Erik Hunter

Institutional Forces The Invisible Hand that Shapes Venture Ideas

Institutional theory is employed for examining how and to what extent external pressure leads to changes in the venture idea during the start-up and early life of new, knowledge-intensive ventures. From a population of 321 young, knowledge-intensive firms that underwent a training program at Linkping University, Sweden, structured telephone interview data were obtained from 167 firms. The results confirmed that the venture idea had undergone more change in ventures that had more external owners, a dominant customer, and an incubator location. The results imply that institutional theory is a meaningful tool for understanding why and how venture ideas change over time.

Celebrity capital as a strategic asset: Implications for new venture strategies

Despite an increase in businesses started by celebrities, we have limited understanding as to how celebrity entrepreneurs benefit new ventures. Drawing on a reputational capital perspective, we develop the notion of celebrity capital and show how it can be used to uniquely differentiate the venture and to overcome liabilities of newness. We discuss how celebrity capital can negatively influence the venture when negative information about the celebrity surfaces and in terms of limiting the scope of the venture. We discuss the different strategic implications of celebrity capital for ventures using celebrity entrepreneurs versus endorsers.

Celebrity Entrepreneurship : Communication Effectiveness through Perceived Involvement

Increasingly, celebrities appear not only as endorsers for products but are apparently involved in entrepreneurial roles in the ventures that market the products they promote. We call this phenomenon Celebrity Entrepreneurship. We hypothesise that celebrity entrepreneurs are more effective communicators than typical celebrity endorsers. Further, we hypothesize that this is because celebrity entrepreneurship leads to higher perceptions of Involvement – an endorser quality hitherto neglected in the marketing communication literature – which in turn affects traditional outcome variables such as Aad and Abr. Two experiments confirm that a) involvement can successfully be operationalised as distinct from variables previously shown to influence communicator effectiveness, b) involvement has a positive effect on Aad and Abr over and above the traditional predictors, and c) celebrity entrepreneurship in experimental manipulations leads to increased perceived involvement.