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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.

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.

This multiple case study research aims to identify the characteristics of scaling up SMEs in Chile for exploring how and why some entrepreneurship in the information technology (IT) sector are able to scale up and develop sustainable strategies, based on three consecutive years. The average sales of the companies during the last period analysed was around US$1,323,579, with an average annual growth rate of 66.7%. Scaling up SMEs may require several attributes to achieve positive revenue and develop effective high growth rates that allow them to succeed over several years.

To discern the phenomenon of entrepreneurship, the methodology of multiple case study research was conducted in three parts. The first was to define and design the research process, in which the study should settle the theory analysis and then show that research propositions and questions. The second part of the research was to prepare, collect and analyse the data through crafting instruments and data collection protocols as a source of evidence to conduct the pilot and multiple case study. In this stage, interviews were scheduled, transcribed, analysed and coded to explore how individual attributes may create a scaling-up entrepreneurial process for maintaining or developing high performance in the IT sector. The last part of the research concludes and validates the research propositions for the identification for potential attributes, which were obtained during the qualitative study.

Attributes were selected when 13 or more SMEs reported the importance of this initiative for the process of scaling up their SMEs. As a result of the data analysis, the empirical findings suggest on the importance of the academic background, budgetary control, negative entrepreneurial experiences, building teams, geographical expansion and first critical experience as key attributes for scaling-up. Additionally, the data propose that constructive entrepreneurial ecosystem and reforms financing markets and programmes are two additional components that could moderate the interaction between the scaling-up process and the achievement of rapid sales results as a key outcome measure.

The first limitation was the lack of consensus on the phenomenon of the scaling up of entrepreneurship. Information in Latin America and emerging countries is scarce, which also represents an opportunity for other researchers to deepen and validate the results reported here. Even though it was an attempt to understand the issue of environmental change, this additional limitation did not allow the evaluation of these adjustments over time that can positively or negatively drive the strategies corresponding to the evolution in each of the moderator variables.

Because of the characteristics of the sample in terms of size of the SMEs, industrial sector, location, culture, socio-economic environment and years of establishment of the company, the study cannot be generalised in terms of other industrial sectors or countries. The results of this research are also limited to SMEs in Chile, and to the extent that it can be applied to emerging countries IT sectors with similar sample characteristics, it must be done so with caution. Yin states that eight cases “are sufficient replications to convince the reader of a general phenomenon”.

Policymakers have the option to identify what skills and knowledge the entrepreneur requires to be trained to scale up their established ventures. In this context, they will also benefit from the empirical contribution of knowing what the restrictions that limit this process are, such as adverse tax systems and public strategies. Additionally, it is of public interest because no national records exist on the presence of theoretical terms.

Even though the literature promotes the present findings, it shows that there is an absence of empirical evidence in emerging economies to better comprehend which factors may affect the development process of scaling up entrepreneurship in the IT sector. Both deliberate and emergent strategic initiatives are necessary for the scaling-up process where six critical factors are the basis of the scaling-up. This empirical contribution for entrepreneurs will support the achievement of rapid and sustained sales results for scaling up their ventures.

Recent research acknowledges entrepreneurial passion’s outcomes, but far less is known about how entrepreneurial passion comes about. In this study, the authors are interested in the emergence of entrepreneurial passion, and how competences and social network are associated with entrepreneurial passion. The paper aims to discuss these issues.

The authors investigate whether entrepreneurial passion emerges out of socialisation, entrepreneurial experience or various combinations thereof. The authors tested the hypotheses on a data set of entrepreneurs who started their businesses with government financial support (n=1150).

The findings show that within a social environment, perceived emotional support is positively associated with entrepreneurial passion. Moreover, entrepreneurs’ task-related competence moderates this relationship positively. By investigating the emergence of entrepreneurial passion, the authors contribute to prior passion literature, which has mainly focused on its consequences.

The findings demonstrate both how entrepreneurial passion is associated with and how perceived emotional support can stem from unexpected sources, such as from a government-based start-up grant. For entrepreneurs, an increased awareness of passion’s emergence could better encourage them in their entrepreneurial endeavours. To people who are engaged in promoting entrepreneurship, our findings emphasise the symbolic and emotional aspects of instruments intended to support entrepreneurship.

Longer life expectancy brings a new phenomenon: senior entrepreneurship. Whereas starting a business involves investing energy, time, money or other types of resources, ageing is somewhat incompatible with these terms. Research on the impact of time perception on the entrepreneurial process is rather scarce. Considering the lack of knowledge related to the impact of time perception on the entrepreneurship process, this study aims to answer the following research question: how does temporal perception influence the entrepreneurial process?

Senior entrepreneurs are the most relevant category of individuals from which the impact of time perception could be observed, as they are objectively closer to the end of their careers than younger entrepreneurs. Therefore, longitudinal research was conducted by interviewing five senior entrepreneurs at 4-year intervals.

Results show that there are two types of temporal perception in entrepreneurship: temporal perception of the entrepreneur's career and temporal perception of the enterprise's development. When these two-time perspectives are not synchronized with the entrepreneur's vision, the entrepreneur develops strategies for seeking to re-establish synchronicity between the temporal perspective (TP) of their entrepreneurial career and that of the business development. The senior entrepreneur is distinguished from a traditional entrepreneur by a limited TP of their entrepreneurial career combined with the notions of bridge employment and generativity.

The number of cases under study did not allow us to examine every possible type of situation. The sampling of the cases under study did not offer great diversity in terms of gender, as the study had only men. However, the range of ages at startup, from 50 to 65 years, provides greater diversity, as does the range of business segments that included the service, manufacturing and retail food industries.

Entrepreneurs with a limited career time perspective correspond to senior entrepreneurs, while others who have an open career prospect, regardless of their age, correspond to any other form of an entrepreneur. This study has also been able to identify that an entrepreneur who realizes their limited entrepreneurial career horizon and perceives a temporal purpose of their company in the service of the involved parties tends to plan the entrepreneurial exit phase.

This study aims to evaluate the role of entrepreneurial ecosystems conditions (formal, informal and social capital) on different types of entrepreneurial re-entry at a global scale.

Given this phenomenon’s nature, this study builds a panel of data of 54 economies covering different (advanced and emerging) countries across the globe during the period 2004–2017 by mixing multiples sources of information (e.g. Global Entrepreneurship Monitor, the World Economic Forum, the World Bank and the International Monetary Fund). The statistical analysis consisted of the fixed-effect dynamic generalized method of moments (GMM) estimation for panel data.

Three empirical insights emerge from the study. First, the entrepreneurial ecosystem’s formal conditions are mainly configured to support high-growth entrepreneurship ignoring re-entrepreneurs. Consequently, the formal conditions’ contribution is very limited in emerging economies. Second, the analysis of informal conditions revealed social media’s critical contribution for legitimizing entrepreneurship and supporting those entrepreneurs who want to re-enter the domestic or international market after a business failure. Third, social networks built during previous business angels or entrepreneurial experiences or with other entrepreneurs also play a crucial role for re-entrepreneurs to overcome the weaknesses in the entrepreneurial ecosystems’ conditions.

The study contributes to two ongoing academic debates among entrepreneurship scholars. The first is related to how the entrepreneurial ecosystem supports entrepreneurial activity in different economic contexts. The second is related to the study of the contextual determinants of entrepreneurial re-entry after a business failure.

Ex-prisoners often experience negative stigma from society, making it difficult to find employment upon release. Prison institutions play an active role in building character and improving prisoners' skills by providing various empowerment programs to increase opportunities for their economic potential. However, these programs are considered not optimal in increasing the entrepreneurial intentions of prisoners. This study aims to identify the effects of prison entrepreneurship programs, entrepreneurial resilience and self-efficacy as drivers in increasing prisoners' entrepreneurial intentions. This study also examines the effect of these variables focusing on prisoners with neither entrepreneurial experience nor entrepreneurial training.

This study deployed a quantitative method by distributing a questionnaire to prisoners involved in talent and skill development activities (called BIMKER, an abbreviation in Indonesian, which means Work Guidance), a compulsory program provided by prison institutions. A total of 204 prisoners, including 70 with no entrepreneurial experience, completed the research questionnaire in one of the prison institutions in Indonesia. Partial least sequential-structural equation modeling (PLS-SEM) was used as the analytical technique.

The study findings show that the prison entrepreneurship program has not been able to influence prisoners' entrepreneurial intentions directly. However, the prison entrepreneurship program has a positive and significant effect on increasing prisoners' self-efficacy and entrepreneurial resilience that ultimately encourages the emergence of entrepreneurial intentions. Entrepreneurial resilience was found not to affect entrepreneurial intentions for prisoners with no entrepreneurial experience and who have never attended entrepreneurship training.

This study identifies the drivers of prisoners' entrepreneurial intentions, including prison entrepreneurship programs, self-efficacy and entrepreneurial resilience. These can be used as references to build understanding at the theoretical level and can be adopted practically. This study expands the social cognitive theory (SCT) and entrepreneurial intention models (EIMs) by adding new insights into the context of prison entrepreneurship that underline the potential of prisoners engaging in entrepreneurship, once released, to expand opportunities, learning and employment. This study highlights the importance of implementing prison entrepreneurship programs to reduce crime, recidivism rates, poverty and inequality.

Escalation of commitment is one of the most important decision-making biases among entrepreneurs and may deprive them of valuable resources and even result in their eventual failure. Many entrepreneurs become escalated to their ongoing plans by allocating more resources, even after receiving negative feedbacks regarding those plans. Although the escalating behavior is an inherent part of the entrepreneurial cognition, previous studies have mostly ignored its antecedents among entrepreneurs. This dearth of studies is more severe regarding women entrepreneurs, whose biases have rarely been investigated. Therefore, this paper aims to explore the antecedents of the escalation of commitment among women entrepreneurs.

To explore the antecedents of the escalation of commitment in women entrepreneurs’ decisions based on their lived experiences, this paper used a narrative inquiry. The data were collected by conducting in-depth interviews with three Iranian women entrepreneurs running small businesses and analyzed by narrative data analysis.

According to the findings, bitter memories of previous failures, overconfidence and familial pressure are the main antecedents of the escalation of commitment in women entrepreneurs.

This study has a very important managerial implication for women entrepreneurs, who should know that while decision-making biases may occur unintentionally, they are able to reduce the harmful effects and enhance the benefits of biases by knowing their most common signs.

This study is a pioneer in exploring women entrepreneurs’ biases and took a novel approach by conducting a narrative analysis of women entrepreneurs’ escalation of commitment.

This paper investigates how a new entrepreneurial identity forms in conjunction with prior work-related identities during sponsored self-employment after an emotional job loss.

The authors empirically examine why some dismissed employees failed and others succeeded in transitioning from a wage-earner career via corporate sponsorship to a career as an entrepreneur, investigating how those employees meaningfully constructed (or did not) an entrepreneurial identity.

The authors' findings show that the simultaneous preservation of central attributes of prior work-related identities and the engenderment of new entrepreneurial attributes support the formation of an entrepreneurial identity and that a liminal state, in which people practice entrepreneurship at work, may facilitate identity transition.

This paper demonstrates that the initial entrepreneurial endeavor is based on prior work-related identity and identity congruence between prior work-related identities and a projected entrepreneurial identity is of great importance for the identity transition. However, the authors also show that incongruence may in some cases turn into congruence if entrepreneurs are given the opportunity to experiment with provisional entrepreneurial selves in a risk-free environment (so-called liminal states).

The purpose of this paper is to propose a model suggesting that innovation may act as a motivating force that increases entrepreneurs’ growth expectations, in which entrepreneurs’ growth expectations are shaped by their subjective values and entrepreneurial experience moderates this relationship.

This paper conducts statistical analysis on a sample of 11,579 entrepreneurs from 24 countries who participated in the IIIP survey of innovation in 2011 under the Global Entrepreneurship Monitor project.

The results suggest that entrepreneurs involved in innovative entrepreneurship are more likely to have higher growth expectations, with subjective values playing a direct and indirect role in entrepreneurs’ expectations of firm growth. Additionally, the results indicate that the duration of entrepreneurial experience moderates the relationship between strategic orientation and confidence in innovation. This finding suggests there is feedback between having beliefs about the benefits of innovation and being an innovative entrepreneur, resulting in an over-estimation – at least in comparative terms – regarding firm growth rates. This relationship is stronger for novice entrepreneurs since experienced entrepreneurs tend to be more cautious about their expectations of growing.

This study deepens our understanding of the complex processes through which organizational-level decisions ultimately influence individual-level factors. The present findings contribute to progress in this task by suggesting that strategies aimed at cultivating innovation feed entrepreneurs’ subjective values of innovation as well as expectations of growth. Although the duration of entrepreneurial experience moderates the relationship between acting as an innovative entrepreneur and subjective values of innovation, the results suggest that entrepreneurs’ expectations are primarily driven by their internal perceptions of reality.