Challenges and Opportunities in Entrepreneurship Research

© Phillip PhanIACMR July 2007

Challenges and Opportunities in Entrepreneurship Research

Phillip H. PhanWarren H. Bruggeman ’46 and Pauline

Urban Bruggeman Professor of Entrepreneurship

Rensselaer Polytechnic InstituteTroy, New York, USA


Approach The distinctiveness of

entrepreneurship theory Testing the theory

•Constructs•Data•Analyses• Implications

Conclusions


What’s wrong with this picture? Most new products – even the line

extensions – and most new ventures still fail

Most business plans raise no money (and probably should never have been written!)

Only 1 or 2 in 10 companies in most venture capital portfolios achieve returns in excess of the cost of capital


A problem?


Why so poorly understood? Most research has focused on

process and not outcomes•Outcomes are not easily examined

through cross-sectional research•Post-hoc biases

The confounding of implementation effects

Divergent academic perspectives have not been brought together (the “blind man describing the elephant” problem)


What is entrepreneurship? Why, when and how opportunities

for the creation of goods and services come into existence

Why, when, and how some people and not others discover and exploit these opportunities

Why, when and how different modes of actions are used to exploit entrepreneural opportunities


How are opportunities defined? Economics: Creative destruction

(Schumpeter); Discovery (Austrian School)

Strategy: Industry attractiveness, generic strategies (Porter); cognition (Kahneman); resource-based view (Peteraf)

Finance: Real options (Dixit and Pindyke)

Bottom line: Ideas with economic value


What is an entrepreneurial opportunity? Confluence of:

• Idea for a new way to create value

•People to give substance to the idea

•Context to ground the idea in time and space


Research implications Theory

•Multidimensional•Multilevel•Dynamic•Multiple dependent variables (not

all are economic) Empirical

•Left censorship•Right censorship•Multi-operationalization


Where do ideas come from? Kirzner (entrepreneurial discovery is

the gradual and systematic pushing back of the boundaries of sheer ignorance) – ideas are discovered

Schumpeter (creative destruction on the process by which a new economic order replaces an older one through the new application of technology to problems) – ideas are created

Viable ideas are ‘competitively’ determined (market for ideas)

‘Equilibrium’ does not exist


How are ideas discovered? Hayek (information exist and are

simply discovered) – structural imperfections in the marketplace prevent discovery

Cognition (information do not always exist and are created) – cognitive biases prevent us from creating new ideas, ‘alertness’


Research implications Theory

• Economics of information (network effects, increasing returns, spillovers, appropriability)

• Theory of knowledge (interactions between individual and group cognition, group and organization, individual and organization)

• Technology change and diffusion of innovations

• Sources of industry differences Empirical

• Recursive process models require dynamic modeling with updating

• Panel data (or at least longitudinal data)


The entrepreneur (team)? Why do they choose to (not)

exploit the idea?• Individual differences

(Kahneman, Baron)•Human experience

(demographics) (Laffont, Caroll)


The context? Where do they choose to (not)

exploit the idea?•Existing organized enterprise•Newly formed enterprise•Virtual enterprise

How do they choose to (not) exploit•At what point is the idea

exploitable? Can there be exploitation without

enterprise?


Research Implications Theory

• Individual and group decision making processes

• Emergence of ordered systems from constituent components (complexity theory)

• Moderated structural models (contingency theory)

• Brain studies/ genetic studies?• New conceptualizations of value creation

(e.g., monetization of virtual worlds) Empirical

• Measuring and counting nascent organizations (also in corporate settings)

• Finding failures (projects and organizations)


The formation of new firms Most common expression of the

entrepreneurial process Where does the process start?

• Idea?• Individual (serial entrepreneurs)?•Formal organization?

Where does it end?• Idea?• Individual (life span)?•Dissolution of formal organization?


Research implications Contingency models

• Effectuation (person, idea, context) The importance of non-economic actors

• Family• Community• Advocacy associations• Pressure groups

Appropriate dependent variables• Value creation and value appropriation

(create economic value but appropriate it in non-economic ways)


Resource assembly The resources (venture capital,

technology, people, legitimacy) Process of resource assembly

(networking, coalition building, political models)

Who gets involved (customers, suppliers, technology and capital providers)


Note on empirical issues Use of panel data (right censorship) Event history analysis (critical

incident technique, event studies) Assumptions about the reaction of

markets and competitors to entrepreneurial events (based on equilibrium paradigm)

Constant updating of information (appropriate time frame)

Dependent variable(s)•congruency•contradictions


Roundtable discussion

Questions and Answers

Documents

Challenges and Opportunities in Entrepreneurship Research