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The purpose of this paper is to explore the efficacy of Osterwalder and Pigneur’s Business Model Canvas for 271 teams competing in a venture pitch competition during a cleantech accelerator program.

It uses competition results and data from a website used by participants to track their hypothesis construction and testing.

Teams that used the elements of customer segment, value proposition, key activities or key partnerships performed significantly better in the competition. Yet of all nine elements in the Canvas, only customer segmentation showed a significant linear bivariate correlation between the number of validated hypotheses and performance. Finally, teams that heavily used a triumvirate of elements composed of customer segmentation, value proposition and channel performed two times better than teams that barely used these elements.

The findings of this exploratory analysis imply that the components of a business model that explain and predict early success might be different than those for a more mature firm.

These results suggest that practitioners could improve early performance by narrowing their scrutiny to just the triumvirate, because the Canvas may contain components that are unhelpful for entrepreneurs as they form a business model for their nascent venture.

This paper fills a gap by empirically testing the prediction that application of the Business Model Canvas drives venture success and providing a revise definition for a business model that is more appropriate for start-up ventures.

The purpose of this paper was to determine whether innovativeness is a personal attribute that enhances entrepreneurial success and to obtain external validation for the Valuable Novelty Theory of innovation and the Innovator Mindset (IM) instrument for measuring personal innovativeness.

This is the final paper in a series of three articles. The first article, Valuable Novelty: A Proposed General Theory of Innovation and Innovativeness, laid out the Valuable Novelty Theory and the Innovation Cycle. The second article Evaluating Mindset as a Means of Measuring Personal Innovativeness explained the design of the IM instrument. For this study, some 300 entrepreneurs were given the IM assessment and asked to provide data on their ventures’ recent performance. The data were then analyzed to see whether differing IM scores reflected different business outcomes. Due to the heavily skewed nature of the business performance data, this required the development of a non-traditional approach to data analysis that combined Rasch measurement, segmentation of the data into quantiles and hypothesis testing using simulations.

The findings were that there is a robust relationship between personal innovativeness and multiple measures of value creation. An unexpected finding was a Value Creation Curve, a non-linear pattern that appears to characterize the relationship between innovativeness and value creation regardless of the specific type of value.

Key limitations of this study were that it was retrospective and focused on value creation in a particular endeavor – the launching of a new business. A longitudinal study with a control group would further clarify the relationship between innovativeness and value creation. Research in other settings is needed to explore the relevance of innovativeness to other types of value creation.

This is the first study to demonstrate and measure a relationship between personal innovativeness and entrepreneurial value creation, with effect sizes that appear to exceed any previously studied personal attributes. It confirms the role innovativeness plays in creating value, demonstrates the utility of the IM assessment as a research instrument and provides a tool that entrepreneurs and investors can use to more accurately predict the likely outcomes of business ventures.

Though often considered a critical factor in predicting venture success, past research into the effects of founder experience has often produced mixed results. What factors influence founders’ decisions to use, or not use, experience they possess? This study examines the role job dissatisfaction might play in a founder's decision to leverage multiple types of experience (sector, entrepreneurial, role model and education) on external (sales performance) and internal (founder intrinsic satisfaction) outcomes. Greater dissatisfaction was associated with decreased likelihood of founders building on sector experience. While dissatisfaction influenced the use of experience, greater experience levels did not consistently account for higher levels of venture sales performance. Moreover, no differences were found in founders’ intrinsic satisfaction, regardless of sales performance. The differing results in the two outcome measures suggest potential differences in the goals and consequent actions of entrepreneurs in the study. By examining multiple types of experience, and what might moderate founders’ use of that experience, these findings provide additional insights into the entrepreneurial process.

The purpose of this paper is to examine the role of founding team experience (industry and venturing) in new venture creation. This paper posits the following questions: How does founding team experience influence the likelihood of new venture creation, in the nascent stage? How does industry context moderate this relationship? The study aims to fill an important gap in the literature by unpacking the impact of different types of founding team experiences on venture outcome, and by focusing on the influence of founding team in the venture creation process, specifically at the nascent stage.

The paper utilizes data from the Second Panel Study of Entrepreneurial Dynamics, a longitudinal data set of 1,214 nascent entrepreneurs in the USA. Logistics regression was employed to analyze the effect of founding team experience on new venture creation. Post hoc analysis was conducted to ensure the confidence of the findings.

The paper provides empirical insights about how founding team experience influences the likelihood of new venture creation in the nascent stage. At the nascent stage, founding team industry experience positively affects new venture creation while founding team venturing experience does not. However, in the high-technology industry environment, the influence of the founding team’s venturing experience on new venture creation is stronger than that in the low-technology industry environment.

Due to the design of the data set, there is a risk of “right-censoring” problem. Also, because the study used archival data on founding teams, the methodology did not allow for uncovering the underlying team processes and dynamics during the venture creation process based on learning from experience. Future studies are encouraged to examine other types of founding team experience and the underlying process-level factors on venture creation.

The paper provides important practical implications for nascent entrepreneurs/entrepreneurial teams on team assembling and composition. In general, a team with higher-level industry experience is critical for venturing success. A team with higher-level venturing experience is more desired in the high-technology industry.

This paper fulfills an important gap in the entrepreneurial team literature by highlighting the complex and nuanced ways in which founding team experience influences the likelihood of venture creation in the nascent stage of the firm, especially after incorporating the additional impact of the industry context.

Past entrepreneurship research has emphasized the importance of the context of the entrepreneur (e.g., personality) along with environmental characteristics as predictors of the success of new ventures. Additional literature has expanded our understanding of how implementation processes such as business planning, social networking, and external financing may be key to new venture performance. This paper offers 12 propositions that link these two literatures. Specifically, we argue that the personality and goals of the entrepreneur, as well as the dynamism and munificence of the environment, may affect how well implementation processes enhance new venture performance.

Cognition, conflict and cohesion constitute an inseparable body of group dynamics in entrepreneurial teams. There have been few studies of how entrepreneurial team members interact with each other to enhance venture performance. The purpose of this paper is to develop and test a model that explains the trinity of cognition, conflict and cohesion in terms of social interaction between entrepreneurial team members.

Drawing upon the existing literature concerning entrepreneurial teams, the hypothesized model posits that shared cognition influences team cohesion through the mediating effects of intra-team conflicts. The model also postulates that team cohesion is positively associated with new venture performance and entrepreneurial satisfaction. Structural equation modeling is used to test the hypothesized model, using data that were collected from 203 entrepreneurial teams from technology-based companies in Taiwan.

The results show that shared cognition in entrepreneurial team members maintains team cohesion by restraining conflict and that team cohesion has a positive influence on entrepreneurial members’ satisfaction and new venture profitability.

The leader of a new venture team must endeavor to improve shared cognition between entrepreneurial members. To strengthen shared cognition, the leader can hold formal workshops to build consensus, informal meetings to share views, or use social media to enhance common understanding.

This paper verifies the connections between shared cognition, conflicts and cohesion in entrepreneurial teams in predicting new venture success and highlights the importance of cultivating a shared cognition in an entrepreneurial team to manage conflicts.

For the present generation of entrepreneurs, the operating environment in Afghanistan has been among the most tenuous in the world. Numerous regime changes, civil unrest and war have created tremendous uncertainty, making civilian business planning difficult. These challenges incrementally impact female entrepreneurs. This paper aims to investigate the relationship between one aspect of entrepreneurial psychological capital – optimism regarding enterprise success of Afghan female entrepreneurs – and aspects of the marketing function.

Primary data collection was used for this study. A total of 248 women business owners were surveyed via telephone from five provinces of Afghanistan. Over half (133) of respondents were from the Afghan capital, Kabul. A total of 49 respondents were obtained from Herat, 44 from Mazar, 12 from Nangarhar and ten were obtained from Kandahar.

We find that a focus on marketing positively and significantly impacts reported optimism by female Afghan entrepreneurs, as do marketing planning efforts. However, self-reliance and orientation toward the outside world do not impact the perceived success of the entrepreneurial venture.

Like other empirical studies, this research has its own limitation. First, we would have liked a larger sample size, but date collection in a war-torn country and from female business women in a male-dominated society is proofed very challenging task. Also, some cities had less representation due to security concerns especially Kandahar province.

Our results have significant relevance for economic development policymakers, non-governmental organizations and entrepreneurs throughout the developing world. What drives the psychological capital of these entrepreneurs under these extreme conditions should be of interest not only from the perspective of the entrepreneurship literature, but also for policymakers who are often uninformed regarding on the ground conditions under which individuals in the environment function.

It is our hope that our results inform those in a position of power so that they support the development of human capital of Afghan women who are or who seek to be entrepreneurs. We also hope to raise questions for other researchers related to the importance of human capital investment and the business functions for entrepreneurs in other less developed, conflict-prone environments with low mean educational levels.

This paper is the first to use proprietary, hand collected survey data from Afghani female entrepreneurs to collect, analyze and draw conclusions and recommendations from a sample of 248 women-owned businesses regarding the relationship between the marketing function and one aspect of psychological capital – perceived optimism – in five Afghan cities.

How does career boundary-crossing affect an entrepreneur’s new venture? When entrepreneurs cross industry or functional boundaries to lead startups, they may lack specific experience needed for performance. Conversely, the diverse experiences they carry can enhance exploration and lead to the emergence of innovation in startups. We highlight important consequences of career boundary-crossing, using a multi-industry longitudinal sample of high-technology firms. We find that entrepreneurs who cross functional boundaries are more likely to lead their startups into new product areas. We also find that entrepreneurs’ industry boundary-crossing is associated with startup failure, but it also increases the probability of an IPO.