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The purpose of this paper is to examine the effects of past entrepreneurial experience on the reported innovativeness of serial entrepreneurs’ subsequent ventures.

Building on insights from the generative entrepreneurial learning process and from cognition theories, the authors propose that regardless of the type of entrepreneurial experience, positive or negative, such experience enriches the cognitive schemas of serial entrepreneurs leading them to greater reported innovativeness. The proposed hypotheses are tested on a unique sample drawn from a Catalan adult population survey.

Results reveal that practical experience is an essential prerequisite for entrepreneurial learning, and even negative entrepreneurial experience may induce generative entrepreneurial learning suitable for subsequent outperforming ventures for the psychologically strong who have managed to learn from their experience.

The importance of this study stretches beyond a purely academic discussion and has implications for policy making within the area of business and economic development. Appropriate policy depends on the likeliness for serial entrepreneurs to improve. Thus, if serial entrepreneurs learn from their venturing experiences and/or acquire valuable knowledge from them, they may perform better, on average, in subsequent ventures. If subsequent ventures do build upon prior entrepreneurial experiences, calls for policy to encourage re-entries by entrepreneurs may be warranted, even if those entrepreneurs performed poorly in their previous ventures.

The authors analyze the impact of past performance of serial entrepreneurs on the reported innovativeness of their subsequence ventures. The contributions of this study stand as: the inclusion of the re-entry decision together with the innovativeness decision of entrepreneurs within the same model; separation of the positive or negative nature of serial entrepreneurs’ past experiences; focus on the entrepreneur rather than the firm as a unit of analysis; the use of a unique primary data set specifically collected for the purpose of this study about the past entrepreneurial experience of the Catalan adult population.

Entrepreneurship education has been largely treated as a pedagogical “black box.” Despite the emergence of popular entrepreneurship models such as business planning, the lean startup, or business model canvas, neither theoretical nor pedagogical foundations are typically evident. This limits the accumulation of useful evidence that could inform better teaching practices. In this chapter, we develop a set of conceptual models anchored in learning theory regarding how entrepreneurship education should be taught to students. These conceptual models are built on the techniques of entrepreneurship pedagogy such as experiential education. They are developed for three groups of students: students without any entrepreneurship experience, students with previous entrepreneurship experience, and students who are currently running their start-ups. A set of potential variables that could be used for course evaluation purposes is also included. The proposed models meet the needs of students with different levels of entrepreneurship experience. Theoretically, we demonstrate that entrepreneurship students should not be treated as a homogeneous group, as they have different levels of startup experience and different educational needs. Lecturers of entrepreneurship programs could choose the suitable model proposed in this chapter in teaching based on the characteristics of their students. The chapter provides novel insights with regard to how entrepreneurship programs should be designed for students with different levels of entrepreneurship experience.

This study enriches the theory of effectuation by discussing the four independent dimensions of effectuation and their relationships with causation. Additionally, we fill the gap in prior literature by showing how entrepreneurial experience moderates the relationship between effectuation and innovativeness of the venture. Our study of 171 practising entrepreneurs regarding their entrepreneurial decision-making logic yielded multiple findings. The authors find that entrepreneurs rely on causation as well as effectuation in their decision-making; the more experienced entrepreneurs are, the more they actually use causation; and entrepreneurial experience moderates the relationship between effectuation and innovativeness of the venture firm.

This study aims to examine the relationship between entrepreneurship education and students’ intentions and tests for moderating effects of students’ perceived experience and family entrepreneurial orientation, which may strengthen or weaken the effect of entrepreneurship education on intention.

Data were collected through a questionnaire from 584 students in the vocational program at an Indonesian public university. Entrepreneurship education was measured using instruments by Walter and Block (2016) that evaluated the entrepreneurship education provided by faculty. Entrepreneurial intention used a measurement by Vamvaka (2020), which measured students’ choice of intention, entrepreneurial career commitment and nascent entrepreneurship.

Entrepreneurship education has a positive association with students’ entrepreneurial intentions. The results also evidence higher entrepreneurial intention levels in students from families oriented toward and experienced in entrepreneurship. The results also reveal that student experience and having friends who become entrepreneurs reduce entrepreneurial intention, but the difference is not statistically significant.

The main limitation of this survey is that it was drawn from a single university in Indonesia with only domestic students, whilst the study was also designed cross-sectional. Therefore, the generalisability of the results is still limited. This study uses a single item for measuring friends and own influences, which only measure personal experiences. A more multidimensional measure of family, friends and own influence can be further developed to gain more robust results supporting these findings.

The study contributes to understanding the role of family-related variables, particularly family entrepreneurial orientation and experiences, on the development of entrepreneurship education and intention in emerging global market forces. Through family engagement in entrepreneurship education, a family can boost students’ entrepreneurial intention by delivering various capitals (e.g. business value, financial and social capital) and providing practical learning. The results imply the necessity to conduct new subjects, courses or university programmes that can include family-related business in entrepreneurship education.

Despite the expansion of research related to entrepreneurship education and intention, the relationships between perceived experience, family entrepreneurial orientation and students’ entrepreneurial intentions have not been adequately studied, particularly in Indonesia. This work contributes to the existing knowledge of entrepreneurship education by providing two moderator variables that may boost entrepreneurial intention: perceived experience and family entrepreneurial orientation. This work demonstrated how perceived experience and family orientation interact with entrepreneurship education and intention.

Drawing on image theory, the authors investigate how and when cross-cultural experience cultivates two core entrepreneurial sensing capabilities: opportunity recognition and creative behavior.

The authors develop and test a second-stage moderated mediation model across two studies. Study 1 consists of a sample of prospective entrepreneurs from the UK using perceptual scale measures (n = 153). Building on this, core findings are replicated using task-based measures on a sample of US participants (n = 342).

Results show that cross-cultural experience is positively related to both entrepreneurial sensing capabilities through the mediating role of self-image fluidity. No support is found for the moderating role of regulatory focus orientations.

These findings contribute to the burgeoning literature on multicultural experience and initiating skills in nascent venturing by providing insight on the mechanisms and boundary conditions relevant for entrepreneurial capabilities to emerge.

The results reinforce the need for educators, policymakers, and entrepreneurs to facilitate and encourage opportunities for cross-cultural and overseas experiences as they are influential for stimulating entrepreneurial skills.

Positive linkages between international mobility and entrepreneurial activity are of continued interest, yet individual-level mechanisms that explain this have been limited. The authors find that exposure to foreign cultures is potent for entrepreneurship as it can stimulate flexibility and exploration of the self-image and break frames of reference. This fosters greater tendencies for opportunity recognition and creative behaviors.

Previous studies demonstrate that novice entrepreneurs access fewer resources than experienced portfolio entrepreneurs. From an entrepreneurial learning perspective, the purpose of this paper is to investigate why they differ in terms of accessing critical resources.

The authors studied entrepreneurs in the Norwegian offshore petroleum industry, which is conservative with strict regulatory regimes and overall high-entry barriers, and in which a good reputation is crucial. Hence, the authors argue that the industry is well suited for a study of the research questions.

The novices’ mind-sets were anchored in technological ideas and they had problems in prioritizing the critical business relationships and market opportunities. They were also unwilling to compromise on ownership control and to disclose business secrets. Portfolio entrepreneurs, on the other hand, acknowledged that technology had had little value if they could not convince market actors. Therefore, they proactively aimed to establish business relations early in the process. They emphasized that a major lesson was to avoid developing excessive attachment to the product but to be willing to share the risks and profits with other industry and market actors.

The authors had a limited number of cases, and future contributions should aim to study a larger pool of enterprises, preferably in different industries and national contexts.

The findings indicate that novices can learn from the willingness to compromise, in terms of ownership control and disclosure of confidential information to business partners, shown by experienced entrepreneurs. They should also be more willing to involve potential customers at an early stage to gain market knowledge and access.

From a learning perspective, this is the first study investigating why novice and experienced entrepreneurs differ in terms of accessing critical resources.

Based on the cognitive bias theory, this study aims to explore the relationship among the size of new ventures, entrepreneurial experience and organizational decentralization.

This study uses 175 entrepreneurial companies in the Bohai Bay Rim as samples. The hypotheses are tested through partial least squares (PLS).

A clear positive relationship is found between size and organizational decentralization, and entrepreneurial experience is found to have a negative effect on this relationship.

The influences of other variables at the organizational level on organizational decentralization are not taken into consideration, and the measurement of entrepreneurial experience is not accurate enough.

This study also has practical implications. Compared with inexperienced entrepreneurs, experienced entrepreneurs do not always have many advantages. Entrepreneurs should decentralize power at the right time in the process of expanding their businesses and continuously reflect and learn, instead of exaggerating their own intelligence, consequently making more rational decisions.

This study has three theoretical implications. First, it provides a theoretical implication for understanding the characteristics of changes in the organizational decentralization of new ventures, which enriches the literature on organizational decentralization in the field of entrepreneurship. Second, it derives theoretical implications for understanding the role of organizational size in organizational development. Third, this study, which applies the cognitive bias theory to assess the effect of entrepreneurial experience, helps supplement existing research on the relationship between entrepreneurial experience and new ventures.

The purpose of this paper is to analyze whether business owners that simultaneously demonstrate past entrepreneurial experience and process agility have greater export propensity levels.

The proposed hypotheses are tested using binary choice models relating past entrepreneurial experience and reported process agility on a unique sample of 246 Catalan business owners for the year 2010.

Consistent with the theoretical arguments on the relevance of generative-based cognitive agility, the results of this paper reveal that serial entrepreneurs demonstrate a greater export propensity. Additionally, the authors found that serial entrepreneurs who also demonstrate process agility show superior export propensity levels, compared to the group of business owners outside this ambidextrous group (first-time business owners without process agility).

The findings of this study indicate that traits characterizing international marketing agility, decisional speed and accuracy are also linked with greater export propensity levels. The added export market expansion resulting from the opportunity responsiveness of serial entrepreneurs is found to be amplified by the accuracy of internal adaptation capabilities of process agility.

Therefore, the promotion of ambidextrous strategic agility coming from the complementarities between the benefits of entrepreneurial experience and adaptive process abilities is essential for increasing businesses’ internationalization.

The paper contributes to the literature by further exploring the influence of different sources of agility on the internationalization of entrepreneurial ventures and opens a link between entrepreneurs prone toward export market expansion and international marketing agility.

While interest in and demand for entrepreneurial universities has gained prominence in recent years (e.g. Clark, 1998; Etzkowitz, 2008; Thorp and Goldstein, 2010), there is minimal research on the learning experiences and career-making events that transform traditional faculty members into faculty entrepreneurs who are able to successfully apply their research knowledge toward endeavors that intersect with the private market. As a result, the purpose of this paper is to understand, from the perspective of faculty entrepreneurs, the lived learning experiences that contributed to their development from traditional faculty member to faculty entrepreneur. Specifically, this study explored the question on how faculty members who were founders or co-founders of a business learned “to work in entrepreneurial ways” (Rae and Carswell, 2000, p. 220). In general, individuals who are interested in pursuing a career as a professor are not generally socialized during graduate school to engage in technology transfer activities or encouraged to start businesses (Bercovitz and Feldman, 2008). This study also sought to understand how faculty entrepreneurs learn to persist in an organizational culture that does not always support entrepreneurial endeavors outside the scope of researching, teaching, and service.

A phenomenological qualitative research design was employed using in-depth, semi-structured interview questions. Entrepreneurial learning was the theoretical framework that grounded this study.

The data analysis process revealed six themes which offer insights on the learning experiences, contextual factors, and patterns of behavior that helped the participants to develop and to persist as faculty entrepreneurs.

First, the data were dependent upon the learning experiences identified and articulated by the faculty entrepreneurs. There is a possibility that significant learning or career-making experiences were omitted or unintentionally not reported by the participants. Second, the author used a broad net when searching and recruiting for faculty entrepreneurs. Any faculty member who was in a tenure-track position and who had founded or co-founded an organization was eligible to participate in this study. However, the data analysis process may have yielded different results if the author had elected to study faculty entrepreneurs from a specific academic discipline or if the author had chosen to only interview faculty entrepreneurs who had founded a specific type of business. Third, this study focussed only on tenured faculty members who are currently involved with the businesses that they founded or co-founded. Subsequently, this study did not include any faculty members whose entrepreneurial pursuits were unsuccessful (i.e. closing the business). There is the possibility that former faculty entrepreneurs may have had similar learning experiences as the individuals who were interviewed for this study.

The findings may be instructive for traditional faculty members who are interested in applying their research findings and expertise with an entrepreneurial endeavor such as starting a business. In addition, these findings may be useful for higher education administrators who seek to cultivate an entrepreneurial learning environment in their institutions and for future researchers who want to expand the study of faculty entrepreneurs.

There is a gap in the literature on how traditional faculty members learn to couple their research knowledge and expertise with an entrepreneurial endeavor such as starting a small business. In addition, there has been minimal research that delineates how the faculty entrepreneur comes into existence at the individual level (Clarysse et al., 2011; Pilegaard et al., 2010). Subsequently, this is one of the first phenomenological qualitative research studies to examine the lived learning experiences of faculty entrepreneurs.

Student entrepreneurs account for a considerable number of start-up ventures derived from university settings. Nevertheless, there is little research that demonstrates how university entrepreneurship education (EE) directly influences students’ start-up activities. The primary purpose of this study is to examine the effectiveness of various types of university entrepreneurship activities (incorporate entrepreneurial courses, extra-curricular initiatives, and start-up support) on student start-up behavior. This quantitative research utilized questionnaire data collected from university students (n = 1,820) in southeast China and was analyzed with hierarchical Poisson regression in STATA procedures. Research results indicate that engaging in any type of university entrepreneurship activities positively predicts students’ start-up activities, yet this positive effect is contingent on students’ prior start-up experience and the overall university entrepreneurial climate. These findings advance our understanding of crucial elements within university entrepreneurial ecosystems and how various entrepreneurship activities within these ecosystems potentially impact students’ venture creation.