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The fast-changing, highly competitive and technology-driven business environment forces established firms to continually search for new business opportunities and innovative ideas. In reaction, corporations such as Google, Microsoft, Cisco and Bertelsmann have launched new corporate venture capital (CVC) units or have intensified existing CVC activities. This chapter examines the structure, patterns and investment focus of telecommunication, IT, consumer electronics and media & entertainment firms’ CVC investments by conducting a data-mining project based on the Thomson Reuters Private Equity database. The data-mining project reveals the increasing importance of CVC activities as a strategic development tool to address the requirements of the increasing costs, speed and complexity of a technology-driven industry since the bursting of the Internet bubble. Therefore, following chapter is one of the first CVC studies to describe and compare CVC investments of the last CVC wave across industry sectors.

Researchers have long been interested in understanding why and how corporate managers issue earnings guidance and the effect of such guidance on stakeholders’ (investors’ and managers’) behavior. Several recent studies have employed the experimental approach to address these issues. The purpose of this paper is to analyze and synthesize the literature on experimental studies of management earnings guidance. Consistent with the literature, I organize the synthesis to reflect (a) whether, why and how management issues guidance; (b) investors’ reactions to guidance; (c) the effect of guidance on management behavior. In addition, I provide institutional information (e.g., nature and timing of guidance) about guidance as well as provide several directions for future research. The synthesis reveals that the experimental studies have made a unique contribution to this literature by (i) providing evidence on process variables that underlie some empirical associations, (ii) directly measuring managers’ personal attributes and, (iii) closing the causality gap in the guidance literature.

The purpose of this paper is to examine whether internet search intensity, as captured by Google’s search volume index (SVI), predicts house price changes in an emerging market like India.

Using data on Google’s SVI for four Indian cities and their corresponding house price index values, the authors examine whether abnormal SVI (growth in search intensity normalized by the national average) impacts abnormal house prices (house price change normalized by the national average).

Like developed markets such as the USA, the authors find that internet search intensity strongly predicts future house price changes. A simple rebalancing strategy of buying a representative house in the city with the greatest change in search intensity and selling a representative house in the city with the smallest change in search intensity each quarter yields an annualized excess (over risk-free government T-bills) return of 4 percent.

Emerging markets have low internet penetration and high information asymmetry with a dominant unorganized real estate market. The results are interesting as it sheds light on the nature and role of the internet as an infomediary even in emerging markets

This study explains the international opportunity development of SMEs from emerging economies during institutional transition. This research enriches our understanding of how these firms adopt different approaches to developing international opportunities when they confront the turbulent institutional environment. We develop a phase-based framework for the evolution of transitional institution for SMEs’ internationalization and the SMEs’ internationalization process in that framework. By providing an empirical case study of a privately owned SME from China, the main finding is that SMEs from emerging economies become more entrepreneurial and proactive in developing the international opportunity during the institutional transition.

Government distributing rationed goods through a public distribution system often do not reach the deserving citizens primarily due to the practice of corruption. This paper aims to design an incentive mechanism to curtail such corrupt practices.

The incentive mechanism is developed in a principal-agent framework where the information asymmetry is in the form of moral hazard.

The mechanism designed through this study sufficiently penalizes the agent who receives bribe and incentivizes if desired level of effort is applied.

The paper contributes to the existing literature by developing an incentive mechanism to prevent bureaucratic corruption. Appropriate wages are also quantified in this study.

Interpreting venture creation as a process of learning allows potential entrepreneurs to help themselves, and develop the skills and competences they required for business. The effectiveness of a learning-based approach to enterprise education is explored here. This study examines changing perceptions and performances of business students as they complete a new venture creation module. In this course, students are invited to interpret the start-up process as a process of learning, using an evolutionary metaphor. Several key findings were revealed. First, the evolutionary learning approach increased the self-efficacy of participants, as their self-belief and confidence in their ideas and abilities increased over the course of the module. This increase was even more pronounced within a sub-group who started their businesses within six months of completion of the course. Second, by adopting the ‘learning to evolve’ approach, participants increasingly focused changes made to their ideas on marketing-related issues. The more the individual focused on marketing as a source of change, the better the improvement in quality of the idea. This research has implications for enterprise educators and practicing entrepreneurs. When one shifts the focus of attention to the external world, and when changes are driven by signals from that external world, the quality of emerging opportunities is enhanced. Moreover, self-efficacy increases as nascent entrepreneurs gain confidence and self-belief both in their ideas, and the skills needed to make them happen. The shift in perspective towards the external market is the key driver in triggering the entrepreneurial process. The approach thus promotes the notion that the entrepreneurship option is open to all who can ‘learn to evolve’.

As a critical component in the entrepreneurial process, knowledge is essential to the study of how entrepreneurs compete under constraints. Research in this area is challenged by the unobservable and imprecise nature of knowledge which inhibits advanced theory building and testing, and we explore this problem by analyzing the relationship between the entrepreneurial process, constraints to the process, and knowledge flows. We apply and extend a systems-theoretic framework that identifies the knowledge system in entrepreneurial organizations, and develop an integrative model to guide future research.

This study investigates the impact of the enhanced continuous disclosure regime introduced in December 2002 on several measures of information risk in NZX‐listed stocks. We employ two microstructure models and an intraday data set to measure information risk in a sample of 71 stocks. Our empirical results show that the reforms enacted in December 2002 had no significant effect on either the level of information‐based trading or the adverse selection component of market spreads in our sample of NZX‐listed stocks.

This chapter outlines a design-science perspective of entrepreneurship. It zooms in on the junction between present and future to distinguish entrepreneurship as a natural and as an artificial phenomenon. While the current study of entrepreneurship speaks to the former, it has been silent on the latter. The chapter discusses design as a distinct mode of research, opportunity as a design artifact, and the generative power of recursive action to make the case for problematizing entrepreneurial action as a focus of research. It then defines its research questions, discusses the logic and process for addressing them, and outlines the nature of research outputs.