Entrepreneurial advice sources and their antecedents Venture stage, innovativeness and internationalization

Purpose - Entrepreneurs interact with others and, through this, benefit from access to knowledge, resources and skills that enhance their own entrepreneurial and organizational capabilities. This paper aims to contribute to the literature interested in identifying and analyzing important antecedents of entrepreneurs' choices regarding social relations. The study shows how the venture stage, innovativeness and internationalization of the firm potentially influence entrepreneurial choices regarding their social sources of advice. Design/methodology/approach - The analysis is based on cross-sectional survey data for the years 2009 and 2010, involving 13 Middle East and North African (MENA) countries. Respondents include future prospective entrepreneurs, start-ups and owner-managers of operating businesses, a total of 13,251 respondents across all countries for the entire period. Findings - Entrepreneurs with innovative ventures draw more on advice sources that are able to give information useful for the commercialization of innovative products, and entrepreneurs of internationally exposed ventures rely on a broad base of advice sources that can connect them with a foreign market. However, the outcomes regarding the impact of "different venture stages" point to social interaction patterns that are strongly influenced by local culture and that do not support the assumption of universal entrepreneurship behavior. This study shows that social interactions decline in quantity the more as the venture progresses in age. However, the type of social interaction (e.g. private or professional sources) that entrepreneurs engage throughout the different venture stages remains essentially the same and does not change across different entrepreneurial phases. In the MENA sample, private relations remain the most important source of advice throughout all phases, and they are not replaced by other contacts. Research limitations/implications - Limitations of this paper refer to the use of a large-scale database that cannot address certain issues without more direct observation, such as the quality of different social relations. Future research could address this issue by offering more fine-grained items for the different advice sources. Originality/value - The paper contributes to the debate on whether entrepreneurship is universal in nature. It focuses on data from emerging and developing countries in the Arab world, which is has not been studied very much in the entrepreneurship literature.

Human-centered Innovation Processes

Alan Cabello Llamas

For more than a decade managers, academics, educators and politicians have indicated that innovation is the key to our future. As a result, we find a plethora of innovation initiatives around the world, from university curricula to the mission statements of banks. This push to innovate is a direct result of the recent economic downturn as well as from an ever more competitive, connected and dynamic world. In order to remain relevant in such a world, emphasis is given to generating new ideas that may lead to new products and services. Despite these initiatives, evidence indicates that investment in innovation does not correlate with success. Although the goal of innovation is clear, the processes whereby that goal may be accomplished are varied and not entirely understood. The motivation of this thesis, therefore, is to gain a better understanding of some of those innovation processes. In recent years, a growing number of firms, organizations and governments have adopted an approach to innovation that is referred to as âDesign Thinkingâ. They use the term to describe the process by which a multifunctional team tackles a problem by exploring the underlying needs of the people most affected by that problemâwhether that be customers, users, etc.âthen, based on these observations, defines the root cause or key elements of the problem and finally attempts to resolve it through an active cycle of ideating, prototyping and testing potential solutions. While the process itself is well defined and understood, its implementation and use by managers in the context of innovation management calls for further exploration. With this objective, I first conducted research within academic literature, followed by an ethnographic study focused on the use of Design Thinking by both large firms and entrepreneurial teams. The first paper of this dissertation examines the different elements in the Design Thinking process within the context of management research. The goal of the first conceptual article is thus to establish the common ground among diverse subfields of research in management upon which future research in Design Thinking may build. The second paper of this dissertation aims to uncover how large firms use Design Thinking as an approach to innovation. Based upon direct observation and interview data we find evidence of links between Design Thinking and Absorptive Capacity. We therefore propose that Design Thinking may be a helpful tool for firms who wish to innovate by an increase in their Absorptive Capacity. The third and final paper of this dissertation aims to understand the effects of Design Thinking on the venture creation process. This work is based on ethnographic research conducted at Stanford University wherein twelve teams participated in an accelerator program that uses a Design Thinking approach with the goal of creating and launching new ventures. Building on Dynamic Capabilities literature, this research finds that the teams with greater capability to iterate their venture concept through repeated cycles of attachment and detachment relative to their proposed products or services tend to be more successful.

EPFL2015

Building Capabilities for Service Innovation

Andreas Felix von Vangerow

The service sector is the most dominant sector in every developed economy today. The ability to develop and successfully launch new services is crucial for service organizations to stay competitive and to adapt to the ever-changing conditions of the environment. However, up until now, a mismatch remains between the importance of service innovation for society and the attention given to it in both academia and practice. Existing research has compared the innovative output of service firms with manufacturing firms and found that the difference is one of degree rather than of substance. Studies which focus on the process instead of the output of service innovation, however, are still relatively scarce. This dissertation aims to help close this research gap by examining three service innovation processes in different contexts. First, it offers a theoretical illumination of service innovation with the help of knowledge creation theory. This is beneficial for defining service innovation more precisely. The second study is concerned with the influence of emotional factors on the development of dynamic capabilities in new ventures. It shows that young ventures which are able to deliberately switch between emotional and analytical modes of operation have a higher likelihood of success. The study compares the development of two service-oriented ventures with two product-oriented ones that are part of an accelerator program at the School of Design Thinking at Stanford University. The third paper is concerned with product-service strategies, or Servitization, and the relation to vertical integration and the coordination of innovation in downstream markets. The study shows that the Servitization development, i.e. the vertical integration of manufacturing firms into its users' operation, is a response to the failure of architectural innovation in more flexible buyer-supplier relationships. The study finds four different strategies for the service business of manufacturing firms based on case studies in the mechanical engineering, electrical engineering, and chemical industries. Overall, I am able to show that firms need to be able to build three distinct capabilities to master their service innovation efforts. First, they need to build up a capacity for innovation to gain economies from partial repetition of solutions. Second, firms need to have skills in place to create and manage boundary objects, especially at the client interface. Finally, they need to have capabilities to build up complementarities which help protect revenues from their service innovation initiatives.

EPFL2015

New ventures based on open innovation – an empirical analysis of start-up firms in embedded Linux

Marc Gruber

An important and intriguing aspect of e-entrepreneurship is the formation of new ventures in the domain of open source software (OSS). Previous research on these ventures has primarily looked at the design of business models. The purpose of this paper is to explore how three key challenges of venture management – the liabilities of newness and smallness of start-ups and market entry barriers – affect new ventures in OSS. Based on empirical data from personal interviews and a large scale survey, we find that several liabilities that are typically discussed in the entrepreneurship literature are much less of a challenge for new ventures in OSS. Our findings have implications for the emerging theory on e-entrepreneurship and for entrepreneurs considering to exploit business opportunities based on OSS and on open innovation in general.

2006

Building Capabilities for Service Innovation

Andreas Felix von Vangerow

EPFL2015

Human-centered Innovation Processes

Alan Cabello Llamas

EPFL2015