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The purpose of this pilot study was to identify the key factors that influence the decisions of entrepreneurs who are considering the creation of a new venture. The pilot was conducted to explore the cognitive antecedents of entrepreneurial decision-making and whether specific factors contribute to the decision to create a new venture.

The study utilised an inductive and interpretive research design within a constructivist paradigm. The sample comprised entrepreneurs situated in a business incubation unit who engaged in a series of semi-structured interviews. The results of this study will be used to refine the questions asked in preparation for a larger sample using in-depth interviews with identified entrepreneurs. The resulting narrative in this pilot was subjected to discourse analysis and is categorised into relevant themes.

The findings in this pilot study reveal that factors such as technological advancement, market opportunity, competition, customer demand and prevailing market conditions have a significant influence on the decision-making process involved in creating a new venture.

Although the pilot has identified several factors in entrepreneurial decision-making, further work will be needed in the research design to be able to expose the cognitive processes associated with each factor. The aim is to identify the common cognitive characteristics associated with thinking through the decision to create a new venture with a much larger sample of entrepreneurs.

The value of this research lies in exploring and developing a better understanding of the antecedent cognitive processes used by entrepreneurs for identifying unique, innovative new ideas and converting them into exploitable products or services through new venture creation.

The purpose of this research is to reveal how to improve the quality of entrepreneurship by exploring the key factor, opportunity development, impacting the innovation strategy of new ventures. It also introduces political and business ties as moderating variables to reveal the uniqueness of entrepreneurial activities in the Chinese context.

Empirical data from 215 entrepreneurs and top executives in Chinese new ventures were gathered through a survey and the statistical method used is the regression model.

The empirical results indicate that: (1) new ventures' opportunity creation positively impacts innovation strategy, while opportunity discovery has a curvilinear (inverted U-shape) impact on innovation strategy; (2) the relationship between opportunity development and innovation strategy is moderated by political and business ties.

This research analyzes and compares the effect of opportunity discovery and opportunity creation on new ventures' innovation strategy. This research further offers an in-depth understanding of the influence mechanism between opportunity development and innovation strategy among Chinese new ventures. Further, the results provide practical guidance for new ventures to develop innovation strategies and for Chinese governments to make entrepreneurial policies.

The purpose of this study is to explore how effective new venture teams are developed in venture creation programmes.

This paper presents a multiple case study focusing on the development of effective new venture teams. Semi-structured interviews with 15 new venture teams from two different venture creation programmes were conducted and an abductive analysis approach was used.

Three key phases of the development of an effective new venture team are identified: (1) establishing a foundation for collaboration, (2) structuring the teamwork and (3) adapting to changes. Key activities undertaken by effective new venture teams in each phase are explicated. The findings suggest that new venture teams that are able to establish a foundation for team collaboration and teamwork structuring have the capacity to persevere through the challenges inherent in emerging ventures.

This study offers a much-needed practical perspective about how effective new venture teams are developed in venture creation programmes, and how venture creation programme educators can facilitate the development of effective new venture teams. For educators, these findings provide important insights about team-based learning in entrepreneurship education.

This paper aims to extend current understanding about the relationship between human capital and new venture performance. Human capital has increasingly become one of the critical intellectual resources in enhancing firm's success, however little work has been done in enriching the knowledge of this link from a small entrepreneurial new venture context. Many researchers have studied human capital from various angles, but few have analyzed human capital's influence on firm performance from entrepreneurial competence, motivation and creativity perspectives to ascertain their effects on new venture performance, including profit generation and patent creation.

This study was conducted using 155 small technology‐based new ventures located in government incubators on university campuses throughout Taiwan.

The authors found that entrepreneurial experience, manpower and creativity have positive impact on new venture's performance assessed by using profitability and patents creation as the criterion variables. Amongst all predictors, entrepreneurial manpower was found to have the strongest effect on both profitability and patent creation. The most interesting finding, however, stemmed from a component of entrepreneurial motivation the authors created, pioneering motivation. This unique form of motivation, to explain the extreme determination and time involved in starting a new business, was found to have a significantly negative effect on patent creation.

This study identifies the variety of entrepreneurial human capital and the importance of human capital's multidimensionality in entrepreneurship research. In this paper, the authors integrated some meaningful components of human capital which have been neglected in previous entrepreneurship studies. The paper's findings add to knowledge of how investments in entrepreneurial human capital, such as work experience, manpower, and creativity, influence performance outcomes at the early stages of the entrepreneurial process.

This paper provides a useful guideline for entrepreneurs by investigating new venture performance with seven less‐emphasized but important components of human capital. The authors identified the most influential components of entrepreneurial human capital (i.e. experience, manpower, and creativity) that a new venture should cultivate for improving its performance.

Literature concerning the linkages between entrepreneurial orientation (EO) and firm performance (FP) has been growing in tourism research. However, the linkage's relevance to new venture travel intermediaries remains vague. This study proposes a model that helps researchers and practitioners understand how EO translates into new venture FP through two strategic perspectives of value creation, i.e. firm value (FV) and customer perceived value (CPV).

The study tests this framework using structural equation modeling on a matched dyadic sample of 127 new venture firms belonging to the Indian travel industry.

The results posit that FV and CPV partially mediate the relationship between EO and new venture FP. The study advances the existing knowledge on the link between EO and FP and provides insights into how EO can enhance FV and CPV which ultimately enhances FP.

This work is the first to extend and integrate the idea of FV and CPV to entrepreneurship and new venture performance literature. By considering the two strategic aspects of value creation, i.e. FV and CPV, the paper presents a holistic view of value creation through EO.

The purpose of this paper is to provide a summary and overview of the papers selected by the Guest Editors for this Special Issue on supporting new venture creation in the twenty‐first century. The paper seeks to identify key themes platformed in the articles, and to demonstrate how the papers' findings contribute to a possible new research agenda in the area of new venture creation support.

This is a conceptual paper, providing a thematic editorial overview of the papers contained in this special issue.

The paper helps further the understanding of the complexities of the new venture creation process, as well as the type of support required.

The paper is based on the collective findings of ten articles.

Current support for new venture creation continues to be under‐utilised, under‐evaluated and not entirely aligned to the needs of aspiring and existing new venturers.

The paper should be of value to those researching entrepreneurship and new venture creation support, as it suggests areas upon which scholars should focus. The paper also offers new directions for government to consider when planning future support initiatives, and calls for academics to be involved in objectively evaluating the effectiveness of existing initiatives.

The purpose of this paper is to apply the theory of guided preparation to investigate the relative impact of outside counseling assistance and entrepreneurship courses on new venture creation and performance.

To attain a sample of nascent entrepreneurs who had been impacted by entrepreneurship education and entrepreneurial counseling, 256 individuals who received counseling from the Pennsylvania Small Business Development Center in 1996 or 1998 were surveyed. The authors ran a logistic regression model using venture start‐up as the categorical dependent variable to investigate whether entrepreneurial education and counseling had an influence on the creation of new ventures. To test whether entrepreneurial education or counseling had a long‐term impact on the growth of new ventures, hierarchical regression analyses were run using employment in 2003 as the dependent variable. Various control variables were used for both sets of analyses.

Findings indicate that counseling has a significant impact on venture performance but entrepreneurship courses do not. In contrast, entrepreneurship courses are related to venture creation while counseling is not.

Consistent with theory, the results suggest that counseling programs allow entrepreneurs to develop context‐specific tacit knowledge about their ventures and are best delivered immediately prior to venture start‐up. Entrepreneurship courses appear to indirectly influence new venture performance by increasing the odds of start up.

This comparative test of the theory of guided preparation contributes to the understanding of the effects of education and counseling on the creation and long‐term performance of new ventures, informing how the delivery of such programs can be improved.

In this chapter, we examine two theorized approaches to entrepreneurial activity: experiential versus prediction based strategies. We empirically assess the comparative performance of several commonly recommended approaches – researching customer needs, researching the competitive landscape, writing a business plan, conceptually adapting the business plan or experimentally adapting the primary business activity. We found that the majority of nascent entrepreneurs began with a business plan, but only about a third adapted their plan in later stages. We also found that talking with customers and examining the competitive landscape were normative activities. Those who started a plan were more likely to create a venture, although the effects much stronger for those who changed their plan later on, as well as for those who researched customer needs.

Our results show that the selection of these activities is both ubiquitous and driven by pre-start-up experience and new venture characteristics. The activities themselves do not robustly link with successful new venture foundation. Hence, pre-start-up experiences, venture characteristics, and the institutional environment are more important in explaining successful performance than recommended activities. Implications for research, practice, and pedagogy are discussed.

The purpose of this paper is to investigate formation of a copreneurial identity during new venture creation by investigating underpinnings of spousal commitment considering business communication quality.

The study was grounded in identity theory, used a longitudinal copreneurial sample, and SEM modeling. Entrepreneurial literature is filled with how entrepreneurs form their identity, but little is known about how entrepreneurs and their spouses mutually form their copreneurial identity.

Entrepreneurs’ reported spouses having high Time 1 commitment, but spouses reported they were more committed than reported by entrepreneurs. Links between spouse’s Time 1 commitment self‐assessment and Time 2 entrepreneur’s assessment of spousal commitment differed by business communication quality. Time 1 spouse’s commitment self‐assessment was positively related to Time 2 entrepreneur’s appraisal of spousal commitment only for the high business communication group and not for the low business communication group. For couples having high business communication quality, entrepreneur’s assessment of spousal commitment over time was composed of spouse’s self‐assessment of commitment and entrepreneur’s appraisal of spousal commitment, reflecting the mutual verification of a copreneurial identity.

This study provides evidence for Van Auken and Werbel's proposition that an entrepreneur's decision to launch a new business depends not only on opportunity analyses but also on the degree that an entrepreneur's spouse shares a common vision about firm goals. This study not only contributes to the theoretical development of a copreneurial identity but it also addresses measurement issues related to spousal business identity formation. Unlike previous studies considering spousal commitment in terms of marital status or work involvement, a measurement model for spousal commitment was tested using three indicators of cognitive moral commitment. Distinctions were made in stock and flow measures of spousal social capital and initial spousal stock levels were assessed. Furthermore, there appeared to be relatively high consistency between entrepreneur's assessment of spousal commitment and spousal's reflection of their own commitment, suggesting that the spousal commitment construct has some clearly defined properties.

The family has the potential to be a breeding ground for entrepreneurs and may be key place where the entrepreneurial spirit is ignited. However, to date there has been little empirical research on how parents may influence their children's subsequent decision to start a new venture.

This study adopts a qualitative approach to investigate, via in‐depth semi‐structured interviews, the experiences of 50 entrepreneurs (25 men and 25 women).

Parents influenced participants' decision to create a new venture in a number of ways and two key gender differences were noted in this parental influence. The first related to how the participants were influenced differently by their mothers and fathers, with fathers playing the primary role in the new venture creation decision. The second was differences between how the women and men participants described the ways they were influenced by their parents. Many women entrepreneurs looked to their parents for advice, support and encouragement, while some men desired independence from their parents (primarily fathers) or were trying to compete with them.

Limitations exist due to the sample size and the complexity of motivations for starting a new venture. This study should be followed by more extensive research, addressing the further research questions and directions that are posed.

This empirical study contributes to the literature by enhancing our limited understanding of how parents influence the decision to start a new venture.