Search results

This study is concerned with the perlocutionary force of emotional strategies in entrepreneurship discourse. The purpose of this paper is to determine to what extent, and under what circumstances, emotional appeals may be effective to convince the conversational partner in entrepreneurship discourse.

To examine the interaction between rational and emotional appeals this paper analyses a corpus formed by several examples of the “elevator pitch” genre, which have been taken from a TV programme called Tu Oportunidad (Your Chance), the Spanish counterpart of the British Dragon’s Den and the American Shark Tank. Using the information gathered in the discursive analysis of the corpus, the paper establishes a template that identifies the main rational and emotional aspects that characterize the entrepreneurial pitch. In a second stage of the research, the template is used to conduct a quantitative analysis of the persuasive influence of rational and emotional aspects.

The results of the qualitative and quantitative research show that there is a clear correlation between the propensity to finance entrepreneurial ventures and the presence of rational aspects in the entrepreneurial pitch. The lack of rational arguments determines the failure of the entrepreneur’s efforts to be persuasive, regardless of the emotional appeals that are introduced into the pitch. Emotional appeals prove to be useful to reinforce rational arguments but they are not sufficiently persuasive on their own.

The paper offers insight into the criteria that investors take into account in order to evaluate entrepreneurial projects, as well as on the strategies that entrepreneurs should develop to build a successful business pitch.

The purpose of this paper is to shed some new light on the entrepreneurial finance of green start-ups, for which there has been little quantitative empirical evidence thus far. It explores what challenges green start-ups might experience when it comes to financial access.

The paper includes a survey of start-ups in Finland, Germany and Sweden and the separate evaluation of the “greenness” of participating companies’ product/service portfolios based on Eurostat’s Environmental Goods and Service Sector classification. A logistic regression is carried out for different company phases for two measures of challenges (“difficulty accessing finance” and “rejection by investor/funder”).

Green start-ups as an overall group cannot be said to have more challenges in access to finance. Particularly, a lack in business education and a high level of innovativeness, however, seem to be lead to more challenges for green start-ups in accessing finance compared to other start-ups.

Further research might seek to identify which exact characteristics of innovative green start-ups lead to challenges in financial access, i.e. is it individual factors such as high risk levels, high investment sums, long development periods or a low return prospect – or is it rather a combination? It might, furthermore, be rewarding to investigate whether “interventions” of business-related training might reduce challenges.

Suggestions are made for improved policy support to sustainable entrepreneurship in the case of green start-ups.

This research paper provides quantitative empirical analysis in a new research area, which has previously been predominantly theory based with some anecdotal observations as well as some early qualitative research.

Take the image of the entrepreneur as a driven accepter of risk, an individual (or set of individuals) hungry to amass a fortune as quickly as possible. This image is consistent with the traditional finance theory view of entrepreneurial startups, one that assumes that profit maximization is the firm’s sole motivation (Chaganti, DeCarolis & Deeds, 1995). Myers’s (1994) cost explanation of the pecking order hypothesis (i.e. entrepreneurs prefer internally generated funds first, debt next, and external equity last) incorporates this economically rational view of entrepreneurs’ financing preferences. According to this view, information asymmetry and uncertainty make the availability of external financing very limited and the cost of it prohibitively high. To compensate, entrepreneurs must give up greater and greater control in order to “buy” funds needed to achieve the desired growth and profitability. Indeed, Brophy and Shulman (1992, p. 65) state, “Those entrepreneurs willing to relinquish absolute independence in order to maximize expected shareholder wealth through corporate growth are deemed rational investors in the finance literature.” Undoubtedly, cost and availability explanations of financing choices are valid for many new and small businesses. However, many entrepreneurship researchers have long been dissatisfied with the incompleteness of this perspective.

Women entrepreneurship is designated as the new engines of economic growth in developing countries. Prior research shows how men and women differ in starting a business, with women normally facing more restrictions on entrepreneurial financing, entrepreneurial growth, and entrepreneurial performance. This has often been explained by gender role, yet we still lack a systematic understanding of how gender roles impact on women's entrepreneurial process in developing countries. In this chapter, we review literatures on female entrepreneurship in developing countries to show how gender role works in developing countries and especially its influence on the intention/entry/business participation and performance of female entrepreneurs.

The crisis generated by the COVID-19 pandemic has had unprecedented effects around the world and particularly on vulnerable populations, such as female entrepreneurs in developing countries. They are facing a new normal, characterized by high uncertainty and resource constraints. This paper aims to use the experiential learning theory applied to entrepreneurship to propose the entrepreneurial bricolage approach to study how female entrepreneurs can overcome this type of crisis.

Within the research designs of conceptual papers, the study is situated within the model approach because the authors propose novel relationships between constructs to answer the research questions through the development of theoretical propositions.

The analysis suggests that the entrepreneurial bricolage process represents a type of strategy that allows these women to adapt to this new normal. Based on this approach, the authors suggest that crowdfunding represents a financial resource at hand for both pre-existing female entrepreneurs and new female entrepreneurs.

The theoretical implications suggest an alternative conceptual framework of the entrepreneurial bricolage process to analyse the female entrepreneurial activity in developing countries and during crisis’ contexts. The managerial implications suggest that crowdfunding is a financial resource at hand for female entrepreneurs that allow them to perform well, innovate or implement growth strategies and have more chances of surviving and growing during the crisis. Finally, the policy implications are oriented to the promotion of this kind of financial alternative and the generation of trust for users, along with the strengthening of a regulatory framework to attract more investors and entrepreneurs.

This study provides useful information on how the crisis generated by the COVID-19 pandemic has been affecting female entrepreneurs in developing countries. It also expands on the literature on crowdfunding in terms of its advantages as a non-traditional funding source for women.

Women’s entrepreneurial activity can significantly impact economic and social development globally, particularly in developing countries. The significant challenges entrepreneurial women face draw the attention of researchers and policymakers. This paper aims to analyse the impact of gender disparity on the likelihood of obtaining equity financing through crowdfunding. The equity crowdfunding industry was selected because it is a non-traditional financial market where gender bias may act differently for women.

To investigate the relationship between gender and equity financing through crowdfunding, this paper applies ordinary least squares regression. The analysis is based on a unique data set of 492 equity crowdfunding campaigns launched between 2013 and 2017 on all existing platforms in Brazil, Chile and Mexico.

The analysis reveals that the involvement of at least one woman on the board of firms seeking equity financing increases campaign success rates in terms of the investors’ average pledge, the target amount reached at the end of the campaign and the percentage raised at the end of the campaign exceeding the initial fundraising goal. Altogether, this suggests that equity crowdfunding campaigns should be based on gender equality in the firms’ boards. The research finds evidence that there is no gender disparity in the likelihood of a campaign being financed by a greater number of investors.

These findings have implications for Latin American female entrepreneurs when selecting funding sources and policymakers when defining political actions to remove the barriers at the root of this historic inequality in female entrepreneurs’ access to finance.

To the best of the authors’ knowledge, this document analyses the gender disparity in the Latin American equity crowdfunding market, shedding light on women’s access to crowdfunding financing for the first time.

▪ Identify and explain the factors that contribute to the success of a restaurant business.

▪ Analyse different sources of entrepreneurial finance.

▪ Identify and explain local entrepreneur’s expectations from a funding agency.

▪ Evaluate investment decision-making criteria for entrepreneurial funding agencies.

Kartikey Rajput, the promoter of a food park Urban Chowk, was waiting for the Covid regulations in the country to be relaxed. The entrepreneur in him found a business opportunity to provide hygienic food with a beautiful ambience and floated a food park (Urban Chowk) with the support of his wife Nikita Agrawal in 2017 and the second edition amidst Covid in 2020. The business model was well-appreciated by food vendors as well as customers. Rajput could see future growth potential in urban India. But his aggressive business plan to open five food parks in different cities in the next three years was disrupted due to the Covid pandemic. The expansion required huge investments, and post-pandemic challenges were plenty. The decision to go beyond Ahmedabad required the selection of cities besides the major challenge of the financing choice. The new cities might have huge footfall potential but finding the right location at the right price was a different challenge. Rajput was also concerned with the sources of getting the required finances. The entrepreneur was contemplating and evaluating the alternative sources of finance available to a start-up.

This case is appropriate for a graduate and post-graduate level programme in the courses like entrepreneurial finance, entrepreneurship and strategy. This case can also be used in an executive programme on management and Management Development Programmes (MDPs) on entrepreneurship or entrepreneurial finance.

Teaching notes are available for educators only.

CSS 1: Accounting and Finance.

Entrepreneurship is the basis of economic development but is somehow limited by the lack of access to financing sources, especially in the crucial moments of start-up early-stage development. For crossing the so-called “valley of death,” start-ups need to access informal finance sources, such as business angels. This study aims at defining the profile of business angels and comparing it with the existing literature.

A novel methodology for sampling the business angles population has been used, which extracts data from online social media networks. This allows taking a closer look at informal sources of entrepreneurial finance. A total of 500 real business angels, acting worldwide, from the LinkedIn and Crunchbase databases has been retrieved for this study.

Results point out that younger investors seem to be entering the entrepreneurial informal finance market. They are mainly males between 40 and 50 years of age, with a previous entrepreneurial record, and more highly educated than previously stated. They tend to have studies from Business Administration and Economics, although they prefer to invest in the ICT sector.

Besides the novel data retrieval technique for analyzing the informal sources of finance, the originality of the work lies in updating the archetype for business angels.

As technological entrepreneurship has distinctive characteristics and needs particular conceptualizations, it is also important to have specific theoretical developments about its technological entrepreneurship. Studying the related domains like entrepreneurship and technology can be helpful in this path; however, their differences should be considered as well. The purpose of this study is to design a model in support of technological entrepreneurship. Since financing is considered as the main restriction on creating and developing technological entrepreneurship, the focus of this study is the research of financial policies of technological entrepreneurship..

This research is from the qualitative point of view and in terms of the purpose of application-development that has been done in the second part. At the first step, Iran’s (IRI) national comprehensive policies have been studied from 1993 to 2020; out of 52 documents, 7 were relevant, of which 38 policies were eventually selected. Then, policy statements were explored, and open coding and categorization has been done through theme analysis approach to attain fundamental themes and organizational themes. In the second step, the themes were extracted in the form of soft research method with the approach of interpretive structural modeling to level the financing policies of technological entrepreneurship in Iran.

The results show that the most important factors influencing financing and entrepreneurship in Iran are increasing the productivity of goods and services, supporting entrepreneurship, increasing the efficiency of monetary policies that are in the first level.

Research limitations include access to upstream documents, strategies, administrative and organizational coordination to study documents.

These findings are very important to scholars, the policymakers and technological entrepreneurship operators in designing their financing strategies. The results show that the most important factors influencing financing and entrepreneurship in Iran are increasing the productivity of goods and services, supporting entrepreneurship, increasing the efficiency of monetary policies.

To the best of the author’s knowledge, this is the first study to explore the explanation and classification of technology-based entrepreneurship financing policies in Iran. Moreover, the findings of this study would prove useful in detailed studies of financing policies in the Middle Eastern countries as well.

The purpose of this paper is to investigate ways to mitigate gender bias in entrepreneurial financing. The authors aim to unveil the role entrepreneurs’ gender played in formal and informal financing under Chinese context, as well as the moderating role corporate social responsibility (CSR) played in such relationships.

This paper adopts ANOVA test and multiple regression method to empirically examine the relationship of entrepreneurs’ gender, formal financing, informal financing and CSR with second hand data from The Eleventh Private Enterprise Survey covering a sample of firms across China.

The results demonstrate that comparing to start-ups led by men, start-ups led by women are less likely to get either formal or informal financing. The results also suggest that CSR negatively moderates the impact entrepreneurs’ gender has on formal financing but not on informal financing.

By focusing on both formal and informal financing, the research of gender’s effects on firms’ financing has been extended. Also, by proving that CSR can help to mitigate gender bias in formal financing, contribution has also been made to the research field of gender financing. This paper contributes to the CSR literature by sorting out another benefit CSR has in new venture financing. Overall, findings of this study deepen the existing understanding of gender issues in the context of entrepreneurial financing.