Search results

New firm creation plays an important role in economic development and growth. Despite the recognized importance of general and entrepreneurial self-efficacy for entrepreneurship, new firm creation, and growth, research has devoted minimal attention to explicitly investigating the relationship between marketing self-efficacy and firm creation. The purpose of this paper is to examine the relationship between marketing self-efficacy and firm creation.

Data were collected in two European countries (Finland and Slovenia). Regression analysis was used to test the hypothesis.

The findings of this study demonstrate that marketing self-efficacy makes a difference in firm creation.

The model advanced in this study is partial and not comprehensive. Gaining insights into marketing self-efficacy-based firm creation in established economies of northern Europe and transition economies of Central and Eastern Europe can be valuable for broadening the new firm formation research and improving marketing self-efficacy-related practices in these countries.

Practitioners and policymakers need to be aware that marketing self-efficacy can be an important driver of new firm creation.

It is suggested that economic policymakers make funds available or channel investments into training and education in marketing abilities in elementary, middle, higher, and university education levels in order to increase marketing self-efficacy levels in the population.

This study contributes to a better understanding of firm creation induced by marketing self-efficacy by developing and testing a normative model.

Various authors have brought forth the idea that the increase in context turbulence and the relentless change in today's economic and competitive environments have rendered it essential for an effective firm strategy to combine both value appropriation and value creation (Porter, 1996; Moran & Ghoshal, 1999; Venkataraman & Sarasvathy, 2001; Hitt, Ireland, Camp, & Sexton, 2001b). Nonetheless, the methodological bases and the assumptions that characterize contributions concerning value appropriation and value creation are notably different and in many respects opposite to one another. These profound methodological differences hinder the possibility of a combined consideration of value appropriation and value creation issues within a coherent interpretative framework. By reinterpreting more conventional strategy studies in the light of the Austrian process view, this article builds a process framework which is able to consider and render mutually compatible both value appropriation and value creation within the unitary process of firm development. In addition, the use of the Austrian approach as an interpretative lens enables an evolution and extension of the resource-based theory that consents it, not only to grasp the mechanisms behind value appropriation, but also to suggest new ways of viewing post-industrial firm behavior that help to interpret its dynamic and proactive role in the value creation process.

The aim of the study is to examine the effects of opportunity creation and discovery on the performance of family firms. Specifically, from the tenets of dynamic capabilities and organizational contingency perspectives, this study proposes and tests a framework of how family firms' creation and discovery behavior impact venture growth and the conditions under which such impact can vary.

The study uses moderated-hierarchical regression to analyze survey data from 156 family-owned small and medium-sized enterprises (SMEs) operating within a sub-Saharan African economy.

The findings indicate that creation behavior has a curvilinear U-shaped relationship with venture growth, while discovery behavior has a direct positive relationship with venture growth. Further analysis reveals that the curvilinearity of the U-shaped relationship between creation and venture growth will be stronger for older family firms than for younger ones.

The study findings may be limited by the cross-sectional nature of the data and the specific focus on family firms only.

The results highlight the significance of pursuing both opportunities among family firms. In fact, both creation and discovery opportunities are significant drivers of family firm growth, albeit in different capacities. Relatedly, managers of older family firms (compared to younger firms) can invest more in exploiting creative opportunities.

From these findings, governments and other stakeholders should create enabling environment and institutional frameworks conducive to exploiting opportunities by entrepreneurial firms.

The study is novel – as it provides unique findings on the performance implications of creation and discovery behavior of entrepreneurial family firms within developing economies.

Using a resource-based approach, the purpose of this paper is to examine the effects of the firm-level determinants financial leverage and liquidity on job creation at small and medium-sized enterprises (SMEs) in six industry sectors in Sweden.

The generalized method of moments system model was used to analyse an extensive panel data set of 26,721 Swedish SMEs over the 2008-2011 period.

The empirical results indicate that job creation is positively related to SMEs’ financial leverage and liquidity, and to their size and age. SMEs’ financial leverage and size are the most important firm-level determinants of job creation. Although there are differences between industry sectors, the results confirm the general pattern of the effect of financial leverage and liquidity on job creation.

Due to the importance of job creation for economic growth, the relationship between SMEs’ capital structure and job creation should be of interest to researchers, practitioners, and policymakers. In investigating the importance of financial leverage and liquidity to labour demand dynamics, this study analyses the firm-level factors that influence job creation by SMEs.

Since there is limited empirical research focusing on this relationship at firm level in the context of SME, the current research aims at investigating the determinants of job creation at the firm level empirically.

The purpose of this study is to assess the effects of discovery and creation behaviour in opportunity identification on firm performance in a developing country context. By doing so, the study adds new knowledge and insights in researching the entrepreneurial behaviour types at the start-up phase and their eventual effects on firm performance.

The study was conducted amongst Ethiopian tour operators (n = 118), which are formally established small tourism firms. A survey questionnaire, which is the main data gathering tool in this study, was prepared based on a distinction between discovery and creation behaviour with regard to the seven entrepreneurial actions described by Alvarez and Barney (2007). Hence, 14 multiple-item measurement scales were derived to define the entrepreneurial behaviour types. Firm performance was measured using four indicators. A regression analysis was conducted to predict the effect of entrepreneurial behaviour at the start-up phase on firm performance.

The findings of this study provide consistent support for the hypothesis that tour-operating firms in Ethiopia founded through creation behaviour instead of discovery behaviour are performing better in terms of sales, employment, profit and asset size change.

The theoretical contribution of this study is two-fold. First, it provides a scale for measuring the extent to which discovery and/or creation opportunity identification played a role in the start-up phase of the business. Second, the study assesses the effects of discovery behaviour and creation behaviour in opportunity identification on firm performance in a developing country context.

The entrepreneurs' behaviour through which they identify and pursue new opportunities may have a considerable effect on the subsequent performance of their newly established firms. It is, therefore, important to understand effects, which result from differences in entrepreneurs' behaviour at the start-up phase, in terms of outcomes such as firm performance among small businesses. Nonetheless, there is little empirical research conducted in this regard, particularly in the context of developing countries. This study contributes to the literature of entrepreneurship by applying entrepreneurial behaviour types, i.e. discovery and creation, as determinants of small firms' performance in a developing country context. Furthermore, it is one of the few studies concentrating on formal instead of informal operations in an African context.

Given that an industrial cluster contains a high concentration of numerous stakeholders, a firm in an industrial cluster often ends up forming relationships with many of the stakeholders. The research questions are as follows: Does stakeholder-based management always lead to greater value creation? What are the moderators in this association? This paper proposes that although relationships with stakeholders can act as a “catalyst” for value-creation, they can also act as a “retardant.” A combination of (1) the strategic nature of the relationships and (2) the policy environment determines whether the relationships with stakeholders act as catalysts or retardants.

Using relationship-focused theory, a conceptual framework that adopts a relational view of stakeholder theory is developed. Given the high concentration of stakeholders in industrial clusters, the conceptual framework uses stakeholders in industrial clusters as a setting. A firm can form relationships with a variety of stakeholders in an industrial cluster. The strategic nature of a relationship with a stakeholder is assessed in terms of variations in strategic intent and intellectual spillover.

The key argument is the following: whether a relationship with a stakeholder becomes a catalyst or a retardant for value creation is contingent on the fit between the strategic nature of the relationship and the policy environment. For instance, in a probusiness policy environment, relying on relationships with stakeholders that maximize intellectual spillover can act as a catalyst for value creation. In contrast, in an antibusiness environment, not having to rely on intellectual spillover is a safer option.

Whereas the literature implicitly assumes that stakeholder theory has relational essence, the conceptual framework developed in this paper adopts a relational view of stakeholder theory in a very explicit way. This paper applies relationship-focused theory by making explicit the different forms of stakeholder relationships. Such an explicitly relational approach in theorizing can help in more in-depth research on the link between stakeholder relationships and value creation. The conceptual framework will allow future research to analyze value creation in an industrial cluster, especially in terms of how stakeholder relationships can act as either catalysts or retardants.

With the rapid development of information technologies and the internet, firms have increasingly focussed on customer interactions to realise value co-creation. Previous studies have empirically examined interaction orientation, but their measurements have been derived from goods-dominant logic and have not explained the mechanism of value co-creation. The purpose of this paper is to propose an operational definition and define the dimensions of interaction orientation based on value co-creation theory (IOVCC), and then develop a scale for it.

In this study, data were collected from employees via three questionnaire surveys, and then analysed using exploratory factor analysis and confirmatory factor analysis.

The findings are as follows: IOVCC represents a firm’s implementation of a set of marketing actions aimed at inserting the firm into its customers’ daily life practices and co-creating value with the customers. The construct of IOVCC consists of five behavioural dimensions: “building communication channels”, “involving customers in co-production”, “improving service capabilities”, “improving interaction quality” and “integrating interaction resources”. The measurement scale for IOVCC has acceptable levels of reliability, content validity, convergent validity, discriminant validity and nomological validity.

This study enriches the literature on value co-creation theory by revealing the process and actions of co-creating value. It also contributes to the understanding of service touchpoints by highlighting the interaction quality of touchpoints. In addition, the authors have developed a reliable and valid scale for IOVCC, thereby facilitating the measurement of a firm’s implementation of the “value co-creation” business philosophy.

Business creation is an important measure of real economic activity as it shows the dynamics with which new firms are born, create jobs, move their capital, innovate and compete with old firms. In this sense, this paper aims to analyze the short-term impact of the lockdown policies implemented to stop the spread of the COVID-19 on the creation of new formal firms in Ecuador.

This paper uses a regression discontinuity in time (RDiT) design jointly with official administrative real-time data. This data is collected by the supervisory and regulatory institution of formal companies in Ecuador. The authors use real-time data from January 13, 2020, to May 15, 2020. This period allows to use the President’s order of effective lockdown on March 16, 2020, as the exogenous event. This gives 43 working days on each side of the cutoff date on the baseline model.

The authors find: an overall large drop in the creation of new formal firms (−73%) and a decrease in the total amount of initial capital coming from the new formal firms (−40%). Additionally, the results suggest that the negative impact of the COVID-19 lockdown on the creation of new formal firms seems not to decrease in the short term. The main conclusion is that lockdown policies have a negative impact on firm creation, a result that is of high policy relevance and can be a tool to design business attraction policies.

The analysis is carried out in a short period because on May18, 2020, a new policy was applied in Ecuador that allowed firms to be created more quickly, with 1 USD of capital, and 1 shareholder, among other benefits, and this may affect the outcomes analyzed in this document, so extending the analysis of the impact of the lockdown to a longer period could result in biased results due to this policy. Additionally, studying daily sales would be of the utmost importance; however, these data are not found in the database of the supervising institution.

This study contributes to the empirical literature and the policy debate in various aspects. First, it is important to generate facilities for the creation of new formal firms, from the reduction of days it takes to create one (using technology as a support in this matter) to the decrease of the minimum capital to formalize a company. Second, improve the business conditions of the new formal firms that were born during the pandemic, but also that these conditions create stimulus for the creation of new companies. Third, the authors show that induced-lockdown policies have a negative impact on the creation of new formal firms and the total amount of initial capital from new formal firms; this effect could be a full-blown recession if governments do not apply mechanisms to revert this situation that could be a drag on the economy.

This paper opens the debate on the effects of the COVID-19 lockdown on the creation of new formal firms; therefore, future research could study the impact in a broader time window to analyze medium and long-run effects, but also in different economic sectors and in the effects on firm bankruptcy, which added to an analysis of job loss, will show a total effect of damage in the economy.

Research in the business-to-business (B2B) and user entrepreneurship literature agrees that “user-driven” perspectives allow entrepreneurs to develop innovative products superior to conventional products. Other researchers argue that such “user-driven” products have limited success and limited impact in certain markets (e.g. niche and industrial markets). This study aims to understand the extent to which user input or co-creation becomes critical in determining product performance.

The key informant approach is used for data collection. Data were collected using a survey instrument via an online panel. Existing scales are used to measure all the focal constructs. Partial least square-based structural equation modeling was used to check for the psychometric properties of the scales and test the hypotheses.

The results indicate that user entrepreneurship is significantly related to firm collaboration efforts and customer collaboration efforts in the B2B market. Both firm collaboration efforts and customer collaboration efforts are significantly related to product performance and mediate the relationship between user entrepreneurship and product performance. Also, findings show that there is an “n” relationship between firm collaboration efforts and product performance.

This study supports the concerns raised by researchers about the dark side of value co-creation and highlights that value co-creation can impede product performance when user entrepreneurs lay too much emphasis on the collaboration processes.

Research on value co‐creation has gained ground rapidly but remained at a very theoretical level. Thus, it has provided relatively little insight into the nature of individual processes of service provision/value creation, and how firms interact with their customers and contribute to their value creation processes. On this basis, the purpose of this paper is to identify and elaborate possible roles firms and their customers enact in the service provision/value creation process.

The research utilizes a multiple case study approach building primarily on qualitative interview data from eight service concepts in the Finnish residential real estate industry.

The research reveals three roles of the firm based on the extent to which firms engage in service provision/value creation processes with their customers. At one extreme, the output of the firms acts as a resource, which is transformed into an outcome and used by the customers. At the other, firms and customers jointly co‐create value, with the firm coordinating the whole offering for the customer. In between, firms transform their resources into relatively standardized outcomes, which customers use in their value creation processes.

The results contribute to the understanding of service provision by categorizing firm‐customer interaction into differing configurations of roles. This reinforces the notion that the depth of interaction affects the extent to which value is co‐created between the firm and customer; different services having different configurations of roles which shape the interaction. Limited to eight service cases, the results only exemplify aggregate role configurations. Moreover, by focusing only on the perspectives of firm representatives, the results do not allow a closer analysis on customer‐specific roles in the value creation process.

This research presents an empirical analysis and interpretation of the service co‐production/value co‐creation process, complementing the extensive theoretical research on the topic. Particularly, the results display different depths of interaction between firms and their customers in co‐producing and co‐creating value, which suggests that it is not necessarily meaningful to consider everything co‐creation from an empirical perspective.