sensitive research methodology was utilized, with empirical evidence drawn from interviews with fifty one female founders and four accelerator managers located in four, competitive accelerator programs located in the Northeastern United States.

Study findings highlight how accelerators contribute to ESE development. Data also shows how the micro-processes related to masculinized discourse, culture, as well as mentorship and training, contribute to the “othering” and minimization of women during early-stage venture development.

This study contributes to the accelerator literature through a provision of insights into the ways a dominant, masculinized discourse and culture alienates female participants, making them feel “othered’, and resulting in a lack of fit with critical networking and funding opportunities. Second, this study builds on self-efficacy theory by applying a gender lens to the areas of mastery learning, vicarious learning, social persuasion and mental state, thus illuminating ways that the masculinization of these processes negatively disrupts the ESE development of female founders. Third, this study builds more broadly on the women's entrepreneurship literature by showing how masculine norms and culture ultimately impact upon the well-being of women in an early-stage entrepreneurship context.

The purpose of this paper is to explore gender differences in the composition of entrepreneurs' networks at four new venture stages: discovery, emergence, young, and established.

The study used ANOVA and linear regression on a sample of 134 female and 266 male entrepreneurs.

Female entrepreneurs have significantly lower proportions of males in their social networks in early venture development stages, but similar levels at later stages.

Taken together, the findings suggest that, just as women in traditional organizations adapt social networks similar to men in order to succeed, their entrepreneurial counterparts build more “male‐oriented” networks as they proceed through venture phases.

This study uses a representative sample of male and female entrepreneurs to explore network composition at four distinct stages. The findings suggest that female entrepreneurs who are able to persist in the new venture process develop networks similar to their male counterparts.

Entrepreneurial support organizations, such as business incubators and accelerators (BIAs), provide coaching as a core element of their service offering for startups. Yet little is known about how coaching creates value from the entrepreneur's perspective. This is an important issue given that entrepreneurship is recognized as a gendered phenomenon. The purpose of this article is to explore how the coaching services provided during incubation create value for men and women entrepreneurs.

Focusing on university business incubators, our comparative qualitative study of 18 men and women entrepreneurs takes a grounded theorizing approach, and draws abductively on entrepreneurial learning theory, to explore the dimensions of coaching services that support venture development and explain gender differences.

The emergent explanatory model suggests that venture development is supported by coaching service design (at the incubator level) and by coaching content and rapport (at the entrepreneur-coach dyad level). Gender differences were observed in the emphasis placed on accessibility of coaching services provided by the incubator and the guidance provided by the coaches. We theorize that these findings reflect differences in entrepreneurial learning.

To better support entrepreneurial learning, gender differences should be considered in both the design and delivery of coaching services.

Our findings provide deeper insight about how coaching services create value for entrepreneurs by revealing explanatory dimensions at two levels of analysis and theorizing the interrelationship between entrepreneurial learning, gender and venture development.

Tracking trends in new technology funding patterns is essential for venture scaling. The emerging advanced digital technologies (ADT) such as virtual reality (VR), artificial intelligence (AI), blockchain and Internet-of-things (IoT) promote business innovation adaptations, and in turn, reshape the industrial landscape. To attract nascent funding for such prospective projects among the public, well-articulated project pitches that are equipped with effective marketing communication convey the projects' importance and marketability. Specifically, when the entrepreneurs and the crowdfunding platform users interact via different types of crowdfunding platforms, pitch framing, including the signaling of ADT terms, project location and fundraising goal, becomes imperative to help facilitate crowdfunding success.

Drawing on data collected from six leading US-based equity and reward-based crowdfunding platforms in 2020, an empirical study was performed. Using the text analysis approach, the authors examined the positive effects of incorporating technology orientation on crowdfunding success. While the effect between the project description's signaling of geographic location, fundraising goal and articulation style on fundraising success, while controlling for project and platform characteristics.

The results suggested that the technology-orientated projects are more likely to achieve better fundraising outcomes. Taking crowdfunding platform types, project locations, minimum fundraising goals and articulation with analytical and authentic into consideration, the results still hold.

Building on the theoretical framework of signaling theory, the authors consider the crowdfunding-specific contextual factors to enhance the understanding of the positivity impact of technology orientation. By such addition, it facilitates more effective strategic composition of entrepreneurs' fundraising conversations.

Entrepreneurs or the move towards self‐employment is, and will continue to become, an increasingly important element of economic growth and development. It is now recognized that small firms in Ireland are “net creators of jobs while the large firm sector is a net shedder of jobs”. To ensure that a sustained increase in self‐employment continues, it is critical that the correct infrastructure is in place to facilitate this development. One critical aspect of this infrastructure is the creation of an enterprise culture which will encourage and entice individuals to take the risk of starting a business. Examines one of the core components of an enterprise culture, which is education, and how the various educational programmes can incorporate entrepreneurship as a subject area which will foster the interest in enterprise. Focuses on how a process model for enterprise education can be used to target various student groups in an interdisciplinary manner, and emphasizes the need to teach entrepreneurship to non‐business students, who in many instances are the originators of ideas, but unfortunately do not have the business knowledge to develop the idea further.

Entrepreneurship plays a key role in society and is important for economic growth. Despite prior studies of entrepreneurial behavior, no research has been conducted to examine the influence of monetary and personality factors on the entrepreneurial start up of Certified Public Accountant (CPA) firms in Hong Kong. The purpose of this paper is to investigate into factors influencing Hong Kong CPAs in becoming entrepreneurial public practitioners.

Data are collected through a questionnaire survey and analyzed by binomial logistic regression. A total of 212 CPAs of Chinese origin are randomly selected in Hong Kong. Social capital theory derived from the sociology literature is employed for analysing the findings.

Results indicate that “profit motivation” and “education level” variables have no significant influence on the entrepreneurial start up, and contradict findings in prior literature. Results further reveal that “social networking” and “internal locus of control” variables could positively influence on the entrepreneurial start up of CPA practices. Results support the validity of social capital theory that reveals social networks have values and productive benefits. Gender plays a role in the entrepreneurial start up of CPA practices, with males predominate has entrepreneurs of CPA practices.

This study could add new contributions to the accounting literature on the study of the entrepreneurial start up of CPA practices in Hong Kong. With the booming Hong Kong economy and the vast supports from China's prosperous market, Hong Kong CPAs are more inclined to become entrepreneurs of CPA practices in the long run. Implications of this study could enable accounting bodies and education institutions focusing on CPAs' personality development and education.

The availability of external equity finance is a key factor in the development of technology‐based firms (TBFs). However, although a wide variety of sources are potentially available, many firms encounter difficulties in securing funding. The venture capital community, particularly in the UK, has done little to finance early stage TBFs and has failed to cater adequately for the specific value‐added requirements of these firms. Non‐financial companies have the potential to become an important alternative source of equity finance for TBFs through the process of corporate venture capital (CVC) investment. Based on a telephone survey of 48 UK TBFs that have raised CVC, examines the role of CVC in the context of TBF equity financing. Shows that CVC finance has represented a significant proportion of the total external equity raised by the survey firms and has been particularly important during the early stages of firm development. In addition, CVC often provides investee firms with value‐added benefits, primarily in the form of technical‐ and marketing‐related nurturing and credibility in the marketplace. Concludes with implications for TBFs, large companies, venture capital fund managers and policy makers.

Modern portfolio theory demonstrates that a well‐diversified portfolio will minimize unsystematic risk. It may be impractical to achieve a well‐diversified portfolio of venture capital (VC) investments due to market imperfections, leading to the decision to specialize. The purpose of this paper is to determine the implications of choosing a strategy of specialization versus diversification in venture investing.

Using a dataset of US VC funds across a 20‐year time period, this paper verifies that there has been a tendency for venture capitalists to pursue a specialization strategy in both industry and stage of development of portfolio firms. A multivariate two‐limit tobit model is constructed to determine the effects of these decisions on venture success rates.

It is found that venture capitalists that diversify across portfolio company stage of development have greater success in bringing companies public and exiting their investments via acquisition. Industry specialization has no significant impact on venture fund success rates.

Success rates may be less important than returns to investors in VC. Future research should examine the effects of specialization on investor returns.

It may be beneficial to increase the level of diversification of VC investments across portfolio company stage of development. The lack of diversification across industry has not significantly affected success rates across funds, thus the tendency to specialize in particular industries over the sample period is not necessarily a poor decision.

Prior research demonstrates a tendency for specialization in VC investing. This paper examines the implications of adopting this strategy.