Entrepreneurship

This article examines five common misunderstandings about case-study research: (a) theoretical knowledge is more valuable than practical knowledge; (b) one cannot generalize from a single case, therefore, the single-case study cannot contribute to scientific development; (c) the case study is most useful for generating hypotheses, whereas other methods are more suitable for hypotheses testing and theory building; (d) the case study contains a bias toward verification; and (e) it is often difficult to summarize specific case studies. This article explains and corrects these misunderstandings one by one and concludes with the Kuhnian insight that a scientific discipline without a large number of thoroughly executed case studies is a discipline without systematic production of exemplars, and a discipline without exemplars is an ineffective one. Social science may be strengthened by the execution of a greater number of good case studies.

We define cultural entrepreneurship as the process of storytelling that mediates between extant stocks of entrepreneurial resources and subsequent capital acquisition and wealth creation.  We propose a framework that focuses on how entrepreneurial stories facilitate the crafting of a new venture identity that serves as a touchstone upon which legitimacy may be conferred by investors, competitors, and consumers, opening up access to new capital and market opportunities.  Stories help create competitive advantage for entrepreneurs through focal content shaped by two key forms of entrepreneurial capital: firm-specific resource capital and industry-level institutional capital.  We illustrate our ideas with anecdotal entrepreneurial stories that range from contemporary high technology accounts to the evolution of the mutual fund industry.  Propositions are offered to guide future empirical research based on our framework.  Theoretically, we aim to extend recent efforts to synthesize strategic and institutional perspectives by incorporating insights from contemporary approaches to culture and organizational identity

This article presents results from the first statistically significant study of cost escalation in transportation infrastructure projects. Based on a sample of 258 transportation infrastructure projects worth US$90 billion and representing different project types, geographical regions, and historical periods, it is found with overwhelming statistical significance that the cost estimates used to decide whether such projects should be built are highly and systematically misleading. Underestimation cannot be explained by error and is best explained by strategic misrepresentation, that is, lying. The policy implications are clear: legislators, administrators, investors, media representatives, and members of the public who value honest numbers should not trust cost estimates and cost-benefit analyses produced by project promoters and their analysts.

This paper reports the results of a study designed to investigate entrepreneurship and ‘fit’ in small and medium sized high technology manufacturing firms. A normative model of fit has been developed, which including the variables of entrepreneurial style, organizational structure, and mission strategy, determines a measure of the firm's fit with its environment. The normative model of fit proposed here is based on variables and relationships found to be important in previous empirical studies. Data on environmental turbulence, entrepreneurial style, organization structure, mission strategy, and financial performance were collected from 82 manufacturing firms. A measure of fit was calculated for each firm. Findings indicate that performance among firms was positively related to the measurement of fit. In short, fit is an important construct for firm success. Implications include prescriptive guidance to assist practitioners in diagnosing and correcting ‘misfit’ for individual firms.

The performance implications of innovation in small and medium-sized enterprises (SMEs) have attracted considerable interest among academics and practitioners. However, empirical research on the innovation–performance relationship in SMEs shows controversial results. This meta-analysis synthesizes empirical findings in order to obtain evidence whether and especially under which circumstances smaller, resource-scarce firms benefit from innovation. We find that innovation–performance relationship is context dependent. Factors such as the age of the firm, the type of innovation, and the cultural context affect the impact of innovation on firm performance to a large extent.

Back cover text: If the new fin de siècle marks a recurrence of the real, Bent Flyvbjerg’s Rationality and Power epitomizes that development and sets new standards for social and political inquiry. The Danish town of Aalborg is to Flyvbjerg what Florence was to Machiavelli: a laboratory for understanding the real workings of power, and for grasping what they mean to our more general concerns of social and political organization. Politics, administration, and planning are examined in ways that allow  a rare, in-depth understanding. The reader witnesses, firsthand, the classic and endless drama which defines what modernity and democracy are and can be.

This research would like to assess the impact of entrepreneurship education on entrepreneurial self-efficacy (ESE) and entrepreneurial intentions (EI) in the context of Indonesia. The research will take advantage of a newly established Entrepreneurship program study at School of Business and Management, Institute of Technology Bandung (SBM-ITB). The longitudinal data from a survey would be collected from the students in Entrepreneurship program at the beginning and at the end of their study. SBM-ITB also has a long established Management program study which offers some entrepreneurship courses/programs in several semesters. As a comparison, the same survey would be applied to the students in Management program at the same cohort. Study to these different types of entrepreneurship education (Entrepreneurship vs Management program study) seems to give different result in terms of the impact on entrepreneurial self-efficacy and intentions of students.
The result is expected to be two fold. First is to understand the impact of entrepreneurship education on students’ ESE and EI; second is to have a comparison with the ‘sister’ program of Management and see whether the entrepreneurship education in Entrepreneurship program study do make a significant difference in terms of the impact on students’ ESE and IE. The results are expected to provide a valuable contribution to entrepreneurship literature in terms of the comparison of the impact of two different schemes of entrepreneurship education to students’ ESE and EI and also for improvement in the entrepreneurship education not only in SBM-ITB but also in general.

The impact of smaller firm size on corporate social responsibility (CSR) is ambiguous. Some contend that small businesses are socially responsible by nature, while others argue that a smaller firm size imposes barriers on small firms that constrain their ability to take responsible action. This paper critically analyses recent theoretical and empirical contributions on the size–social responsibility relationship among small businesses. More specifically, it reviews the impact of firm size on four antecedents of business behaviour: issue characteristics, personal characteristics, organizational characteristics and context characteristics. It concludes that the small business context does impose barriers on social responsibility taking, but that the impact of the smaller firm size on social responsibility should be nuanced depending on a number of conditions. From a critical analysis of these conditions, opportunities for small businesses and their constituents to overcome the constraining barriers are suggested.

This article presents results from the first statistically significant study of traffic forecasts in transportation infrastructure projects. The sample used is the largest of its kind, covering 210 projects in 14 nations worth U.S.$59 billion. The study shows with very high statistical significance that forecasters generally do a poor job of estimating the demand for transportation infrastructure projects. For 9 out of 10 rail projects, passenger forecasts are overestimated; the average overestimation is 106%. For half of all road projects, the difference between actual and forecasted traffic is more than ±20%. The result is substantial financial risks, which are typically ignored or downplayed by planners and decision makers to the detriment of social and economic welfare. Our data also show that forecasts have not become more accurate over the 30-year period studied, despite claims to the contrary by forecasters. The causes of inaccuracy in forecasts are different for rail and road projects, with political causes playing a larger role for rail than for road. The cure is transparency, accountability, and new forecasting methods. The challenge is to change the governance structures for forecasting and project development. Our article shows how planners may help achieve this.

Entrepreneurial ecosystems have emerged as a popular concept to explain the persist- ence of high-growth entrepreneurship within regions. However, as a theoretical concept ecosystems remain underdeveloped, making it difficult to understand their structure and influence on the entrepreneurship process. The article argues that ecosystems are com- posed of 10 cultural, social, and material attributes that provide benefits and resources to entrepreneurs and that the relationships between these attributes reproduce the ecosys- tem. This model is illustrated with case studies of Waterloo, Ontario, and Calgary, Alberta, Canada. The cases demonstrate the variety of different configurations that ecosystems can take.

Firm internationalisation has long been regarded as an incremental process, wherein firms gravitate towards ‘psychologically close’ markets and increase commitment to international markets in a gradual, step-wise, manner through a series of evolutionary ‘stages’. However, much of the recent literature provides clear evidence of rapid and dedicated internationalisation by ‘born global firms’. Typically, these are smaller entrepreneurial firms that internationalise

This analysis demonstrates the relevance and robustness of the theory of planned behavior in the prediction of business start–up intentions and subsequent behavior based on longitudinal survey data (2011 and 2012; n = 969) from the adult population in Austria and Finland. By doing so, the study addresses two weaknesses in current research: the limited scope of samples used in the majority of prior studies and the scarcity of investigations studying the translation of entrepreneurial intentions into behavior. The paper discusses conceptual and methodological issues related to studying the intention–behavior relationship and outlines avenues for future research.