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The purpose is to examine the relationship between entrepreneurs’ exit strategies and modes of entry. The topic of exit strategies in the context of approaching retirement warrants further attention.

We apply logistic regression to analyse 1,192 responses to an online survey of firms with entrepreneurs aged over 55.

Family successors are more likely to choose family succession and buyers to choose to sell, but the association between founding and exit mode cannot be confirmed. Firm size is also significant. Our findings suggest that entry and exit via a business transfer are linked. Entrepreneurs might be influenced by their form of entry when choosing their exit strategy.

The data were collected from a single European country, limiting generalisation. Future research should incorporate intervening variables not controlled for here, such as, entrepreneurial experience. Future studies should also seek to test the existence of imprinting directly, as it is implied rather than verified here.

If the entry mode has a lasting effect on the entrepreneur as our results suggest, thus influencing the exit strategy selected, entrepreneurs could benefit from greater awareness of the imprinting mechanism. Increasing awareness of imprinted biases could unlock the benefits of exit strategies previously overlooked.

The study is the first to consider sale, family succession and liquidation as exit strategies in relation to the original entry mode of ageing owners. It contributes to the understanding of exit strategies of ageing entrepreneurs and proposes using entrepreneurial learning and imprinting as lenses to clarify the phenomenon.

This article seeks to enhance the understanding as to why head coaches and general managers (GMs) in the National Basketball Association (NBA) and the National Football League (NFL) exit from their positions.

Three hypotheses were investigated using a series of quantitative and qualitative data from the past 30 years. The samples analyzed are comprised of 891 GM and coach annual observations for the NBA clubs and 949 GM and coach observations for the NFL clubs. Analyses include a logit analysis for coach exit/retention, a logit analysis for GM exit/retention and textual analysis via topic modeling via latent Dirichlet allocation.

Results show a correlation between a coach exiting and a GM exiting simultaneously, thus amplifying the importance of these two roles in enhancing or destroying the success of a club and supporting the need for a deeper understanding of both roles, particularly the GM. The results further highlight cultural differences across clubs in terms of GM and coach turnover, a factor that often is heavily influenced by club ownership.

The results support the role of owners in exits, confirm the importance of winning in avoiding an exit, find a high level of interrelationship between GM and coach exits and show that past culture of firings influences future exit decisions.

Consumer product firms renowned for marketing appear to be complementing brand creation, extension and acquisition with minority equity investments in entrepreneurial brand ventures (EBVs) for strategic purposes. Similarly, EBVs are looking for growth and resources that can be accessed via inter-organizational partnerships. This flourishing industry practice and the paucity of empirical research indicates the potential for new studies. The research objective was to examine why and how large incumbents were implementing strategic brand venturing (SBV), and with this understanding to develop a framework useful for descriptive and normative purposes.

This qualitative research study comprised in-depth interviews and multiple data sources across seven case studies drawn from US subsidiaries of global firms within the consumer products industry. Grounded in resource theory, the dimensions of strategic brand equity investments are abductively derived.

The findings delineate 16 process capabilities within four aggregate clusters entailing, the designing of the SBV program, opportunity identification, brand entrepreneur partnerships and venture portfolio management. Prefaced by endogenous and exogenous antecedents, these process capabilities help to contribute strategic and financial value when implemented.

This qualitative research study yielded analytical rather than statistical generalizations. A range of market and economic factors exist in the United States contributing towards a favorable entrepreneurial and brand incubation climate. This may render the SBV concept as contingent and contextual. Furthermore, the view of brand entrepreneurs' regarding the design of the process model were not explicitly sought but inferred from the discourses of the venturing units interviewed.

The article outlines several important implementation imperatives for corporations endeavoring to competitively advantage their brand portfolios via adoption of a minority equity investing strategy in EBVs. Practitioners are cautioned against myopically adopting this process alone as a success heuristic given other factors may impact success such as changes in corporate strategy or upper echelon sponsorship.

Mission preservation for social brand ventures being tethered to a large incumbent may need to be taken into account prior to and during SBV relationships.

The research contributes to the call for greater insights into the investment processes used in venturing relationships as well as coverage of new industry sectors beyond technology industries that often characterize corporate venture capital studies. Several novel findings emerged related to the importance of—the industry ecosystem; symbiosis between the founding brand entrepreneur and brand culture; synchronization of investment strategies with an emerging brand life-cycle model and serendipitous corporate entrepreneurial opportunities.

Technology acquisition is a common phenomenon of acquiring external knowledge, but we have a limited understanding of conditions in which the acquirer integrates the target or not. On one hand, the acquirer may have a policy to integrate the target to benefit from its prior knowledge. On the other hand, the target may face challenges in continuing its knowledge creation and the acquirer may want to provide it autonomy to not disrupt it. This paper aims to identify conditions in which targets tend to be less integrated after acquisitions, allowing them to maintain more autonomy and contribute more to knowledge creation.

We test our arguments in the empirical setting of the global biopharmaceutical industry using a difference-in-difference approach on a longitudinal dataset of matched patents. We examine self-cites received by patents belonging to acquirers and the targets before and after the acquisitions.

We find that, on average, the targets’ prior patents do not receive more self-cites after the acquisition. We conclude that this is because their R&D activities are disrupted, suggesting a higher level of post-acquisition integration. However, more nuanced findings reveal that it may not be the case all the time. When the target has more research experience, is international or is specialized in complementary technologies, prior patents of targets continue to receive more self-cites after the acquisition. It indicates that the targets in such conditions continue knowledge creation, suggesting a lower level of post-acquisition integration.

Our findings contribute to post-acquisition integration research. While post-acquisition integration downside is common, we present conditions in which such a downside may be less likely. We highlight that the context of an acquisition may be an important determinant of the extent of integration of the target. Moreover, we supplement the integration research (cultural, structural and human resource and leadership perspectives of integration) by adding a knowledge-based perspective to it. Such dynamics have important implications for acquirers and targets in deriving value from the acquisition.

This paper aims to investigate the divestment behavior of emerging market multinationals from Latin America – multilatinas – by examining how their foreign market entry decision impacts the likelihood of subsidiary divestment.

The hypotheses are tested using Cox’s proportional hazard rate model in a longitudinal database of Brazilian multinational companies established in 43 countries.

Results indicate that these subsidiaries can thrive in environments that bear similarities to their home country, being less likely to divest in institutionally weak countries. Contrary to developed country multinationals, these firms benefit from foreign entry decisions that entail handling partnerships abroad; thus, wholly-owned greenfield (WOGF) investments have a higher likelihood of being divested.

To the best of the authors’ knowledge, this paper is the first to analyze foreign divestment from multilatinas, accounting for how entry mode strategy and host country institutions may impact these firms’ de-internationalization.

This study aims to explore the rise of virtual specialty care startups and understand how the ventures leverage digital services to create a new market space. Given the high level of competition in an established industry like health care, the authors investigate the business models and competitive strategies of leading virtual specialty care startups with unicorn status (i.e. emerging, current and exited unicorns).

The authors performed an analysis of Crunchbase data to examine whether rising virtual care ventures target specialty care. They focused on companies from the USA, Europe and Asia-Pacific. The identified virtual specialty care ventures were investigated in-depth via a multiple case study. By reviewing corporate websites, Crunchbase data and media coverage, the authors analyzed the ventures’ business models and competitive strategies.

This study demonstrates that even in established and highly competitive markets such as health care, managers and entrepreneurs can still leverage digital services to unlock new market spaces. The data analysis reveals that virtual care startups target the field of specialty care. They create a new market space by focusing on fast access to services, personalization, measurable outcomes and affordability. The majority of investigated companies pursues a platform-based business model approach.

In the context of an established industry like health care, this study gives insights into a new generation of virtual specialty care ventures. By investigating the ventures’ business models and competitive strategies, the authors advance a young field of research.

Madan Mohanka set up Tega Industries Ltd in 1976 to manufacture abrasion-resistant rubber mill lining products used in the mining and mineral processing industries. In 2006, as part of its inorganic expansion strategy, Tega bought a mill-liner company in South Africa. Buoyed by this growth, two acquisitions were made in Australia and Chile in the year 2011. However, post-acquisition, several managerial, legal and commercial problems crept up in its manufacturing facilities in Chile, leading to financial downturn in Tega's fortunes in 2016 and compelling it to either plan a revival or divest its interest in its Chilean Plant.

Alain Bouchard was born in 1949. He bought his first convenience store in 1978, when he was almost 30 years old. By then, he already had nearly 10 years of experience in the sector. He had already been involved in the start-up of more than 200 convenience stores. He understood that if he was to transform his newly acquired store into a chain and build something big, he needed to set up a team of people with complementary skills to help him make acquisitions.

In 2023, there are roughly 15,000 convenience stores operating under the Circle K/Ingo/Couche-Tard banners, employing 130,000 people in more than 30 countries. Annual sales are more than US$60 billion. Alain Bouchard officially retired from his position as President and CEO in 2014 and became Founder and Executive Chairman of the Board. He continues to be a major shareholder. He is still actively involved in strategic orientations and in identifying potential acquisitions. He has become a ‘Chief Culture Officer’ involved in executive leadership mentoring. He has never stopped communicating the importance of innovative, creative and intrapreneurial behaviour at all levels of the enterprise.

This case study presents Alain Bouchard, the man and the entrepreneur. It shows how he learned and mastered the craft of starting, acquiring, managing and developing convenience stores. It looks at how he encouraged the people around him to act as facilitators and intrapreneurs. It describes his values, how he works and learned to live with risk.

First-generation college students in the United States are a unique demographic that is often characterized by the institutions that serve them with a risk-laden and deficit-based model. However, our analysis of the transcripts of open-ended, semi-structured interviews with 22 “first-gen” respondents suggests they are actively deft, agentic, self-determining parties to processes of identity construction that are both externally imposed and potentially stigmatizing, as well as exemplars of survivance and determination. We deploy a grounded theory approach to an open-coding process, modeled after the extended case method, while viewing our data through a novel synthesis of the dual theoretical lenses of structural and radical/structural symbolic interactionism and intersectional/standpoint feminist traditions, in order to reveal the complex, unfolding, active strategies students used to make sense of their obstacles, successes, co-created identities, and distinctive institutional encounters. We find that contrary to the dictates of prevailing paradigms, identity-building among first-gens is an incremental and bidirectional process through which students actively perceive and engage existing power structures to persist and even thrive amid incredibly trying, challenging, distressing, and even traumatic circumstances. Our findings suggest that successful institutional interventional strategies designed to serve this functionally unique student population (and particularly those tailored to the COVID-moment) would do well to listen deeply to their voices, consider the secondary consequences of “protectionary” policies as potentially more harmful than helpful, and fundamentally, to reexamine the presumption that such students present just institutional risk and vulnerability, but also present a valuable addition to university environments, due to the unique perspective and broader scale of vision their experiences afford them.

Australian Securities Exchange (ASX) initial public offerings (IPOs) are an important source of early-stage capital and have also driven a substantial increase in main-board listed companies post-millennium. By contrast, Australian venture capital (VC) funding has remained largely dormant. The opposite has occurred in the US: IPOs have fallen by half, and VC funding has surged. The authors examine the reason for this divergence between ASX IPO and US VC systems that, with their supporting ecosystems, have many features in common and function similarly. The authors explore the potential factors that could explain the US VC surge vis-à-vis Australia's VC stagnation.

The authors’ analysis is predominantly qualitative. The authors describe the Australian listing process and its similar features and functions as for the prototypical VC. The authors also describe the developments in US VC driving its recent exceptional surge and highlight that such developments have not yet materialised on the Australian scene, where early-stage IPOs have served as a substitute.

The ASX's structure and ecosystem have been critical to its success in fostering early-stage main-board listings. While the US has succeeded in alternatively growing VC, there is an increasing concern that the latter has occurred partially because valuations are stretched, tax concessions for carried-interest capital gains are too high and corporate control benefits are becoming increasingly diluted. These developments could have important implications for Australia, where VC structures are currently being reviewed.

To the best of the authors’ knowledge, no prior study has attempted to bridge the broad differences in IPO and VC funding trends for early-stage companies in Australia and the USA.