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The purpose of this paper is to investigate the effect of different types of networking, namely, business networking, financial networking and political networking, on the performance of new ventures and the extent to which competitive advantage influences the process.

Data were collected through a structured questionnaire using sample size of 319 newly established ventures in Pakistan – an emerging economy. The hypotheses were tested with structural equation modeling by using AMOS 21.

Results of the study indicate that business networking, financial networking and political networking significantly and positively contribute to new ventures performance and competitive advantage. Results also show that competitive advantage is a strong mediator between financial networking and new venture performance, as well as between business networking and new venture performance, respectively. However, in case of relationship between political networking and new venture performance, competitive advantage plays only a partial mediating role.

The study suggests that the owners and managers of new ventures should devote considerable efforts to developing all the three types of networks; in particular these networks are important for newly established ventures operating in emerging markets to access resources and to enhance performance.

Extensive review of available literature indicates that this is the first paper to assess the impact of networking on new ventures’ performance with a mediating role of competitive advantage. This study contributes to the existing literature through empirical evidence.

The purpose of this paper is to provide researchers and journal reviewers with guidance regarding the appropriate level of analysis when developing and testing theory on export performance determinants. The authors’ focus is on the implications this has for the measurement of export performance.

The paper takes the form of an essay.

Researchers should measure export performance at the level at which the theory is developed. Most export performance theory developed is inherently export function level theory, requiring export function level measurement of performance. Less commonly, researchers may develop theory at the intra‐firm level, which requires performance data from multiple export ventures within firms for theory testing purposes. Researchers rarely have cause to collect data from a single export venture from firms, since data at this level are unlikely to generalize to the firm as a whole, and may lead to a biased picture of the determinants of overall export performance.

Researchers sometimes find that their passage to publication is blocked by reviewers who insist that measurement of export performance should occur at an incorrect level. Typically, the reviewer demands export performance assessment at the export venture level when the theory being tested is inherently an export function level theory. In this paper, the authors hope to correct poorly informed opinion regarding the use of venture level export performance measures, and encourage the use of measures of export performance that match the theory being tested.

The purpose of this paper is to investigate whether predicting factors of conventional ventures’ performance are appropriate in interpreting the creative industries context. Moreover, this paper introduces a way to measure venture performance in creative industries.

A structured questionnaire was used to address this research objectives, based mainly on scales tested in previous studies. Data were collected from a sample of 371 female entrepreneurs of creative industries. A hierarchical linear regression analysis was conducted to examine the research hypotheses.

In congruence with the hypotheses, the findings demonstrated that venture performance in creative industries can be predicted by factors that affect conventional venture performance. Creative personality and professional network ties are regarded according to the empirical analysis presented in this paper as the factors with the highest impact.

Data were pulled from female entrepreneurs in Greece, especially from the two biggest cities Athens and Thessaloniki. Consequently, it was precarious to fulfill the condition of generalizability. Additionally, a snowball sampling method was used, because of the absence of creative industries firms’ directory in Greece.

Based on authors’ knowledge and review, no prior study has examined predictors’ effect on creative industries venture performance.

The purpose of this paper is to present several opportunities that can emerge from using a multilevel approach to study the antecedents of export venture performance, and provide scholars with the conceptual and practical tools for developing multilevel models of export venture success.

Essay.

The paper shows the problems which scholars face if they continue to engage in using single venture data to test models that are inherently multilevel in nature.

There may be a need to revisit previous works that utilize samples of single ventures to assess models of export venture performance that are implicitly multilevel.

This paper outlines the practical issues that researchers need to consider when conducting multilevel research in the export venture performance field.

This paper is the first to focus on the multilevel nature of the export venture performance construct.

This study compares the performance of female majority-owned new ventures (FNV) vs. male majority-owned new ventures (MNV). It analyzes the differences in levels of variables such as education, the same industry work experience of owners, and other venture level attributes between FNVs and MNVs. More importantly, this study employs decomposition techniques to determine the individual contribution from the intergender difference of each attribute on the performance of the new venture. For example, the study finds that, on average, the owners of an MNV possessed 3.4 years more of the same industry work experience than their FNV counterparts. This difference in work experience accounted for 47% of the “explained” gap [1] in Net Profits between the FNVs and MNVs.

This paper utilizes the Kauffman Firm Survey, a longitudinal dataset of 4,928 new ventures started in the USA in 2004. It employs Blinder-Oaxaca and Fairlie decomposition techniques in conjunction with OLS and Logit regressions. Both methods provide point estimates of contributions to the performance gap due to the heterogeneity in each attribute across the groups (FNV and MNV). This approach has a significant advantage over OLS or mediation analysis, which can only provide a directional analysis of the contributions of differences in attributes to performance.

The paper finds no performance gap between MNVs and FNVs. It further investigates whether the heterogeneous characteristics of MNVs vs FNVs are related to different effects on survival and performance. It finds that characteristics such as owners’ work experience in the same industry, average hours worked by owners in the new venture, the technology level of the venture, and its incorporation status are related with a differential impact on new venture survival and performance.

All firms in the dataset belonged to a single cohort (2004) of new ventures started in the US. Future studies are encouraged to develop a dataset from multiple geographies and founding over several years so that the results may be more generalizable.

The paper provides crucial practical guidance to policymakers, investors, and entrepreneurs. In general, policies that enhance the work experience of women entrepreneurs and provide access to infrastructure such as daycares, which may allow them to work more hours, would probably improve the performance of FNVs.

The paper furthers the literature on women entrepreneurship by analyzing point estimates of differential contribution of disparate variables to performance. From a methodological perspective, the study reconciles the results between regression and decomposition analyses.

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.

Over the past decades, mainstream studies have generally indicated that new ventures could improve entrepreneurial performance by adopting strategic alliances (SAs). However, recently an increasing number of new ventures appear to not realize this objective using SAs at all times and may, rather, even be stuck in the survival trap. This dilemma indicates that the causal relationship between SAs and entrepreneurial performance in new ventures is not simply linear and rather a further complex nonlinear relationship. To handle this debate, this study attempted to reveal the nonlinear relationship of two types of SAs (technology alliances and market alliances) in new ventures with entrepreneurial performance (organizational growth and customer value). In addition, the moderating effect of transactive memory system (TMS) in the entrepreneurial team under the nonlinear relationship was explored.

This study established a research model by considering technology alliances and market alliances as two independent variables, organizational growth and customer value as two dimensions of entrepreneurial performance, and TMS as the moderators. The survey data collected from 207 Chinese new ventures was subjected to the hierarchical linear regression method for testing the proposed hypotheses.

The results revealed that there is an inverse U-shaped relationship between technology alliances and organizational growth, while the relationship between technology alliances and customer value was U-shaped. In addition, the relationship between market alliances and organizational growth was U-shaped, while an inverse U-shaped relationship was observed between market alliances and customer value. Finally, TMS was observed to positively moderate the U-shaped relationship between technology alliances and customer value as well as the U-shaped relationship between market alliances and organizational growth.

This study concluded that a nonlinear relationship between SAs and entrepreneurial performance existed in new ventures, which contributes to resolving the debate on whether new ventures could adopt SAs to improve entrepreneurial performance at all times. Specifically, the findings of this study would enrich the existing literature on the outcomes of SAs in new ventures through an evaluation of the effect of the inverse nonlinear relationship between technology alliances and market alliances on entrepreneurial performance (e.g. organizational growth and customer value). In addition, the findings of this study would extend the discussions about the conditions of the above causal relationship by introducing the TMS as the core moderator.

The entrepreneurial process often cannot be explained by a single entrepreneurial theory. Instead, it is more likely the result of the interaction between various entrepreneurial behavior patterns and different environmental conditions. However, existing research has frequently overlooked the complexity inherent in the entrepreneurial phenomenon. Building on a configurational perspective, this study aims to examine how new ventures can use different behavioral configurations to achieve high performance amid various uncertain environments.

Based on the survey data from 143 new start-ups in China’s software industry, this study uses fuzzy-set qualitative comparative analysis (fsQCA).

This study jointly considers multiple entrepreneurial behaviors − causation, effectuation and entrepreneurial bricolage and different types of environmental uncertainty − state uncertainty, effect uncertainty and response uncertainty. The findings reveal three behavioral configurations for high/nonhigh new venture performance.

This study expands previous insights into the relationship between entrepreneurial behaviors and new venture performance from the perspective of configurational theory. Moreover, it offers new insights into the types of uncertainty, further refining our understanding of the uncertainties inherent in entrepreneurial activities.

The purpose of this paper is to explore the curvilinear relationship between entrepreneurial orientation (EO) and innovation performance in ventures of Korea, where this topic has been unexplored.

This study used 1,837 ventures’ responses in a panel data of the 2015 Korea’s Venture Business Investigation Survey. The measurements of EO based on the Miller/Covin and Slevin scale were used from the survey. The author adopted and independently measured three different indicators of innovation performance: technology innovation, product innovation and sales growth.

The results of the regression analysis show the significant curvilinear relationships of EO with technology innovation and product innovation, while the relationship between EO and sales growth remains linear. The author also found that multiplicative EO construct explains the changes in R² better than the summative EO construct for the improvement of innovations in technology and product.

This paper provides empirical evidence on the EO–innovation performance relationships from Korean ventures – an underexplored area of research. It also takes into account the curvilinear relationships of summative and multiplicative EO constructs with different performance indicators. Future research can benefit from the use of the multiplicative EO estimation and multiple performance indicators to capture a clearer picture of the causal relationships.

Although business incubators are widely used support mechanisms for innovative entrepreneurship, the literature still lacks theoretically based explanations of how the incubation process creates value for stakeholders. This study aims to address this gap by developing a conceptual model, and related research propositions, that explains how the entrepreneurial logic in use by an incubator influences the incubation process (selection criteria and service offering) and performance.

Integrating the effectuation and entrepreneurial opportunities literature, which shares common conceptualizations about how the predictability of the future affects entrepreneurial action, the authors posit two archetypes of entrepreneurial logic that are associated with different incubation processes (causal or effectual) and two archetypes of opportunity attributes (discovery- or creation-based) that affect the incubation process needed to support their development.

Juxtaposing these archetypes, the proposed cross-level conceptual model specifies four levels of fit (ideal, surplus, deficit and mismatch) between the incubation process and the opportunity attributes of individual ventures, which directly influence venture performance (high, moderate and low). In turn, an incubator's performance is largely shaped by the overall performance of ventures in its portfolio.

This paper responds to the call for theory-building that links the antecedents and outcomes of the incubation process across levels of analysis. In addition to developing a conceptual model and research agenda at the intersection of entrepreneurship and business incubation, the proposed model also has implications for incubator directors deciding how to allocate limited resources, and for public/private sector administrators interested in leveraging investment in business incubators.