Alka Gupta

The Concept of Entrepreneurial Orientation

Entrepreneurial orientation (EO) - overall strategic posture toward entrepreneurship - is emerging as a predominant concept in management science. As knowledge in the area of EO has expanded, researchers have become interested in issues related to the evolution, potential contributions, and future trajectory of EO research. The purpose of this essay is to take stock of where EO scholarship has come so far, identify interesting gaps for the future, and encourage extending the knowledge frontier in this area. In order to do so, we acknowledge key developmental milestones in EO studies, attempt to make sense of the extant EO literature and highlight possible avenues for further work, and offer specific suggestions for exploring areas where EO research has not gone before. We hope our essay will show that EO research has made considerable strides over its life course as well as point to productive directions for the EO concept going forward.

Retrospective Relatedness Reconstruction Applications to Adaptive Social Networks and Social Sentiment

Examination of temporally changing adaptive social networks has been difficult given the need for extensive and usually real-time data collection. Building from interdisciplinary advances, the authors propose a web search engine–based method (called retrospective relatedness reconstruction or 3R) for collecting approximated historical data of temporally changing adaptive social networks. As quantifying relatedness among people in social networks leads to difficulty in assigning proper weights to relationship ties, 3R offers a means for assessing relatedness between people over time. Additionally, 3R can be applied beyond people relatedness to include word associations. To illustrate these two novel contributions, the authors reconstructed the temporal evolution of a social network from 2005 to 2009 of 92 individuals (key leaders) related to the U.S. financial crisis and also examined the temporal evolution of social sentiment (i.e., fear, shame, blame, confidence) related to the same 92 individuals. We found several illustrative cases where temporal changes in centrality and/or sentiment captured actual events related to these individuals during this time period.

Does Management’s Attention to Different Facets of Entrepreneurial Orientation Create Value for the Firm? A Longitudinal Study of Large Retailers

Studies of entrepreneurial orientation tend to merge its three components‐proactiveness, risk-taking, and innovativeness‐into a monolithic construct and analyze its relationship with firm outcomes at one point in time. This has resulted in knowledge voids related to the relative importance of the different components, their specific effect on value created by the firm, and their evolution over time. The present study links each component of entrepreneurial orientation to economic value creation using a longitudinal dataset. Results provide support for hypothesized relationships. Implications and avenues for future research are discussed.

Reconstructing History of Social Network Evolution Using Web Search Engines

We propose a simple web search engine based method for collecting approximated historical data of temporally changing social adaptive networks, which are rather difficult to obtain experimentally in conventional research methods. In the proposed method, a search query string is combined with additional keywords that specify inclusion/exclusion of specific years to limit the search results to a particular time point. Using the proposed method, we reconstructed the temporal evolution of a social network from 2005 to 2009 of 93 individuals who are important in the US economy. We measured centralities of those individuals for every year and found several illustrative cases where the temporal change of centrality of an individual correctly captured the actual events that are related to him/her over this time period. These results indicate the effectiveness of the proposed method. Limitations and future directions of research are discussed.

Relating Cultural Values with Opportunity Evaluation: Evidence from India

The link between social interaction and entrepreneurial activity has attracted considerable attention in the entrepreneurship literature. In this study, we focus on individual cultural values, shaped by interactions in the social space, as they relate to opportunity evaluation, a cornerstone of the entrepreneurial process. We test our predictions in India, a non-Western society that has sustained one of the highest rates of entrepreneurial activity in the world. Our findings suggest that value orientation of high power distance is negatively associated with opportunity evaluation whereas uncertainty avoidance, collectivism, and femininity are positively associated with opportunity evaluation.

Just a Lemonade Stand: An Introduction to Student Entrepreneurship

Despite the increasing popularity of entrepreneurship among students in colleges and university, there is a surprising scarcity of theoretical or empirical research on this topic. In this article, we define the concept of student entrepreneurship, delineate its domain, and demarcate its boundaries. We propose a preliminary typology of student entrepreneurship rooted in the works of three leading economists from the Austrian School of Economics: Joseph Schumpeter, Israel Kirzner, and Ludwig Lachmann. We also identify and discuss important challenges associated with the practice of student entrepreneurship. The article concludes by advancing a future research agenda for the study of student entrepreneurship.

Feeling Good, Being Intentional, and Their Relationship to Two Types of Creativity at Work

In recent years, scholars have empirically demonstrated that creativity can be described as radical or incremental creativity. In efforts to better understand the nomological networks underlying radical and incremental creativity, this study explored the role that positive emotions directly and indirectly plays in predicting each type of creativity. Further, whether the nature of these mediated relationships varied differentially as a function of employees’ tendency to also engage in such purposeful activities as monitoring their creative behaviors and deepening their expertise was also explored. The resultant moderated-mediation model was tested in a field study of 129 professional employees in a large North American consumer products organization. Results indicated that positive emotions influence incremental and radical creativity differentially through fun, and that the degree to which individuals engage in monitoring impacts their levels of creativity. Implications and future directions for research and practitioners are discussed.

Entrepreneurial Behavior During Industry Emergence: An Unconventional Study of Discovery and Creation in the Early PC Industry

Acting entrepreneurially in nascent industries is a complex endeavor characterized by uncertainty and ambiguity. Nevertheless, entirely new industries do emerge, often as a direct result of entrepreneurial behavior. We extend and apply discovery and creation approaches to study entrepreneurial behavior during industry emergence by means of qualitative analysis of a film about the personal computer (PC) industry℉s formative years. We find that discovery and creation behavior are fundamentally interrelated and share a common element: bricolage. Moreover, ideological activism is a major component of entrepreneurial behavior in a new industry℉s formative years during both creation and discovery processes. Implications for research and practice are discussed.