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The purpose of this paper is to focus on the cognitive and motivational consequences of a business failure, and their relation with subsequent start up success. The paper hypothesizes that if previous business failure was attributed to an internal and stable cause, subsequent business would be less successful compared to where an entrepreneur attributed business failure to an internal and unstable cause.

The authors reviewed the literature on attribution theory in an achievement context and derived a hypothesis about the relation between causal thinking and subsequent business success. A survey amongst entrepreneurs in Uganda was carried out to yield insights on how attributions to past performance influence subsequent business performance.

Entrepreneurs who attributed previous business failure to an internal, stable cause were found to be less successful in subsequent business start up. When repeat entrepreneurs attribute previous shut down to a lack of ability, they are less successful in a subsequent business start up. However, attributing the failure to a lack of effort, does not affect subsequent business success.

The study reaffirms the importance of attributional thinking in entrepreneurship and provides empirical evidence on the relationship between the way entrepreneurs think about their previous performance and subsequent performance. Attributional thinking influences subsequent business actions and outcomes, which offers important practical applications. For instance training to change attributions of entrepreneurs may be used to influence their eventual performance.

In spite of the recognised significance of habitual entrepreneurship, enough is not known about the drivers that lead individuals to become habitual entrepreneurs. Drawing from Lazear’s theory of entrepreneurship, this paper addresses the specifics of habitual entrepreneurs in terms of different human capital-related factors, including breadth and diversity of experience and education. This paper aims to elucidate what makes some people habitual entrepreneurs.

In this empirical study on a broad data set (1,538 surveys), the authors juxtapose habitual entrepreneurs with ex-entrepreneurs who decided to give up and chose a salary job after running their first and only firm. The authors formulate four hypotheses that are tested by using a logit regression to model the probability of being a habitual entrepreneur vs giving up entrepreneurship and choosing a salary job.

The probability of being a habitual entrepreneur increases with the diversity of both managerial and professional experience, as well as with the breadth of education. In addition, entrepreneurial self-efficacy supports setting up more than one firm.

The findings actualise knowledge of whether habitual entrepreneurs are unique concerning their pools of human capital. They broaden the knowledge of the backgrounds of the decision to start up a business again.

This paper contributes to the current entrepreneurship discussion by offering an enhanced understanding of habitual entrepreneurship. The phenomenon of repeatedly engaging in entrepreneurship is a promising source of knowledge that enables us to better understand entrepreneurship. In addition, the authors verify and extend Lazear’s theory to a new group of entrepreneurs.

This study enriches the theory of effectuation by discussing the four independent dimensions of effectuation and their relationships with causation. Additionally, we fill the gap in prior literature by showing how entrepreneurial experience moderates the relationship between effectuation and innovativeness of the venture. Our study of 171 practising entrepreneurs regarding their entrepreneurial decision-making logic yielded multiple findings. The authors find that entrepreneurs rely on causation as well as effectuation in their decision-making; the more experienced entrepreneurs are, the more they actually use causation; and entrepreneurial experience moderates the relationship between effectuation and innovativeness of the venture firm.

Decision-making biases play substantial roles in entrepreneurs' decisions and the fate of entrepreneurial enterprises, as well. Previous studies have assumed all entrepreneurs are homogeneous in their proneness to biases, therefore inadvertently creating a crucial research gap by ignoring the role of business experience in the genesis of biases. Furthermore, there is a lack of research on women entrepreneurs' decision-making biases. Thus, this paper's main objective is to explore two influential biases of overconfidence and over-optimism in novice and habitual women entrepreneurs.

The data for this study were collected by conducting semi-structured interviews with 21 Iranian novice and habitual women entrepreneurs active in four high-tech sectors of biotech, nanotech, aerospace and advanced medicine. The gathered data were analyzed by thematic analysis.

According to the findings, while habitual entrepreneurs are prone to all three types of overconfidence (overestimation, overplacement and overprecision) and over-optimism, novice entrepreneurs do not show any signs of overplacement or overprecision.

There are certain valuable implications resulting from this study that could be of use for not only future researchers in the field of entrepreneurial decision-making and women entrepreneurship but also for women entrepreneurs running entrepreneurial enterprises, especially small businesses.

This paper offers certain novel contributions to the field of entrepreneurship by not only exploring biases in women entrepreneurs exclusively but also scrutinizing biases in novice (first-time) and habitual (experienced) entrepreneurs comparatively.

This paper aims to review the academic literature on entrepreneurial reentry after failure in an attempt to highlight the contribution to the knowledge, identify research gaps and outline an agenda for future research.

Several databases such as ABI/Inform Global, Academic Search Complete, Business Source Premier and Emerald Full Text were used to find peer-reviewed journal articles. Different search terms were used, such as entrepreneurial reentry, failure of habitual entrepreneurs, reentry intentions, entrepreneurial failure, serial entrepreneurship and venture failure. A total of 27 articles were finally selected and included in the final analysis. Using thematic codes, the selected articles were manually coded.

The concept of entrepreneurial reentry after failure has recently gained some attention from entrepreneurship scholars, but still, there are significant gaps in the literature. A wide range of entrepreneurship theories can potentially provide the necessary impetus to guide future research. The current literature remains largely inconclusive with inconsistent findings. This underlines the need to focus on this domain to conduct more studies to develop knowledge. The available literature is largely focused on exploring antecedents of entrepreneurial reentry after failure. Therefore, the author’s understanding remains limited with regard to other aspects of entrepreneurial reentry after failure, such as context of reentry and outcomes of reentry. Moreover, future studies also need to include the developing country context for better understanding of entrepreneurial reentry after failure.

To the best of the author's knowledge, the current paper is the first identifiable review of the literature on entrepreneurial reentry after failure. The suggested areas of future research will potentially help in addressing the identified research gaps and further strengthening the theoretical foundations of this emerging research domain. Identified themes in the literature will also potentially help aspiring entrepreneurs to better understand the antecedents, contextual settings and outcomes of reentry after failure. This practical perspective will help failed entrepreneurs in particular to be more aware of the dynamics of reentry after failure and better manage the reentry process.

Failure plays a pivotal role in entrepreneurial learning. Knowledge of the learning process that enables an entrepreneur to re-emerge stronger after a failure, though considerable, is fragmented. This paper systematically collects relevant literature, assigns it to the stages of the experiential learning process (concrete experience, reflective observation, abstract conceptualization, active experimentation; Kolb, 1984), evaluates the research coverage of each stage and identifies promising avenues for future research.

This systematic literature review follows the guidelines articulated by Short (2009) and Tranfield et al. (2003), using Web of Science and EBSCO as primary data sources. Kolb’s (1984) experiential learning theory provides a basis for organizing the identified material into a framework of entrepreneurial learning from failure.

The literature provides insights on all stages of the process of entrepreneurial learning from failure. Particularly well elaborated are the nature of failure and its triggering effect for reflection, the factors influencing reflection, the contents of the resulting learning and their application in entrepreneurial re-emergence. Other topics remain under-researched, including alternative modes of recovery, the impact of personal attributes upon reflection, the cognitive processes underlying reflection, the transformation of failure-based observations into logically sound concepts and the application of this learning in non-entrepreneurial contexts.

This review provides the most complete overview of research into the process of entrepreneurial learning from failure. The systematic, theory-based mapping of this literature takes stock of current knowledge and proposes areas for future research.

This paper aims to investigate the motivations of social entrepreneurs in East Africa to create a social enterprise and their identified links to successful social entrepreneurship in East Africa.

The authors employed a qualitative method by performing thematic analysis on a set of interviews on social entrepreneurs from East Africa who are Ashoka fellows.

The findings suggest that intense personal experiences linked to past-life events as well as a high achievement orientation towards improving livelihoods and creating impact serve as key triggers for social entrepreneurship. Successful entrepreneurship focusses on system change at national and local levels. Their success is also seen when the social entrepreneurs have achieved their mission and are no longer needed; thus, they become irrelevant. The paper discusses the implications of these findings on the model used for sustainable social entrepreneurship in East Africa.

Based on an exploratory research on Ashoka fellows, the study adds insight to their motivations and success which can be used in a wider scale study of the same.

The authors advance the scarce empirical research on East African social entrepreneurs, link success factors of social entrepreneurship to a recent framework on motivation to engage in social entrepreneurship and stimulate further research in the area. The study contributes to the literature on social entrepreneurship by linking success factors of social entrepreneurship to a recent framework on motivation to engage in social entrepreneurship.

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.

In the strategic management literature, two mechanisms have been proposed to explain how managers generate economic rents: resource selection, and capability building. Resource selection is a Ricardian perspective where the productivity of resources are heterogeneously distributed among firms (Peteraf, 1993; Wernerfelt, 1984), and managers outsmart the factor markets by selecting resources based on their future values (Barney, 1986). The alternative Schumpeterian perspective is capability building, a mechanism that depends on deployment of resources to affect a desired end (Amit & Shoemaker, 1993; Mahoney, 1995). While capability building requires that managers develop a capacity to manage firm specific tangible and intangible processes, the resource selection mechanism demands managers to accurately assess expectations about the future value of resources.

This paper aims to focus on the role of team and entrepreneurial experience for firm performance of serial entrepreneurs in the multi‐media industry.

The research assumes that serial entrepreneurs have certain advantages over novice entrepreneurs, such as the development of effective start‐up teams and entrepreneurial experience effects. Disadvantages, however, are also mentioned in the literature, and these are assumed to out‐balance the advantages, leading to mixed research findings. The hypotheses are tested on a sample of 52 European multimedia companies.

The results show a positive impact of relevant entrepreneurial experience and evidence both team advantages as well as disadvantages. Team diversity had a positive impact on performance while the extent of repeated partnerships (or relative team stability) had a negative impact on performance. Moreover, entrepreneurial experience helps to build better diverse teams but has no impact on repeated partnerships.

The degree of experience of serial entrepreneurs in the same industry matters, and suggests that more experience is better. The findings challenge a general assumption about serial entrepreneurs: that the building of superior teams creates performance differences. Team diversity drives performance and the study could also show that habitual entrepreneurs are better in building diverse teams (through a positive moderation of team diversity by entrepreneurial experience). However, relying heavily on previous partners is counter‐productive. Limitations of this study are due to self‐reported data, small sample size and survivor bias.

Entrepreneurs need to focus on opportunities and resource needs linked to these opportunities, and use their experience to build stronger teams but to resist the temptation of replicating perceived past success formula by over‐relying on previous partners. The latter is also important for stakeholders in the entrepreneurial venture.

This paper tests various assumptions and propositions about serial entrepreneurship that are rarely based on sound evidence. The role of entrepreneurial experience to build better diverse teams and the role of repeated partnerships constitute an original contribution to habitual entrepreneurship research.