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Three studies aimed to investigate the role of perceived value of entrepreneurial identity (i.e. one's evaluation of the worthiness of one's entrepreneurial role) in the relationship between motives for entrepreneurship and business growth motivation among small-business owners.

Two studies were conducted online (Studies 1 and 2) and one study in the field in Indonesia (Study 3); both employed a cross-sectional design with a mixed correlational and experimental approach.

Opportunity-based entrepreneurship, but not necessity-based entrepreneurship, was positively associated with perceived value of entrepreneurial identity. Perceived value of entrepreneurial identity was a positive predictor of future time perspective and growth-pursuit intentions. Study 2 further showed the potential of increasing the salience of both personal and others' positive views of one's business for increasing one's perceived value of their entrepreneurial identity.

The investigation of perceived value of entrepreneurial identity in this paper extends current knowledge regarding the mechanism through which motives for entrepreneurship predict business growth motivation.

The paper provides practitioners and policy-makers with useful insights into the importance of small-business owners' perceived value of entrepreneurial identity for business growth motivation, and offers suggestions on how to increase it.

The paper sheds light on the important role of perceived value of entrepreneurial identity in explaining the association between motives for entrepreneurship and business growth motivation.

The purpose of this viewpoint paper is to bring attention to the declining rate of entrepreneurship, its effect on the broader economy, the need for public policy solutions and to offer several such solutions. Government intervention is needed to address the stagnation trends discussed throughout the paper. It is up to academic scholars, researchers and think tanks to make government leaders aware of the trends and possible solutions.

A literature review was performed and the need to increase entrepreneurship through public policies was discussed.

The current ten-year economic expansion is suffering from secular stagnation as a result of diminishing new venture creation and slower adoption of technological innovations. Economic policies are heavily tilted toward large, established firms even as new entrepreneurial ventures have greater impact on job creation. The importance of using public policies to spur economic growth through greater opportunity-based entrepreneurship is discussed. Unique tax policy changes are suggested as well as a proposed national business plan competition.

This paper makes a contribution to the entrepreneurship and public policy literature by discussing how the declining rate of entrepreneurship and slower adoption of new technology are related to the relatively tepid pace of economic expansion seen over the last decade in the US. The proposed policies focus on increasing new ventures based on opportunity-based entrepreneurship, and it is hoped that this will help in the development of other policies and spur new lines of research and knowledge that lead to increased economic growth.

The purpose of this paper is to examine the impact of small loans on new firm performance using data from the second Panel Study of Entrepreneurial Dynamics, a large longitudinal data set of new firms in the USA. Contrary to prior research which suggests that small or microloans primarily benefit entrepreneurs who experience disadvantages in the marketplace, the findings revealed no significant differences in loan source or loan amount by gender, ethnicity, or employment status during the early years of the firm. The findings did reveal, however, that the motivations (push vs pull) of the entrepreneur were a determinant of loan source. From this, the authors begin to develop a theory of financial bricolage based on the premise that small loans secured at key points in time can make a significant difference on firm performance for all types of entrepreneurs, not just those who have traditionally be classified as “disadvantaged.”

The data for this study was taken from the Panel Study on Entrepreneurial Dynamics (PSED II). The authors focussed on business performance measures over the six years of that study to reassess existing findings on relationships between microfinance and underperformance, especially among women, ethnic and unemployed entrepreneurs, from a financial bricolage perspective. Specifically, the authors will assess the impact of small or microloans on business performance over time by tracking the role of financial sources, amount of money borrowed, background characteristics, and motivation to start a business (i.e. push or pull).

The results also revealed no significant difference by gender, ethnicity, or employment status in the source of amounts of small loans secured during the first two years of the businesses. Thus, consistent with the theory of financial bricolage, all types of entrepreneurs engaged in seeking out small loans during the early years of their businesses’ existence.

Although using the PSED II has many advantages, it is not protected from methodological pitfalls. One such potential disadvantage is the fact that this database allows the authors to understand the development of US-based nascent entrepreneurs, but overlooks other countries. Future research efforts should be focussed on surveying nascent entrepreneurs from other countries and cultures to expand the understanding of the relations between small loans and financial sources on business performance worldwide. This could be most useful for intensifying research in regions that generate more push and/or pull entrepreneurs. A second disadvantage inherent in the PSED is that interviews in follow-up surveys may have become impossible over time, resulting in missing data. In addition, the reasons for being unable to reach interviewees are not always clear. In the entrepreneurial realm, these reasons have a great impact on the understanding of the development of new businesses. Interviewees’ businesses may have gone bankrupt, merged with other firms and thus changed contact details, gone global and therefore left the country, etc. (Delmar and Shane, 2003); these could bias the results. A final potential weakness in the PSED is that the data are based on entrepreneurs’ self-reports which are known to be prone to many kinds of response bias.

By offering practical education aimed at enhancing the financial performance of entrepreneurs, the authors believe that they can meet the challenges posed by the research (e.g. Du Rietz and Henrekson, 2000; Parker, 2004; Pfeiffer and Reize, 2000; Reynolds et al., 2002) on performance gaps between entrepreneurs with different background characteristics and those embarking on entrepreneurship with different motivations (push vs pull). In line with the financial bricolage theory, the results may aid governmental bodies, educational and academic institutions oriented toward entrepreneurs, and small businesses, in constructing programs that will train entrepreneurs to be attentive to the diverse range of potentially available resources, including small loans and different financial sources.

The research challenges the necessity-opportunity simplistic categorization and builds upon prior work in the field of bricolage, or the practice of “making do with whatever is at hand,” to begin developing a theory of “financial bricolage.” It is the contention that all new businesses are resource-constrained due to challenges posed by asymmetric information. Thus, new businesses, in general, do not have access to a full range of funding alternatives. In light of this, small loans may be critical for the survival and success of not only necessity-based businesses but opportunity-based businesses as well. The results and findings bear this out.

This paper aims to evaluate whether entrepreneurs with an innovative product/service are more likely to formally register their businesses. Understanding the decision of business registration as a rational choice of the entrepreneurs, where she weighs the costs versus the benefits of such formalization, the study expands the literature on informal entrepreneurship by looking at the benefit-side rather than the typically evaluated cost-side of an individual cost-benefit evaluation.

The authors relied on the Global Entrepreneurship Monitor (GEM) adult population survey to evaluate the hypothesis. Specifically, the authors used the GEM data of 2016 for Colombia, covering 2,069 observations (a representative sample at the country level), evaluating the relationship between innovativeness and business registration for the early stage of the entrepreneurial process. Given the nature of our dependent variable, the authors estimated a logistic regression model.

Different from what the authors hypothesized, they did not find empirical evidence for a positive correlation between an innovative product or service and business registration. Instead, businesses that compete with many others offering the same product/service have a higher tendency to register at the Chamber of Commerce. Contrarily of what might be suspected, opportunity-based entrepreneurship – as opposed to necessity-based – is not a relevant variable when formalizing a business, providing evidence for our hypothesis that necessity-based entrepreneurship cannot be equalized with informal entrepreneurship. Additionally, the authors show that an entrepreneur with higher socioeconomic status is more likely to register his company.

The results provide first exploratory evidence that the benefit evaluation may play a role in formalizing a start-up, thus calling for future research that not only tackles the influence of registration costs and administrative burden but rather looks at the outcome of a cost-benefit analysis. The data imply several limitations which future research should address: variables measuring the innovativeness of the product/service are rather coarse measures and need to be expanded and detailed in future research. Additionally, the authors acknowledge that a relatively high number of missing values may generate a selection bias in our population sample. Finally, because of situating the research in a developing country, the research results may lack generalizability. Therefore, researchers are encouraged to test the proposed propositions further.

In a country like Colombia with very high levels of informality, it is necessary that the government fully understands the role of innovation in the formalization process of start-ups. The results indicate that a differentiation of support mechanisms to increase the formalization of businesses according to the different stages of their development may be necessary and that aside from costs, benefits of formalization play a role. A higher level of formality is not only related to economic growth but also much better protection of workers, therefore going beyond the reduction of registration costs and the implied administrative burden should be an additional public policy target for decreasing informality. Finally, the correlation of socioeconomic stratum with the decision to register hints at a varying evaluation of formalization, a point that merits attention by government and academia.

The study shifts the focus from the evaluation of solely costs for business registering as a barrier to start-up formalization to the cost-benefit analysis. The authors propose – and show – that such an evaluation is not generalizable for all kinds of business. Specifically, the authors show that a start-up is more likely to register when it competes with a large number of competitors than when it competes with a smaller number of others offering the same. At the same time, the authors also show that the stage at which the start-up company is at influences the decision to formalize.

Este trabajo tiene como objetivo evaluar si los empresarios con un producto/servicio innovador son más propensos a registrar formalmente sus negocios, entendiendo la decisión de registrar el negocio como una elección racional, en la que el emprendedor sopesa los costos frente a los beneficios de dicha formalización. Este estudio amplía la literatura sobre el emprendimiento informal al plantear un análisis enfocado en los beneficios de una formalización del negocio.

Se utiliza la encuesta Global Entrepreneurship Monitor (GEM) Adult Population Survey para evaluar nuestras hipótesis. Específicamente, utilizamos los datos del GEM de 2016 para Colombia, cubriendo 2.069 observaciones (una muestra representativa a nivel de país), evaluando la relación entre una oferta innovadora y el registro de negocios para la etapa temprana del proceso emprendedor. Dada la naturaleza de nuestra variable dependiente, estimamos un modelo de regresión logística.

Contrario a la hipótesis propuesta, no encontramos una correlación estadísticamente significativa positiva entre un producto o servicio innovador y el registro de empresas. En su lugar, las empresas que compiten con muchas otras empresas que ofrecen el mismo producto/servicio tienen una mayor tendencia a registrarse en la Cámara de Comercio. Asimismo, el emprendimiento basado en la oportunidad -en contraposición al basado en la necesidad- no es una variable relevante a la hora de formalizar un negocio, hallazgo en congruencia con a nuestra hipótesis de que el emprendimiento basado en la necesidad no puede equipararse al emprendimiento informal. Además, mostramos que un emprendedor con un estatus socioeconómico más alto tiene una mayor probabilidad de registrar su empresa.

Los resultados obtenidos proporcionan la primera evidencia exploratoria de que la evaluación de los beneficios puede desempeñar un rol en la formalización de una empresa de nueva creación, por lo que se requiere mayor investigación que no sólo aborde la influencia de los costos de registro y administrativos asociados, sino que examine el resultado de un análisis costo-beneficio. Los datos utilizados tienen varias limitaciones que una investigación posterior debería abordar: las variables que miden el carácter innovador del producto/servicio son medidas muy básicas y deben ampliarse y detallarse en futuros estudios. Además, el número relativamente alto de valores perdidos puede generar un sesgo de selección en nuestra muestra empleada. Por último, al situar nuestra investigación en el contexto de un país de desarrollo, los resultados pueden ser poco generalizables. Por lo tanto, futuras investigaciones deberían abordar en detalle los hallazgos presentados.

En un país como Colombia, con niveles muy altos de informalidad, es necesario que el gobierno comprenda plenamente el papel de la innovación en el proceso de formalización de las empresas emergentes. Nuestros resultados indican que una diferenciación de los mecanismos de apoyo para aumentar la formalización de las empresas según las diferentes etapas de su desarrollo puede ser necesario. A su vez, además de los costos, los beneficios de la formalización juegan un papel importante. Un mayor nivel de formalidad no sólo está relacionado con el crecimiento económico sino también con una mejor protección de los trabajadores, por lo que ir más allá de la reducción de los costos de registro y de la carga administrativa implícita debería ser un objetivo adicional de política pública para disminuir la informalidad. Por último, la correlación del estrato socioeconómico con la decisión de registrarse sugiere que la evaluación de formalizarse varía dependiendo del estatus socioeconómico, un punto que merece la atención del gobierno y la academia.

Nuestro estudio desplaza la atención exclusiva en los costos de registro de una empresa, y sus barreras asociadas, hacia el análisis costo-beneficio como parte de la evaluación y decisión de formalización de las nuevas empresas. Proponemos ‐y demostramos‐ que dicha evaluación no es generalizable para todo tipo de empresas. En concreto, demostramos que es más probable que una empresa emergente se registre cuando compite con un gran número de competidores que cuando compite con un número menor de otras que ofrecen lo mismo. A su vez, también mostramos que la etapa de desarrollo en la cual se encuentra la empresa emergente influye en la decisión de formalizarse.

Women entrepreneurship has grown significantly all over the world, and it is widely established that entrepreneurship is important for economic growth and wealth. Despite those facts, women’s participation in entrepreneurship is lower than men’s in almost all societies. Those phenomena get the attention of scholars from diverse disciplines, all of them interested in the behaviour and profile of female entrepreneurs and their business success rates. Several isolated factors were studied, with positive and negative effects on each stage of the entrepreneur process, for women entrepreneurs, so the purpose of this research is identify, classify by their impact and organise those factors in relation to the stages of the entrepreneur process.

The literature on factors affecting female entrepreneurship produced since January 2010 until October 2015 is analysed to define entrepreneurial success, identify factors affecting success at each stage of the entrepreneurial process and propose and organise those factors at individual and environment levels.

Several factors affecting female entrepreneurial success at each stage of the entrepreneurship process were found and organised at the internal (individual), micro, meso and macro environment level. In the literature reviewed, the most considered factors are: at the internal level, human capital, education and experience, with effects on the opportunity identification stage of the entrepreneurial process, and at the micro environment level, access to resources with effects on the opportunity recognition, acquiring resources and entrepreneurial performance stages, both with influence on quantitative and qualitative indicators of success.

This paper proposes an integrated classification and an array for all those factors that have an influence on women’s entrepreneurship and its success, relating those to the entrepreneurship process.

The main objective of this research is to exploratorily analyse different factors that influence the decision of the senior population (+50 years) to engage in entrepreneurship activities in a group of Latin American countries. This study considers the motivations for entrepreneurship (opportunity and necessity) and the level of development of the countries.

The authors used data from the Global Entrepreneurship Monitor (GEM) with a sample of 22,139 observations of senior individuals in seven Latin American countries surveyed between 2013 and 2017. The authors also used the Human Development Index to capture the relevance of the level of development. The authors employed a multilevel logistic regression model to test the study hypotheses.

The study results show that individual factors such as personal income, education and occupation have a significant influence on the probability of entrepreneurship of senior individuals. Related to contextual factors, the level of human development of a country has a negative influence mainly on opportunity-based entrepreneurs.

Because of the rapidly ageing population in Latin America, understanding senior entrepreneurs and their motivations is very relevant not only in terms of theoretical development but also for policy and practical implications, primarily those related to labour markets and social protection.

The purpose of this paper is to use a unique set of measures from Holmes et al. (2013) to clarify the relationship between entrepreneurial readiness and entrepreneurial behaviours across countries and determine whether formal institutions moderate this relationship.

This paper uses data collected by the Global Entrepreneurship Monitor, the Index of Economic Freedom, Political Risk Services, and the Freedom House and Political Constraint Index to test a theoretical model. A multilevel analysis is performed based on set of 377,356 observations from 51 countries spanning eight years (2001-2008).

The results suggest that entrepreneurial readiness has a strong relationship with entrepreneurial behaviour (as measured by entrepreneurial entry and opportunity-based entrepreneurship) and that this relationship strengthens with increases in political democracy (PD), government regulations (GR), financial capital availability (FCA) and market liquidity (ML).

The study is based on Holmes et al.’s (2013) institutions that are most important for society, uses satisfactory sample size and multi-level modelling. However, many more institutional conditions that remain to be considered might affect entrepreneurial activities.

For policy-makers, the results show that PD, GR, FCA and ML correlate favourably with entrepreneurial behaviour when individuals have a high level of entrepreneurial readiness. Policy-makers should introduce policies that provide a secure environment to individuals to start their own ventures.

The current study is among the first to examine the three dimensions of formal institutions—political, regulatory, and economic institutions—in a single study. Using the three dimensions, the study explains theoretically and examines empirically the effect of individual-level entrepreneurial readiness on entrepreneurial behaviour.

This chapter develops a conceptual framework of economic development of Algeria with a particular focus on youth entrepreneurship. Drawing on the opportunity-based approach of Drucker (1985) and the impact analysis theory (IAT) advocated by Murphy and Marvel (2008), Lenjo (2015), and Dontigney (2018), this proposed conceptual framework theoretically allows the integration of different perspectives including economic development of a country and youth entrepreneurship. In principle, the opportunity-based theory posits that entrepreneurship represents a response to a stimulus, through a business venture, where an unemployed person exploits opportunities engendered by social, technological, and cultural changes in the environment. The IAT is a paradigm that deconstructs the causes and effects of a phenomenon (i.e. youth entrepreneurship) to afford greater understanding and appreciation of the research agenda, while providing an indicative assessment of the overall impact of the issue (OECD, 2014). The authors discuss the core barriers (venture capital, foreign direct investments, bureaucratic obstacles, gender discrimination, and soft skills) to entrepreneurship in Algeria, Furthermore, the authors assess the different economic forces in Algeria that appear to be promoting or sustaining entrepreneurship, particularly in young people. These forces have a tendency to be connected to a broader possibility of economic development. Further analysis is required that demonstrates the potential upsides of promoting youth entrepreneurship. Thus, the authors attempt to answer a key question: What can be done to engage the youth in small business entrepreneurship across Algeria and thus implement a sustainable solution to the country’s employment problem?

Recent analysis suggests entrepreneurship is in decline. If so, some argue that the appropriate policy response is to devote even further government intervention to nurture both fledgling ventures as well as entirely new undertakings, lamenting the fact that much current economic policy caters to already-successful firms – thereby creating a decision-making environment that stacks the deck against would-be entrepreneurs. While it is indeed true that entrepreneurial ventures lead to value creation over time, this paper argues that the answer to any slowdown in entrepreneurship is not to add even more policy Band-Aids to an already broken system of carve-outs, exemptions, subsidies and tax breaks. Instead the solution to bad policy is to unwind bad policy that favors Goliaths over Davids, thereby creating a level playing field for all. Any attempt to use government initiatives to spur entrepreneurship will, over the longer term, only serve to distort the economic outcomes society would have observed as the product of a system of rule-of-law, clearly defined and enforced property rights and freely functioning markets that permit entrepreneurs, investors, consumers and savers to make the most sensible choices available to them.

This essay cites fundamental pieces of existing entrepreneurial research to make its argument.

Rather than adding even more policy initiatives to address any slowdown in entrepreneurship, policymakers should aspire to create the most fertile environment possible to foster entrepreneurial activity. Adding more policies on top of existing ones presumes to know which policies are better than others. Even when perceived as neutral, policy incentives cannot improve upon the outcomes of the unseen price system.

This paper reminds readers that entrepreneurship is vital to economic flourishing, while reminding readers that even policy actions presumed to be beneficial likely bear unintended consequences because they bring their own disruptions to the decision-making environment.

The aim of this paper is to conceptualise entrepreneurial capacity-building as an integrated approach within the international higher education sector. Whilst university–enterprise collaboration is recognised as being essential to promoting graduate employability and entrepreneurship, the lack of an integrated approach towards embedding entrepreneurship education and entrepreneurial capacity-building with an entrepreneurial skill and mind-set prevails in the higher education sector. With reference to the retail sector, increasingly competitive job markets and the need for entrepreneurial capacity-building place growing pressures on universities to nurture career-ready graduates with entrepreneurial acumen.

The theoretical paper presents a rationale for embedding entrepreneurship education into university curricula and for promoting university–business collaboration. Secondly, it reviews the extent to which entrepreneurial capacity-building is institutionally embedded to foster graduate entrepreneurship, university–business collaboration and business incubation within one strategic framework. Finally, the paper proposes five propositions within a tripartite approach that can foster graduate entrepreneurs with entrepreneurial skills and mind-set, useful for existing enterprises and start-ups. The implications for these propositions are discussed.

The authors propose five propositions with a tripartite approach that can foster graduate entrepreneurs with entrepreneurial skill and mind-set, skills for creating enterprises and university–enterprise collaboration within one strategic framework.

Increasingly competitive job markets and the need for entrepreneurial capacity-building place growing pressures on universities to nurture career-ready graduates with entrepreneurial acumen in social science (e.g. retail, business management and accountancy) and science (e.g. pharmacy, architecture and engineering) programmes centred within the tripartite approach.

Whilst university–enterprise collaboration is recognised as being essential to promoting graduate employability and entrepreneurship, the tripartite integrated approach embeds entrepreneurship education and entrepreneurial capacity-building with an entrepreneurial skillset and mind-set in the international higher education sector.