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This study investigates the influence of entrepreneurial experience on small business investment. The purpose of this paper is to examine whether entrepreneurs with more prior start-up experience are better able to identify business opportunities and successfully transform these opportunities into investment projects.

The empirical setting in this study is Vietnam. The authors employ a panel data of small businesses (mostly households) from 2005 to 2013, and use a fixed effect method to estimate the regression coefficients. The results are also re-checked using the general method of moments and matching technique.

Empirically, it is found that entrepreneurial experience is an important determinant of investment decisions. Specifically, entrepreneurs with one start-up experience make more investments than novice entrepreneurs. However, entrepreneurs with more than one start-up experience do not make more investments than entrepreneurs with one start-up experience.

This is country-specific research. Further study may employ data from multi-countries to re-test the validity of the hypotheses.

This study provides a new perspective for analysing the role of entrepreneurial experience on entrepreneurial investments. It shows that prior start-up experience may turn out to be a liability to entrepreneurs since it restricts their ability to identify new opportunities.

The aim of this study is to test the assumption that ability to handle communication and liability of newness (LoN) is enhanced by academic entrepreneurship education and/or previous start‐up experience.

The data collection includes a questionnaire with a total sample of 392 responding entrepreneurs in Sweden. Statistical analyses are made between entrepreneurs with academic entrepreneurship education respectively previous start‐up experience.

The findings show that entrepreneurs with experience from entrepreneurship education report more developed communicative skills in the dimensions of openness as well as adaptation, whereas the dimension of other‐orientation is found to be learned by previous start‐up experience. When it comes to perceived problems related to LoN the differences between the groups were not as strong as assumed. However, the differences observed imply that also for handling LoN the authors identify a combined effect of possessing start‐up experience as well as experience from entrepreneurship education. Consequently, entrepreneurs with experience from both, show in total the most elaborated skills.

One way to improve future entrepreneurship educations is to make students more aware of the mutual profit in a business agreement and how to communicate this in a marketing situation. Another suggestion is to include starting business as a course work.

This study not only meets the call for actual outcome from entrepreneurship educations in terms of changed behaviour but also for interdisciplinary research in the entrepreneurship field in integrating leadership research with focus on communication.

Student entrepreneurs account for a considerable number of start-up ventures derived from university settings. Nevertheless, there is little research that demonstrates how university entrepreneurship education (EE) directly influences students’ start-up activities. The primary purpose of this study is to examine the effectiveness of various types of university entrepreneurship activities (incorporate entrepreneurial courses, extra-curricular initiatives, and start-up support) on student start-up behavior. This quantitative research utilized questionnaire data collected from university students (n = 1,820) in southeast China and was analyzed with hierarchical Poisson regression in STATA procedures. Research results indicate that engaging in any type of university entrepreneurship activities positively predicts students’ start-up activities, yet this positive effect is contingent on students’ prior start-up experience and the overall university entrepreneurial climate. These findings advance our understanding of crucial elements within university entrepreneurial ecosystems and how various entrepreneurship activities within these ecosystems potentially impact students’ venture creation.

The development of teaching methods in the field of entrepreneurship education is a challenge for academics to achieve “real active learning.” This paper aims to investigate the effectiveness of learning experience through internship program at start-ups. This paper examines the benefits and challenges from stakeholders' experiences and perspectives (business students, start-ups and universities). The authors focus on the entrepreneurial values obtained by exploring start-up processes, culture and work environments.

This study uses qualitative research with a case study approach by applying experiential learning. The objects of this research are students of the School of Business and Management and start-ups in Indonesia. This study divides the pilot program of internship at start-ups into three stages, designing process, execution and evaluation. The analysis technique uses an interpretive approach from interviews and observations of internships based on experiential learning.

The results showed that the internship program at start-ups in this study has benefits for all major stakeholders, especially students. The results of student learning experiences show that start-ups' characteristics such as a creative work environment, egalitarian work culture and dynamic workflow flexibility can increase their professional and moral values.

This study has several limitations, including the internship program designed in this study, which is still raw and has several shortcomings. Time series in testing experiential learning is another limitation. For further study, it is necessary to conduct longitudinal research to measure the effectiveness of the start-ups' internship program.

This study provides new insights on experiential learning in developing an internship program at a start-up as an effort to increase entrepreneurial value for business students. This study highlights the possibility that an internship program at a start-up will have an impact on students' entrepreneurial values and competencies.

This paper aims to present a study of the role of prior start‐up experience as a source of learning in the entrepreneurial process. Three learning outcomes are examined with respect to a comparison between habitual and novice entrepreneurs: skills for coping with liabilities of newness, preference for effectual reasoning, and attitudes towards failure.

This is an empirical study based on statistical analysis conducted on a sample of 231 Swedish entrepreneurs that have started a new independent firm in 2004.

The findings suggest that habitual and novice entrepreneurs differ significantly with regard to several interesting aspects of the hypothesized dimensions.

The findings provide a better understanding of start‐up experience as a source of learning and its effects on the skills, preferences and attitudes of habitual entrepreneurs.

Previous research has suggested that prior start‐up experience is an important source of entrepreneurial learning, but has not put much effort into explaining how this particular type of experience influences various learning outcomes on an individual level. The present study advances these suggestions by showing how prior start‐up experience influences entrepreneurs' skills for coping with liabilities of newness, effectual reasoning and attitudes towards failures. Moreover, the study contributes to existing literature and research on entrepreneurial learning by developing explorative measures of individual learning outcomes that have been highlighted as influenced by prior experience in recent entrepreneurship research.

This paper aims to present an original conceptual model that captures the orientations of new business founders in the fashion design sector as they navigate the tension between creative endeavour and business practice.

The start‐up experiences of 38 fashion designers from the four main fashion centres in New Zealand were examined using an interpretive narrative approach. The designers' enterprise development narratives were analysed using in‐depth literary and conceptual analyses to reveal the nature and context of their start‐up behaviour and the conceptual frameworks they employed to make sense of their start‐up behaviour.

The designers were, to varying degrees, preoccupied with a perceived tension between creative processes and business practices. This tension was typically experienced as a disjunction between self‐identity and the identities supported by the business models designers worked within. Successfully navigating this tension could require significant conceptual shifts or fundamental adjustments in business approaches which challenged designers' original rationales for start‐up. The analysis of designers' responses to the creativity‐business tension and how they made sense of this produced a conceptual framework, a space delineated by three basic enterprise orientations: creative enterprise orientation (CEO), creative business orientation (CBO), and fashion industry orientation (FIO).

This conceptual framework has major implications for policy makers and providers of design education and business support as it offers a means of differentiating between the lived‐in experiences of designers. In so doing it could be used as a tool for tailoring support more appropriately to designers' needs. The narrative approach produced rich, contextualised insights and a template for the further studies that will be required to establish the wider applicability of the framework.

The original conceptual framework presented here provides much needed insight into creative business start‐ups that will allow better targeting of education, support and policy development. The approach used to create this framework is an innovative example of how narrative and sensemaking approaches can be combined to provide rich insights into enterprise creation from the entrepreneur's perspective.

The purpose of this paper is to study support factors influencing the entrepreneur's use of external assistance programs and explain why some entrepreneurs obtain support from these programs while others do not. The proposed framework suggests that outside assistance programs are a support option of last resort that entrepreneurs utilize only when the start‐up team and personal network are incapable of providing support.

Data from the Panel Study of Entrepreneurial Dynamics I are used to perform logistic regression of use of assistance programs on the entrepreneur's human capital and characteristics of the start‐up team and personal network.

A total of 26 percent of entrepreneurs in the sample made contact with assistance programs. Regression results suggest that entrepreneurs who are more educated and experienced, rely extensively on the start‐up team, have a less experienced start‐up team, and have larger personal networks are more likely to use assistance programs.

This study informs policy and support practices about the different factors that drive entrepreneurs to use assistance programs provided by public agencies, professional organizations, and educational institutions.

This research fills the gap in existing research of entrepreneurial assistance programs by studying both entrepreneurs who do and do not obtain support, thus addressing the selection bias problem.

Entrepreneurs nurture their ambitions of founding tech start-ups that facilitate significant innovations despite vulnerability and considerable uncertainty by resolutely addressing multiple challenges to avert failures. The paper aims to answer how soon do tech start-ups fail, given their lifecycle comprising multiple stages of formation and what attributes hasten failure of tech start-ups over their lifecycle? These questions have not been answered adequately, particularly in the context of India's emerging economy, where an aspiring start-up ecosystem is striving to flourish at an exceptional rate.

The study addressed two specific objectives: (1) Does life expectancy vary between life-cycle stages? and (2) What attributes impact tech start-ups' failures? Primary data were gathered from 151 cofounders (101 who have experienced failure and 50 who are successful and continuing their operations) from India's 6 leading start-up hubs. The survival analysis techniques were used, including non-parametric Kaplan–Meier estimator, to study the first objective and semi-parametric Cox proportional hazard regression to explore the second objective.

The survival probability log-rank statistics ascertain that life expectancy is different across the life-cycle stages, namely emergence, stability and growth. The hazard ratios (HRs) throw light on attributes like stage, revenue, conflict with investors, number of current start-ups, cofounder experience, level of confidence (LoC) and educational qualifications as the key attributes that influence start-up life expectancy over its lifecycle.

The empirical study on tech start-ups' life expectancy has practical implications for entrepreneurs and investors besides guiding the ecosystem's policymakers. First, the study helps entrepreneurs plan for resources and be aware of their start-up journey's potential pitfalls. Second, the study helps investors to establish the engagement framework and plan their future funding strategy. Third, the study helps policymakers to design and establish progressive support mechanisms that can prevent a start-up's failure.

First and foremost, start-up life expectancy study by life-cycle stages provide detailed insights on start-ups' failures. The theoretical framework defined is replicable, scalable and distinctly measurable for studying the start-up failure phenomenon. The life expectancy of tech start-ups by life-cycle stage is a critical empirical contribution. Next, the attributes impacting start-up life expectancy are identified in the context of an emerging economy.

This paper aims to better understand how to lead toward creativity in virtual work in a start-up context.

The study investigates the participants’ experiences about the learning challenges in leadership toward creativity in virtual work in a start-up company and the meanings attributed to their experiences, and the measures they see to meet those challenges. The data have been gathered on a Finnish partnership start-up company through interviews capturing peoples’ personal perspectives and experiences. This study uses a qualitative research study approach to better understand leadership toward creativity in virtual work in a start-up.

The results underline the importance of co-creative and assertive coaching leadership in a start-up to foster creativity and create new shared value. Key persons’ multiliteracy skills and lobbying are means to manage social and physical distances in virtual work.

The study suggests collaborative coaching leadership and assertiveness for start-ups to minimize mistakes in virtual work. Practitioners must unlearn old courses of action to learn to operate in a start-up environment and utilize information and communication technology in a smart way.

The paper gives empirical evidence in a start-up context about combining leadership and creativity within the virtual work research.

The purpose of this paper is to focus on the early development of eHealth service start-ups. To elaborate the research problem, the study addresses the following research questions: How do managerial experiences in eHealth service start-ups relate to the central findings of the recent empirically based stages-of-growth literature? What context-specific viewpoints should be considered when using the stage framework in relation to eHealth service start-ups?

In this explorative multiple case study, the authors test a growth framework describing the early stages of eHealth service firms through eight case studies. The authors utilise the critical incident technique and semi-structured interviews in the data collection.

When taking into account the key contradictions assessed in the study as well as context-specific features of eHealth businesses, the empirically based stage framework seems to be a useful starting point for reflecting on and predicting the challenges faced during the early development of eHealth service start-ups. Slow growth due to several factors and the essential role of the public sector were commonly emphasised elements of the context-specific viewpoints of the eHealth service business.

The results may be used in start-ups and intermediary organisations as a framework for predicting managerial challenges during the start-up stage of an eHealth service business.

Numerous universal models and frameworks have attempted to clarify management priorities during the early stages of business. However, context-specific viewpoints and their effects on start-ups have not been broadly studied. This study provides new insights into growth management in the eHealth context.