Gry Agnete Alsos

New Venture Financing and Subsequent Business Growth in Men- and Women-Led Businesses

This study investigates the possible funding gap for women–owned compared with men–owned new businesses. With longitudinal data from new businesses in Norway, gender differences in funding perceptions and behaviors, as well as in actually obtained amounts of funding, are explored. While there are few detected gender differences with respect to funding perceptions and behavior, women obtain significantly less financial capital to develop their new businesses. Moreover, the results indicate that the lower levels of financial capital that women business founders achieve are associated with lower early business growth compared with their male counterparts.

Farm‐based entrepreneurs: what triggers the start‐up of new business activities?

This exploratory study combines three theoretical approaches to investigate why farmers start additional business activities: the rural sociology perspective, the opportunity perspective and the resource‐based perspective – as applied within entrepreneurship research. Building on in‐depth interviews of respondents from Norwegian farm households, three types of entrepreneurs were identified: the pluriactive farmer, the resource exploiting entrepreneur and the portfolio entrepreneur. These entrepreneurial types differed in regard to their basic motivation and objectives for start‐up, the source of their business ideas, the basis of competitive position and the connectivity between the new business and the farm, as well as in several other ways.

Resource configuration and creative practices of community entrepreneurs

Purpose – This paper aims to focus on the role of the community entrepreneur and the process of community entrepreneurship. It seeks to emphasize the social context as critical for gaining access to the resources needed by a community venture and elaborates on the action pattern of the community entrepreneur towards raising critical resources from the environment.Design/methodology/approach – The analysis is based on a longitudinal field study of community entrepreneurs in four Norwegian rural municipalities. The data consists of interviews, observations, and documents.Findings – Community entrepreneurs create local arenas and thereby facilitate cooperative entrepreneurial action, through bridging social capital. The actors are part of these community contexts and are involved in a range of reciprocal relations. Thus, the actors creative practices toward the community have to run parallel with the resource configuration process.Research limitations/implications – Future studies may provide a broader empi...

Stakeholder theory approach to technology incubators

Purpose – Using stakeholder theory the paper seeks to investigate how technology incubators manage and balance the expectations of stakeholders, and the effect on the shaping of technology incubators and their chances of success.Design/methodology/approach – Incubator programmes have been introduced with multiple goals. A case study is conducted in order to examine stakeholders based on their power to influence, the legitimacy of the relationship and the urgency of claim, and how incubators deal with stakeholder expectations.Findings – Incubator management involves balancing a complex set of conflicting goals. Expectations are interdependent, hierarchically organised, and involve sub‐processes related to different stakeholders. Goals are not fitted to an operational context. Consequently, suboptimal solutions are chosen to balance and fulfil expectations sufficiently to ensure survival. Three strategies to balance stakeholder expectations are identified.Research limitations/implications – The stakeholder ...

Introduction: innovation in tourism industries

The tourism sector – already one of the fastest growing industries in the world – is currently undergoing extensive change thanks to strong market growth and a transition to more experience-based products. The capacity for firms to innovate and adapt to market developments is crucial to their success, but research-based knowledge on innovation strategies in tourism remains scarce. This pioneering Handbook offers timely, original research on innovation within the tourism industry from a number of interdisciplinary and global perspectives.

Gender and Entrepreneurship: Revealing Constructions and Underlying Processes – The Case of Norway

Candida G. Brush is Professor of Entrepreneurship, holder of the Paul T. Babson Chair in Entrepreneurship, and Chair of the Entrepreneurship Division at Babson College, USA. She is a Visiting Adjunct Professor to the Norwegian School of Engineering and Technology in Trondheim, Norway. Dr Brush is a founding member of the Diana Project International, and received the 2007 FSF NUTEK Award for Outstanding Contributions to Entrepreneurship Research. Her research investigates women’s growth businesses and resource acquisition strategies in emerging ventures.

Gender equality in regional entrepreneurial ecosystems: the implementation of policy initiatives: A Comparative Analysis

This is a draft chapter. The final version is available in Entrepreneurial Ecosystems and Growth of Women’s Entrepreneurship: A comparative Analysis, edited by T. S. Manolova, C. G. Brush, L. F. Edelman, A. Robb & F. Welter, published in 2017, Edward Elgar Publishing Ltd https://doi.org/10.4337/9781785364624.00017.

Business Start-up Processes in Norway

The Norwegian PSED (NO-PSED) was designed to explore the prevalence and characteristics of potential and actual business founders in Norway, as well as attitudes towards entrepreneurs in the Norwegian context. The focus emphasized business-gestation activities, their sequences and frequencies, and how they are related to the propensity of actually starting a new business. The original objective was to examine the relationships between activities in the start-up process and performance of new businesses in terms of profitability and growth. For reasons to be explained later, these issues received limited attention.

Paper and Book Reviews

For researchers within the areas of entrepreneurship and small business, the business-family relationship is a subject of significance, since it affects the goals, the strategies and the actions within the business. Since there is a distinctiveness to small businesses, a book discussing this relationship within the small business context is very welcome. The family business literature has often tended to treat family businesses as a homogenous group independent of the firm size. Among 33 articles in the latest two volumes of Family Business Review, only 4 highlight firm size as an aspect of the study, and even in the special issue of Journal of Small Business Management on family businesses, the articles do not focus on the distinctiveness of small family businesses (though the empirical setting is SMEs). According to the editor’s introduction the ambition of the book is to investigate the relationship between work and family in the context of the small family business, as well as focusing on the tensions and contradictions resulting from this distinctive work-family relation. The individual chapters represent three discourses within small family business research: the rationality discourse, the resource-based discourse and the critical discourse. The section relating to the rationality discourse contains three chapters, though it may be claimed that only two of them are actually dealing with rationality issues. The first chapter by Westhead, Cowling, Storey and Howorth discusses the definition of family business and argues that the scale of the phenomenon is dependent on the definition used. However, the next two chapters offer an interesting discussion of the complexity of rationality. Hall argues that a multi-rationality perspective is most suitable for understanding strategy processes of family businesses. Johannisson argues that the different ideologies that exist in a family business compete and are hence not complementary rationalities as Hall argues, and that the tensions resulting from this competition can be exploited to energize the organization. The second and largest section of the book includes six chapters defined within the resource-based discourse. These chapters are ‘exploring the contradictory relation between work-family-small business organisation and the complex way in which the “family” is a resource’. The chapters by Smyrnios et al. and Murray investigate the supporting role of the family when it comes to anxiety and work stress experienced by family members involved in the business. Murray shows how emotional dynamics in family business provide different outcomes in terms of organizational actions. Nordqvist and Melin combine institutional theory with concepts from the area of corporative governance when they discuss how family