1,720,988 research outputs found
Entrepreneurs and intertemporal decision making
No full textThis paper investigates the decision making behaviour of individuals with respect to attributes considered relevant to the assessment of potential venture opportunities. Using a decision making experiment, we were able to consider the behaviour of individuals taking into account their risk and time preferences. We find that while the respondent as a whole placed most weight on the potential payoffs when considering the value of a venture opportunity, we find significant individual differences in preference weightings across the attributes used in the study. By using a series of hypothetical venture vignettes, we also find some evidence that these differences in preference weightings may be useful in predicting choice behaviour in a more realistic entrepreneurial environment
The Impact of Overconfidence on Entrepreneurial Intentions
No full textResearchers have found that the determinants of entrepreneurial intention (or action) include general, specific, and social aspects of human capital as well as the possession of entrepreneurial attitudes toward income, independence, perquisites, risk and hard work. Recently the cognitive bias of overconfidence has been associated with entrepreneurship, with research showing that entrepreneurs exhibit greater overconfidence than do other managers. Accordingly it is useful to investigate the role of overconfidence in the decision to form an intention to become self-employed. This paper finds that overconfidence significantly drives the intention to behave entrepreneurially, and moreover has significant interaction effects with ownership motivation of nascent entrepreneurs. Interestingly, self-efficacy, and attitudes towards income, autonomy and risk were not significant determinant of intentions in this study, contrary to earlier studies
Making Do With Less: Firm Growth And Financial Performance Under Resource Constraints
No full textThis paper examines the financial resourcing behaviour of a sample of high growth firms. Firms growing faster than generated internally funds must finance this growth through external means or alternatively adopt bootstrapping measures aimed at increasing efficiency in working capital management. For a sample of manufacturing firms, we find that consistent with the pecking order theory; high growth firms have a preference for internal rather than external finance. More specifically, we find that the short term growth in sales to be largely financed through increased inventory turnover along with a reduction in gross margins. This raises questions about the longer term sustainability of this growth
A temporal typology of entrepreneurial opportunities: implications for optimal timing of entrepreneurial action: Implications for the optimal timing of entrepreneurial action
No full textEntrepreneurial opportunities emerge and dissipate over time, yet little is known about how and why they vary in their ephemerality and what the implications of temporal variance are for the optimal timing of entrepreneurial action. Building on the actualization theory of opportunity and signal processing theory, we propose that profit possibilities exist in the convolution of consumer desire, technical feasibility, and economic viability of an innovation. Conceiving consumer desire – a necessary ingredient of any profit opportunity – as consisting of fleeting or enduring consumer preferences and fixed or variable consumer expectations, we identify four possible distributions of consumer desire over time. We then show how the interaction of these distributions with technical feasibility functions produces a temporal typology of entrepreneurial opportunities. Our analysis suggests that, despite sharing conceptual similarities in structure, each type of opportunity emphasizes a different form of asymmetry across opportunity categories, which is likely to differentially affect the optimal timing of entrepreneurial action. We conclude by pointing out how considerations of time facilitate the move away from fruitless philosophical debates and toward a more theoretically nuanced and empirically informative view of the concept.</p
Entrepreneurial Attitudes and Entrepreneurial Intentions: A Cross-Culturals Study of Potential Entrepreneurs in India, China, Thailand and Australia
No full textThe intention of an individual to behave entrepreneurially arises because the entrepreneur perceives self-employment (or entrepreneurial behaviour within an organization) to be utility-maximizing, and thus forms the motivation to behave entrepreneurially. As argued elsewhere, the intention to behave entrepreneurially depends on the human capital of the individual. Here we argue that human capital includes not only personal abilities and social capital but also innate attitudes to aspects of entrepreneurship, such as independence, firm ownership and risk. Thus the motive for pursuing self employment (or any other entrepreneurial behaviour) is considered as a function of an individual’s abilities and attitudes. This study investigated the relationship between entrepreneurial attitudes and abilities and entrepreneurial intentions across four countries, viz: India, China, Thailand and Australia. We find that entrepreneurial attitudes are significant in explaining career decisions in all four countries with some variation in the relative importance of each of these attitudes. We also find cross-cultural differences in the degree to which entrepreneurial attitudes explain entrepreneurial intentions
Knowledge, Motivation and Entrepreneurial Opportunities: An Experimental Investigation using Functional Measurement
No full textPrincipal Topic\ud
An examination of how opportunities come to be, and in turn the how they are enacted by entrepreneurs will enhance our understanding of entrepreneurship. This study focuses on how opportunities come to be, or are recognized. Recent theorising has focused on cognitive explanations for variations in individual opportunity attention (McMullen and Shepherd, 2006), citing prior knowledge (Shane, 2001) and motivation as antecedents. This study seeks to make an original contribution by empirically examining the functional relationships between knowledge, motivation and entrepreneurial opportunity cognition.\ud
While scholars agree that prior knowledge is an important factor in the acknowledgement of opportunity it is still not clear how cognition or motivation impacts. This study aims to address this gap by simultaneously examining the relationships between knowledge, motivation and opportunity using the model of McMullen and Shepherd (2006) as a basis for the study. Where, we expect that the relationship between knowledge, motivation and opportunity may be described by a simple cognitive algebraic function of multiplication. Additionally, we expect that higher levels of knowledge and higher levels of motivation will be associated with an individual’s attention to the value of a particular opportunity.\ud
Method\ud
Subjects, drawn from a qualified sample of individuals interested in entrepreneurial activity, participated in an opportunity experiment. This experiment consisted of a series of vignettes, used to prime the attention to entrepreneurial opportunity, where orthogonal factors relating to knowledge and motivation were varied in a factorial design. Knowledge and motivation stimuli contained in the vignettes were jointly considered and subjectively integrated by the experiment participants, who in turn made individual judgements whether this constituted an opportunity. Further, functional measurement (Anderson, 1996) allowed the responses to these patterns of cues to be modelled using algebraic forms.\ud
Results and Implications\ud
An important outcome of this research is a better understanding of the motivational and cognitive factors that influence entrepreneurial opportunity. Furthermore, by using functional measurement to describe the structure of relationships between knowledge and motivation in term of simple algebra, we have the basis with which to model the cognitive information processing involved in opportunity recognition
Going Beyond Counting First Authors in Author Co-citation Analysis
Full text linkThe present study examines one of the fundamental aspects of author co-citation analysis (ACA) - the way co-citation
counts are defined. Co-citation counting provides the data on which all subsequent statistical analyses and mappings
are based, and we compare ACA results based on two different types of co-citation counting - the traditional type that
only counts the first one among a cited work's authors on the one hand and a non-traditional type that takes into
account the first 5 authors of a cited work on the other hand. Results indicate that the picture produced through this non-traditional author co-citation counting contains more coherent author groups and is therefore considerably clearer. However, this picture represents fewer specialties in the research field being studied than that produced through the traditional first-author co-citation counting when the same number of top-ranked authors is selected and analyzed. Reasons for these effects are discussed
Growth and Profitability in Small and Medium Sized Australian Firms
Full text linkThis study investigated the longitudinal behaviour of growth rates and profitability for a large sample of Australian firms. Similar to previous studies, growth rates were found to be much more volatile than profitability measures. Using a regression equation with lagged profit and growth variables, we found no evidence of a consistent relationship between growth and profitability. The longitudinal behaviour of the growth profitability relationship was also investigated. Consistent with previous research, we found that higher growth firms were on average younger. Similarly, high and low profit firms were found to be younger on average. Our results found that a higher proportion of firms pursuing the profitability pathway were much more likely to achieve high growth and profitability in following years. A much lower proportion of firms pursuing the growth pathway were likely to achieve above average performance in profitability in future years
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