Maija Renko

Danger Zone Entrepreneurs: The Importance of Resilience and Self-Efficacy for Entrepreneurial Intentions

Little is known about the drivers of entrepreneurial decisions during war. We empirically examine the effects of perceived danger, entrepreneurial self–efficacy, and resilience on entrepreneurial intentions in adverse conditions with primary survey data from Afghanistan. Our findings suggest that perceived danger is negatively related to an individuals entrepreneurial intentions, but marginally less so among highly resilient individuals. Our findings also suggest that even under conditions of war, individuals develop entrepreneurial intentions if they are able to grow from adversity (resilience) and believe in their entrepreneurial abilities (entrepreneurial self–efficacy). Practical implications for role modeling and entrepreneurship training are then discussed.

Early Challenges of Nascent Social Entrepreneurs

Social entrepreneurs are celebrated as transformational leaders whose accomplishments create opportunities for those less fortunate. However, little is known about the early stages of social enterprise development. This study focuses on how a nascent entrepreneurs prosocial motivation affects the progress in building a new venture. Results show that prosocial motivation decreases the likelihood of firm emergence within a 4–year follow–up period, and even more so when the product offering of the emerging venture is new to the markets. These findings are discussed in the light of previous research on prosocial motivation, social entrepreneurship, market novelty, and nascent entrepreneurship.

Perception of Entrepreneurial Opportunity: A General Framework

Purpose – Previous research has predominantly approached the concept of entrepreneurial opportunities from either one of two perspectives: opportunities exist as objective phenomena in the environment waiting to be discovered by alert entrepreneurs, or opportunities are subjectively perceived and even created by individual entrepreneurs. This paper aims to put forward a framework of opportunity perception which demonstrates that all entrepreneurial opportunities possess both objective and subjective qualities, thus helping reconcile both perspectives.Design/methodology/approach – A conceptual framework is developed, based on previous literature and insights from entrepreneurship, economics, psychology and related disciplines.Findings – Various perspectives presented in previous research can be combined into a coherent framework that summarizes the components of entrepreneurial opportunity perception. Testable propositions are provided for future research.Originality/value – The authors show that elements ...

Explaining Export Performance: A Comparative Study of International New Ventures in Finnish and Indian Software Industry

In explaining international expansion and performance, the traditional explanation in international business literature has mainly offered country, and firm-level structural explanations for performance. Moreover, this literature has been biased toward larger, established multinational manufacturing companies (Dunning, 1958; Hymer, 1960; Aharoni, 1966; Vernon, 1966). This was understandable as, for much of the 20th century, manufacturing occupied the dominant share of the economy. However, by the early 1960s, the service sector already accounted for more than half of the domestic economic activity in developed nations. Today, even in international operations, the share of services is rapidly increasing. For example, the share of services in U.S. exports in 1997 had grown to 27%, and to 16% in U.S. imports (Contractor, 1999). Moreover, in sectors such as information technology, telecommunications or biotechnology, recent years have seen a proliferation of entrepreneurial start-up companies, where the characteristics of their founders and leaders appear to have as much, or greater, impact on performance, as traditional firm-level explanations. Since the late 1980s, the growth of venture capital markets and rise in entrepreneurship have been observed in technology-driven industries (The Economist, 1993; Gupta, 1989; Mamis, 1989). Could entrepreneurial and leadership factors assume greater importance in explaining performance, especially international performance, of younger companies in such sectors? This is the broad hypothesis pursued in this study.

Understanding and Measuring Entrepreneurial Leadership Style

Although entrepreneurial leadership is embraced in the popular press and in classrooms, academic knowledge remains underdeveloped. We develop the construct of entrepreneurial leadership and argue that it involves influencing and directing the performance of group members toward achieving those organizational goals that involve recognizing and exploiting entrepreneurial opportunities. We discuss environmental, organizational, and follower‐specific contingencies that may influence the success of entrepreneurial leadership, and we test the reliability and validity of an empirical measure for this construct (the scale). Using this novel measurement tool, we find that entrepreneurial leadership is more prevalent among founder‐leaders than nonfounder leaders, which indicates construct validity.

NASCENT ENTREPRENEURS AND THE TRANSITION TO ENTREPRENEURSHIP: WHY DO PEOPLE START NEW BUSINESSES?

What makes nascent entrepreneurs get their businesses up and running? We answer this by examining in a broad and unifying way: motivation and cognition, knowledge and experience and social support. We apply extensive multivariate analyses to a sample of 338 nascent entrepreneurs from the PSED database. Interestingly, most of our long-term (4½-year) model predictions of startup transition based on early antecedents are more accurate than the short-term ones — a practical strength of these models. Findings indicate that experienced, persistent, confident individuals, motivated mostly by non-financial outcomes, perceiving support from their social contacts and institutional environment, are likely to make the transition to a successful business.

Growth and Profitability in Small Privately Held Biotech Firms: Preliminary Findings

This paper reports on preliminary findings on a study of the relationship of growth and profitability among small privately held Finnish Life Science firms. Previous research results concerning growth and profitability are mixed, ranging from strongly positive to a negative relationship. The conventional wisdom states that growth is a prerequisite for profitability. Our results suggest that the reverse is the case. A high profitability-low growth biotech firm is more probably to make the transition to high profitability-high growth than a firm that starts off with low profitability and high growth.

Building market orientation in biotechnology SMEs : balancing scientific advances

This paper reports on a research project that looks at the market and science interplay in small and medium sized (SME) biotechnology firms. The construct of behavioural market orientation is our main tool for analysing science push and market pull in the biotechnology SME context. We report the findings of an action research project, in which a strategy for the pharmaceutical cluster organisation in Finland has been created. The results of this action research show the strong science and technology orientation (push) of biotechnology SMEs along with insufficient, or weak, market orientation (pull). Furthermore, our results show that the traditional components of market orientation, i.e. market intelligence generation, dissemination, and responsiveness, need to be redefined in the biotechnology context. Our findings serve as a basis for future development of a research instrument that measures market orientation in science-based firms.

Women’s Business Ownership Operating Within the Context of Institutional and In-Group Collectivism

The development of women’s entrepreneurship has positive implications for societal and economic growth. In this study, we examine the effects of culture and, more specifically, collectivism on women’s businesses. With a mixed-method and multilevel approach, we conducted a quantitative country-level analysis followed by a qualitative study of women entrepreneurs. Our results indicate that collectivism at the in-group level (family and close friends and colleagues) is a particularly important predictor of women’s business ownership. Furthermore, it is a balance of both collectivism and individualism at the in-group level that is most conducive to women’s business ownership. Institutional collectivism (at the societal level) acts as a background condition that influences the way in which in-group collectivism directly affects women’s business ownership. More specifically, when engaging in business development, women are primarily influenced by their in-groups. The freedom to pursue individual goals, combined with support from the in-group, provides the most beneficial environment for women to develop businesses, especially in societal-level cultures at the extreme ends of the collectivism spectrum—highly collectivistic or highly individualistic. A better understanding of these cultural factors should help with designing better business development training programs for women entrepreneurs and properly advising policy makers.

Social entrepreneurship as an employment pathway for people with disabilities: exploring political–economic and socio-cultural factors

The current economic climate demands more innovative approaches to increasing labor market participation for people with disabilities. Social entrepreneurship (SE) offers one alternative employment pathway. However, little is known about the broader factors influencing SE for people with disabilities. Using empirical data from focus groups comprised of social entrepreneurs with disabilities and interviews with key stakeholders working in the fields of policy, disability, and business, this research frames its analysis in the intersection of disability studies and entrepreneurship to explore which factors influence the potential for SE to provide equal participation opportunities for people with disabilities in the labor market. Findings suggest that further consideration of political–economic and socio-cultural factors is needed if we are to better understand the potential of SE for people with disabilities.