Search results

The purpose of this paper is to explore societal entrepreneurship in the turbulent health‐care sector in a changing welfare state, Sweden. Empirically oriented questions about the businesses explored in this paper are: how do the entrepreneurs see combining “health‐driven” and profit‐driven enterprises? What mindset and strategies guide their enterprises? What organizatorial solutions are used?

The paper is based on two case‐entrepreneurs, selected due to the author's perception of them as successful both as businesses and as societal change agents. The entrepreneurs have been interviewed by means of unstructured dialogues.

Both entrepreneurs prove to be frontier crossing combiners in several dimensions; they unite ideological commitment with economically sound businesses, they bring together their medical professions and complementary methods of treatment, they combine bridge building with challenging and they reconcile part‐time entrepreneurship with employment.

With regard to the long‐term preconditions for societal entrepreneurship, it is concluded that these two entrepreneurial processes have traits of both opportunity‐ and self‐exploitation. The long‐term social sustainability of enterprises of this kind is an issue for further research.

The paper goes beyond non‐profit research by exploring societal entrepreneurship in the for‐profit sector, with focus on entrepreneurship which crosses sectoral borders.

The purpose of this study is to empirically examine how individuals’ hybrid entrepreneurial venturing activities (HEVA) influence key characteristics associated with one’s wage work, namely creativity and job satisfaction.

Through a cross-sectional self-administered survey design, data were gathered from 465 US-based useable responses via Amazon Mechanical Turk and analyzed using structural equation modeling (SEM).

Findings show individuals reporting higher levels of HEVA – such as creating, founding, starting or running – tend to also exhibit higher levels of creativity and job satisfaction in their workplaces. Findings further reveal that income negatively moderates the relationship between creativity and wage work job satisfaction.

By providing a better understanding of how engaging in HEVA can impact creativity and job satisfaction, this study has important implications for (1) managers seeking to influence key employee outcomes and (2) employees considering such entrepreneurial activities.

This paper adds to the growing scholarly and practitioner interest in hybrid entrepreneurship and its outcomes. Specifically, the paper adds new insights regarding how engaging in HEVA can influence individual skills (i.e. creativity) or organizational goals (i.e. employee job satisfaction). In doing so, the paper also uses insights from the intrinsic/extrinsic motivation literature to suggest how extrinsic motivators (such as income) can interact with intrinsically motivated behaviors (such as creativity) in influencing employee outcomes in wage work. Finally, the paper contributes to the growing interest in applying the empowerment perspective within entrepreneurship research by exploring where and how empowerment may occur.

The German government only recently started paying attention to the topic of female entrepreneurship as an important means to raise the overall level of entrepreneurship. Most relevant support policies concentrate on extending and stabilising the financial base of new female‐owned ventures. Relevant consultancy appears to play a less important role, although there has been a shift towards integrated packages in recent years. However, access to mainstream support is implicitly gender biased. Moreover, an integrated strategy for fostering female entrepreneurship also needs to consider that there are shortcomings in the institutional (political and societal) environment, possibly restricting women's interest in entrepreneurship and thus determining the extent of female entrepreneurship.

Employee entrepreneurship has recently become an emerging area of investigation. However, due to the fragmentation of the turnover and entrepreneurship literature, no coherent theoretical framework has been developed to provide an adequate description of the employee entrepreneurial process. The purpose of this paper is to gain a deeper understanding of why and how an employee in an established organization progresses toward starting a new venture by exploring the key decision-making processes during the initial stages of employee entrepreneurship.

This study addresses the following research questions: What are the key decision-making processes during the initial stages of employee entrepreneurship? How are these decisions made, and how do they interact? This study employed a multiple case study approach, which enabled the authors to gain valuable insight into these “what” and “how” questions. The data consist of 28 in-depth employee entrepreneurship cases.

Based on an in-depth study of 28 cases, this study constructs a comprehensive model of the dynamic and interactive decision-making processes that lead to employee entrepreneurship. In particular, the findings reveal that rather than being a linear staged activity, employee entrepreneurship is an inherently iterative process that involves a set of interrelated subdecision-making processes related to turnover, team entrepreneurship and partner recruitment that entail multiple iterations and feedback loops based on an individual's cognitive judgment.

By illustrating and clarifying the importance of the effects of different initial motivations and the attributes of the network in the course of the employee entrepreneurship decision-making process, this study integrates the turnover and entrepreneurship literature and makes significant contributions to the current literature on employee entrepreneurship. Moreover, this study complements research investigating entrepreneurial team formation by providing a detailed understanding of how the lead entrepreneur and the prospective partner make mutual choices during the entrepreneurial team formation process.

This paper sets out to critically evaluate contemporary entrepreneurship education initiatives in the UK. The authors seek to compare and contrast various entrepreneurship education methods, approaches and curricula as well as relevant outcomes, in the UK context.

Longitudinal case studies were used, over a ten‐year period (1995‐2004), to analyse in‐depth qualitative data relating to the development and implementation of various approaches to entrepreneurship education, in a sample of 40 new and established universities in the UK.

A number of interesting findings have emerged from this longitudinal study. It appears that conceptual and contextual as well as design and delivery factors can impact significantly upon entrepreneurship education courses developed in UK HEIs. Furthermore, a number of actual and perceived barriers needed to be overcome or mitigated in order to facilitate a better understanding of stakeholder needs and contributions.

Measuring the outcomes of entrepreneurship education in the UK is still proving ellusive. This study provides a longitudinal overview of current entrepreneurship education initiatives in order to gain a better understanding of the scope and limitations of this type of educational programme.

This paper presents an empirically rigorous, longitudinal case study approach to a rapidly growing aspect of higher education in the UK. The richness of the emergent data offers a valuable insight into pertinent aspects of entrepreneurship education and stakeholder needs and contributions.

We argue that claims of an entrepreneurial miracle as a description of private sector development in post-communist Europe conflates entrepreneurship with self-employment. The difference between the two hinges on the Weberian distinction between enterprise- and household-centered businesses. We then present two paradigms, the entrepreneurial that emphasizes the first and the post-Fordist that stresses the importance of the second business type, and provide data on businesses and individual motivation of business owners. We find more support for the post-Fordist approach. Then we show that business forms, primarily associated with self-employment have different recruitment patterns and rewards than other, more entrepreneurial forms. We end with a plea to disaggregate the various forms of independent, private sector activity in future research.

Through the lens of experiential learning theory, this conceptual paper examines the factors influencing the likelihood of transitioning from hybrid to full-time entrepreneurship. It is critical to evaluate the experiential learning that takes place during the hybrid phase, in order to establish a more nuanced understanding of the dynamic entrepreneurial journey.

This conceptual paper made use of a secondary data analysis of the existing academic literature, in particular using a thematic analysis, in order to propose a conceptual model and associated propositions.

The proposed conceptual model identifies four factors: fear of failure, perceived risk, entrepreneurial competency development and self-efficacy that are predicted to influence the transition decision. This paper establishes hybrid entrepreneurship as an effective learning ground and path toward full-time entrepreneurship.

Providing insights into the factors that influence the transition, allows policy makers to establish systems and incubators to support hybrid entrepreneurs reach the tipping point at which they have sufficient knowledge to enter full-time entrepreneurship. This paper establishes the importance of developmental policies aimed at encouraging hybrid entrepreneurship. There are also implications for managers of hybrid entrepreneurs to establish policies that encourage a culture of transparency and reap the benefits of enhanced employee development.

The paper has three predominant sources of value. First, offering a multidisciplinary approach by extending an existing theory to a new context; second, through the establishment of a conceptual model, offering propositions readily linked to hypotheses for future empirical assessment and third, enhancing the visibility of hybrid entrepreneurship in the literature to encourage public policy intervention and support.

The purpose of the paper is to offer an insight into gender, context and entrepreneurial learning of women entrepreneurs in Germany.

The paper explores entrepreneurial learning of women entrepreneurs both conceptually and empirically. Section 1 introduces a conceptual framework, which allows analysing entrepreneurial learning both from an individual gender‐specific and from a context‐based perspective. Empirically, the paper explores how women entrepreneurs acquire the (business‐related) knowledge to start and grow an enterprise and the impact of regional, sector, family and social as well as macro environments in this regard. Findings are based on 31 in‐depths interviews with women entrepreneurs and 23 interviews with key experts.

It is found that the meso environment is more of an indirect influence; the macro and micro environments are strong influences on lives and decisions of women entrepreneurs, especially on their opportunity recognition. The business environment has both a direct and indirect influence.

The results demonstrate an ongoing need for a contemporary image of women's entrepreneurship in Germany. The major challenge for policy‐makers and support organizations therefore lies in propagating diverse entrepreneurial images and in incorporating the diversity of women's entrepreneurship and their specific learning approaches into policies and support offers.

The paper contributes a different and so far neglected perspective on entrepreneurial learning and opportunity recognition, drawing attention to the contextual influences and the embedding of cognitive processes.

Wage employees enter self-employment either directly or in a staged manner and may subsequently undertake multiple stints at self-employment. Extant research on the relationship between entry modes and the persistence and outcomes of self-employment is inconclusive. This study investigates the relationship between wage employees’ initial mode of entry into self-employment and the duration of the subsequent first two stints of self-employment.

This study used a matched longitudinal sample of 9,550 employees who became majority owners of incorporated firms from 2005 to 2016.

The findings demonstrate that the initial mode of entry into self-employment matters for the first two stints at self-employment. Staged entry into self-employment was associated with a shorter first stint and became insignificant for the second stint. Staged entry into self-employment was positively related to the odds of becoming self-employed for the second time in the same firm.

Using a comprehensive and reliable dataset, the paper shifts focus from the aggregated onward journey of novice entrepreneurs (survival as the outcome) to the duration of their self-employment stints. By doing so, the paper offers insights into the process of becoming self-employed and the patterns associated with success/failure in entrepreneurship associated with self-employment duration.

In this chapter, we advance an understanding of entrepreneurial resourcefulness in relation to context by focusing on challenging and sometimes outright hostile environments and the way they shape, and are shaped by, entrepreneurial resourcefulness. Drawing on selective evidence from several projects in post-socialist countries in both Central and Eastern Europe and Central Asia and other published research covering these countries, we argue for contextualized conceptualizations of resourcefulness. More specifically we emphasize that temporal, historical, socio-spatial, and institutional contexts are antecedents and boundaries for entrepreneurial behavior, while at the same time allowing for human agency. This is visible in individuals’ actions to negotiate, reenact, and cross these boundaries, and as a result, intentionally or inadvertently contributing to changing contexts. We suggest that resourcefulness is a dynamic concept encompassing multiple practices, which change over time, and it results from a close interplay of multiple contexts with entrepreneurial behavior. We also propose that from a theoretical point of view, resourcefulness not only needs to be contextualized, but it also needs to be explored together with its contextual outcomes – the value it creates and adds at different levels of society.