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- Ljungquist, Urban, et al.
(författare)
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At the Edge of Entrepreneurial Orientation : Identifying Impediments of SME Growth (Interactive Paper)
- 2008
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Ingår i: Frontiers of Entrepreneurship Research. - Babson Park, MA : Center for Entrepreneurial Studies, Babson College. - 0740-7416. ; 28:13
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Tidskriftsartikel (refereegranskat)abstract
- Entrepreneurial orientation (EO) is often assumed to underpin firm growth and the concept is frequently scrutinized on several levels of analyses: Founder, firm, corporate setting and industry. Although many firms may find that EO is underpinning firm growth, for instance in innovation and creativity activities in multinational firms, its application most often is limited to particular departments or teams of employees. Moreover, in further inspection of the concept, it might be relevant to ask whether EO always is facilitating firm growth, or whether it under some conditions even is inhibiting growth. In large firms, the hindering probably is an isolated phenomenon in some divisions and departments. In small and medium sized enterprises (SMEs), larger amplitude is expected, due to the more concentrated context, and therefore the hindrance may be devastating, in that growth of the whole firm is halted. This project focuses empirically on SMEs and theoretically on innovation processes; the latter are assumed to carry the artefacts of the limitations of EO. A firm’s core competences are likely to be applied in the processes, and therefore their inclusion is important. The existence of core competences in SMEs is a blind spot in previous research. Therefore, we adopt Prahalad & Hamel’s (1990) criteria for core competence identification and add a customer verification procedure (Ljungquist, 2007) to fit the SME context, for one reason due to the large dependency of the business environment.
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| 2. |
- Politis, Diamanto, et al.
(författare)
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Exploring the mindset of university entrepreneurs : Do they have a different resource logic?
- 2008
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Ingår i: Frontiers of Entrepreneurship Research. - Wellesley, Massachusetts : Babson College. - 0740-7416. ; 28:4
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Tidskriftsartikel (refereegranskat)abstract
- Principal Topic: Universities are today increasingly acknowledged as powerful drivers of innovation, job creation and economic growth. To promote and support university-based entrepreneurship there has been a tremendous increase in the supply of entrepreneurship courses and the creation of business incubators. As a result of this development there is an increasing group of entrepreneurs that have been educated or fostered in the university context, and who often continue to develop their new ventures in close interaction with the university. The principal research question we ask in this paper is whether university entrepreneurs have a different resource logic compared to entrepreneurs that start up their ventures independently of the university and its surrounding innovation system. Resource logic is in the paper defined as a set of ideas for how to secure and use resources in the start-up process, and we link this concept to three streams of research that can be related to the resource logic of entrepreneurs; effectual decision making, bootstrapping orientation; and personal networking.Method: The empirical study was designed as a questionnaire survey. The questionnaire was sent out to two groups of entrepreneurs resulting in responses from 182 university entrepreneurs and 209 non- university entrepreneurs. The hypotheses are tested using parametric and non-parametric tests in SPSS.Results and Implications: In line with our hypotheses the results suggest that university entrepreneurs to a larger extent have a mindset that favours both effectual reasoning and the use of bootstrapping. When it comes to use of network contacts the results were however contrary to our hypothesis. In sum, our findings add to our knowledge about the extent to which the close connection to the university has any significant influence on the resource acquisition behaviour of university entrepreneurs once they start an entrepreneurial career. The paper develops and uses the concept of “resource logic”. On the basis of this concept the paper provides general implications for our understanding of differences in the mindset of entrepreneurs in the start-up process.
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