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The purpose of this paper is to explore the antecedents of media attention in the context of early-stage startups. While many studies have examined the implications of media attention on firm outcomes, few have investigated the antecedents especially in the context of early-stage startups who significantly lack organizational legitimacy. This study attempts to answer an important and yet unanswered question: What type of startups are more likely to be covered by the media?

Using Poisson regression, the authors analyze all media articles written about 315 early-stage ventures in the USA.

The authors found that startups with a prestigious investor or a patent have more media attention and startups with a female founder or prior entrepreneurial experience have less. The results suggest that entrepreneurial signals do play a role in media attention, but that the signal–signaler relationship may be more complicated than that in the investment literature.

Entrepreneurs may benefit from signaling less noisy and unambiguous signals that the media pays more attention to, such as getting an endorsement from reputable third parties early on, which might activate noisy signals.

The contribution of this paper is to extend the current literature on media attention and entrepreneurship by shedding light on attributes of startups that may help or hurt the volume of media attention in an uncertain and noisy environment.

The purpose of this paper was to present the stages of the Brazilian startups' organizational life cycle (OLC), identifying and describing the main factors related to the entrepreneurial and organizational perspectives, as well as the factors related to external relationship agents and the associated risks at each OLC stage. In addition, the variables that comprised the three perspectives above were used for a descriptive reading of the evolutionary process from the perspective of intellectual capital during the stages.

The type of research used was quantitative with a descriptive character. For data collection, the authors have used the survey method and two complementary questionnaires were used as research tools. The measurement scale used in these instruments was the 11-point Likert scale. In total, 100 Brazilian startups registered in the STARTUPBASE and residents in São Paulo comprised the sample of this research. For the data processing, it was used the exploratory factor analysis techniques, to identify the analysis factors, and the cluster analysis, to identify the OLC stages.

Based on the results obtained, four stages were identified and described to build the OLC model of this research: Stage I – conception and development; Stage II – organization and traction; Stage III – growth and scale; and Stage IV – consolidation and transition. In addition, the authors described the main lines of evidence found at each stage.

This research contributes to academic studies of the OLC in startups and the evolution of risks that originate from the relationship between external agents in the business environment and startups. Thus, a management map is built, which helps entrepreneurs and managers construct these businesses since such a management map allows identifying the risks and challenges that a startup needs to overcome to grow and develop.

The originality of this research lies in the adaptation of the OLC approach, which is widely used in studies analyzing the growth and development of mature organizations. The authors used this adaptation to analyze the growth and development of startups in Brazil. In addition, the identification and analysis of external agents that make up the business environment, as well as the analysis of the risks, originated from the relationships between the startup and these agents, brought original and essential results and discussions, both for OLC studies and for risk analysis studies in startups.

Extant studies on corporate social responsibility (CSR) have mainly focused on established corporations; the context of new ventures remains largely unexplored. This study aims to address this gap by exploring the patterns of socially responsible activities in new ventures.

This study uses the perspective of stakeholders to differentiate external CSR activities (efforts directed toward external stakeholders) from internal CSR activities (efforts directed toward employees) and performs empirical tests using a sample of 3,650 Chinese private firms.

This study empirically shows that new ventures are more involved in external CSR activities and less involved in internal CSR activities than mature firms. New ventures prioritize their limited resources to fulfill the expectations of external stakeholders rather than those of internal stakeholders. External stakeholders are considered primary stakeholders because of their potential to satisfy critical organizational needs at the start-up stage. However, new ventures tend to cut the spending on employee benefits, ignoring the potential effect of this investment on their long-term growth. After testing the moderating effect of financial resource availability, we find that new ventures with high financial resource availability are inclined to implement external CSR strategy rather than internal CSR strategy.

This study focuses on new ventures and reveals the influence of organizational life cycle on CSR decisions. The findings may be limited to the context of China or emerging markets. Thus, further research is needed to compare the patterns of CSR activities in new ventures under different institutional environments.

This study indicates that new ventures are inclined to implement external CSR strategy rather than internal CSR strategy. This choice may be rational in the short term, but insufficient investment in employee benefits may affect the long-term growth of these firms. Therefore, they must also focus on their internal CSR activities.

This study is one of the few studies to investigate the patterns of socially responsible activities in new ventures in a transition economy. The findings in this study can help reconcile the seemingly contradictory views on whether new ventures are socially responsible and contribute to our understanding about CSR strategy in these firms.

This paper studies the impact of different chief executive officer (CEO) succession strategies on consumer evaluation of family firms. CEO succession is critical for family firms as improper succession planning has been shown to be the primary reason for high mortality rates of such firms. Furthermore, the choice of CEO (internal vs external) by family firms can send different signals to stakeholders and thereby impact their appraisal of such firms.

In this paper, the authors use an experiment-based approach to test how the type of CEO succession (internal vs external) influences the consumer's evaluation of family firms.

The authors find that appointing an internal CEO leads to higher perception of firm capability, trust towards the firm and more favorable consumer attitudes. All these factors, in turn, lead to higher purchase intentions. External CEOs in family firms do not seem to have any de facto advantage regarding perceptions of higher capability.

Thus, the authors contribute to the literature of family firms by showing how family firm's strategic decisions during succession can affect consumer behavior.

This paper aims to address which resources provided by an entrepreneurial ecosystem (EE) are necessary for deep technology entrepreneurship.

The authors used a novel approach known as necessary condition analysis (NCA) to data on EEs and deep-tech startups from 132 countries, collected in a global innovation index and Crunchbase data sets. The NCA makes it possible to identify whether an EEs resource is a necessary condition that enables entrepreneurship.

Necessary conditions are related to political and business environment; education, research and development; general infrastructure; credit; trade; diversification and market size; and knowledge absorption capacity.

The results show that business and political environments are the most necessary conditions to drive deep-tech entrepreneurship.

Policymakers could prioritize conditions that maximize entrepreneurial output levels rather than focusing on less necessary elements.

Some resources require less performance than others. So, policymakers should consider allocating policy efforts to strengthen resources that maximize output levels.

Studies on deep-tech entrepreneurship are scarce. This study provides a bottleneck analysis that can guide the formulation of policies to support deep-tech entrepreneurship, as it allows to identify priority areas for resource allocation.

The paradigmatic separation of the strategy and identity literatures constitutes an ongoing problem for the extension of either into more global contexts. The theorization proposed in this chapter presents rhetoric as the means by which the ‘strategy work’ of reimagining future options and the ‘identity work’ of reformulating the meaning of past actions may be integrated in the present moment. By locating both strategy work and identity work within the continuity of experience, we suggest that scholars will be better able to develop theoretically integrated, empirically grounded and globally relevant studies of strategy.

This paper examines the relationship of entrepreneurial orientation (EO), new product development (NPD), legitimacy (political and market) and firm performance (FP). The authors investigate how and when EO improves FP in high-tech small and medium-size enterprises (SMEs).

The paper formulates 5 hypotheses from literature review and theoretical deduction. The hypotheses are tested using ordinary least squares (OLS) regression with data collected from 219 randomly selected SMEs operating in high-tech industries of China.

The findings show that the mechanism of EO improve FP in high-tech SMEs by considering NPD as a mediator and legitimacy as moderators: (1) NPD plays a mediating role in the relationship between EO and FP, (2) market legitimacy (ML) positively moderating the effect of EO on FP and (3) both political legitimacy (PL) and ML positively moderating the effect of NPD on FP.

For the limitations, the firms the authors’ surveyed are SMEs that are not listed companies, which cause some limitations. For the implications, the authors propose some recommendations based on the findings to help Chinese SMEs to enhance performance.

The existing research on EO–FP linkage remains elusive findings. The paper reconciled the inconsistency by providing a nuanced mechanism of how EO promotes FP in high-tech SMEs of Chinese transition economy. By explain the important role of NPD in high-tech SMEs, the findings shed light on the mediators between EO and FP and the moderators. By emphasize the different role of ML and PL in determining EO–FP and NPD–FP linkages, the findings illustrate the peculiarity of contingency factors in a transition economy.