Getting more from many & mdash;A framework of community resourcefulness in new venture creation

In this study, we move beyond the predominant focus entrepreneurship researchers have put on the acquisition of financial capital from professional investors by exploring how, and with what effects, entrepreneurs can mobilize all required resources?financial, human, physical, and social?from local communities. Our temporal analysis of the resource mobilization processes of seven cases of community-based enterprises (CBEs) reveals four sets of activities with distinct goals and effects, which explain how entrepreneurs can meet or even exceed their resource mobilization goals by mobilizing a greater variety of resources from a broader base of resource providers. Importantly, the findings show how entrepreneurs can achieve a multiplier effect meaning that they can perpetuate the inflow of significant amounts of unsolicited resources by continuously engaging in activities targeted at creating a sense of identification and ownership, which require comparatively little extra effort and resource inputs. We synthesize our findings in a framework of community resourcefulness in new venture creation. This framework adds a new perspective of resourcefulness as ?getting more from many,? and demonstrates that resourceful behavior is not necessarily about individuals? ability to respond to situational constraints but also about their ability to recognize and seize situational resource potentials. Our findings have important implications for our understanding of resourcefulness in entrepreneurship and the nascent body of literature on community-based enterprises.

Du savetier au financier: la famille Borel, de Neuchâtel à San Francisco

The Borel Family From Neuchâtel to San Francisco : From shoemaker to banker Did you know that the Cable Car was owned by Swiss citizens? BACKTRACKING : PRIVATE FINANCING OF PUBLIC METROPOLITAN INFRASTRUCTURES Executive Summary: Did you know that one of San Francisco most famous fixtures, the Cable car, was owned by Swiss citizens? Through this detailed study of the Borel family, and its business and investment plans we will observe an example of private financing of public metropolitan infrastructures in the 19th Century and see if it can teach us lessons for tomorrow’s needs? TOPICS Looking at today’s infrastructures, one does not always remember how much work contracting firms had to accomplish in order to produce our contemporary standard of urban comfort . What is to be said of yesterday’s planners or engineers and the credit they deserve? We often hear stories of local events brought to epic proportions, but who are the responsible players who really proved the feasibility of regional infrastructures? Who actually did support, sponsor or finance such achievements? The present study is a trial to propose a new view over such apparently hidden business phenomenons. This research shows us an inspiring case-study of local entrepreneurs who gather key success-factors. The author concentrates on the economic aspect of infrastructure financing to which modern metropolitan society owes its specific urban growth. Contemporary challenges such as job creation, globalisation, technology transfer and local economic development are all interconnected to metropolitan development. XIXTH CENTURY METROPOLITAN INFRASTRUCTURES FINANCING Le Temps, 30th July 1998, D. Masmejan : «Alfred Borel, Auguste’s elder son, enters the finance world. He meets an extraordinary businessman fate. His understanding of the economic impact of the Californian Gold Rush allows him to seize the opportunity of the westward American expansionism. He sails to San Francisco in 1855 where he is the founder of the «Alfred Borel & Company», followed in 1856 by a Mortgage fund (the “Caisse Hypothécaire” bank). The same year sees the foundation of Credit Suisse in Zurich. Alfred Borel investment bank participates in very important infrastructure projects in California and elsewhere in the second half of the XIXth century. At first, its investment into the worldwide famous San Francisco Cable Car is marginal and then becomes overwhelming. Other investments include the “Los Angeles Railway Company” or the “United Railroad Company”, the San Francisco Waterworks, other banks and real estate.» DETAILED RESEARCH ALLOWING TO UNDERSTAND FINANCIAL DECISION MAKING The author reviews financial decision-making through personal correspondence and private accounting in some of those completely documented yearly archives. The «sixth Switzerland» well-connected to the Presbyterian «Huguenot International» cosmopolitan network leads us to detailed research and discoveries. The accounting of 1866 to 1884 goes through the 3rd and 4th San Francisco City real estate crises that the mortgage bankers Borel brothers had to endure. Alfred Borel faced the 2nd Californian real estate crisis (which resulted from the first loss of public interest in gold mines in the years 1854-1858). Then he went back to Switzerland after the death of his father and uncles in order to reconstitute the Swiss end of the pipe connecting his bank’s investors to the Borel family network. He left duty of the day-to-day San Francisco business to his younger brother Antoine after having set up asset management rules. Together both brothers explored new ways of diversifying the investment of the funds they are managing and place them into infrastructures networks. Taking shares «upstream» into equipment industries (for instance the wire works delivering the precise traction rope of cable cars) or other real estate assets, allowed them to guarantee superior interests payments to European investors or creditors in comparison with other financial markets. This anticyclical economic strategy set up their financial success that occurred during the 5th local economic recession, which coincides with the beginning of the big worldwide Victorian economic crisis (1880-1895). UNIQUE SPECIFICITY OF THIS RESEARCH This research process is rarely accomplished in engineering and architecture schools, construction and infrastructures institutes or research centers. The integrity of construction professionals precludes their questioning « where does the whole process originate from?». Builders ultimately considered themselves as «honest craftsmen» that have to dedicate their energy and resources to the proper technical execution of the clients wishes and orders. Customers duty is then to write the project’s specifications and thus to initiate its process. The author of this case-study demonstrates the feasibility of comparisons between similar structural change periods in the XIXth century and the years 1990-2000. Hence, a new theme of interdisciplinary studies for engineers could be implemented by promoting this systemic approach between urban infrastructure financiers, suppliers and users. Last but not least, the insider observations and outsider revelations which are featured in this work are seldom considered in an engineering historical approach. It is not often that an author with a contemporary outsider vision has access to family archives that entirely document bicentennial confidential banker correspondence.

EPFL1999

Three Essays on Navigating the Stages in New Venture Creation

Jana Thiel

Starting a new venture is arguably an exciting journey into previously unknown territories. Since entrepreneurs, through their economic activities, are central to social prosperity, academic research has a strong interest to understand who those entrepreneurs are and what they do. Much is yet unknown about how entrepreneurs think and what behaviors emerge from their thought processes. Consequently, in this dissertation I set out to explore and provide new insights on behavior, cognitive processes, and managerial practices that entrepreneurs employ to navigate the demands and complexities of the venturing process. The first paper puts the aspiring entrepreneur center stage. Starting a new venture is an intentional activity; however, not everyone who exhibits the wish to start a new venture actually does so. For a long time, the entrepreneurship research community has clung to the notion that intention is the single best predictor for action. Yet, empirical evidence from large-scale studies indicates that this view may not reflect reality. Significant time lags exist between the intent to found a venture and actual pursuit, and high dropout rates hint that additional elements are necessary beyond intent. Our current understanding of entrepreneurial intention largely fails to predict when and under which circumstances aspiring entrepreneurs will actually implement their intentions. Consequently, this research addresses the question of which amongst those who aspire to become an entrepreneur is more likely to execute their entrepreneurial intentions. In order to answer that question, the paper builds on fragmented and disparate work of personality, cognition, affect, and self-regulatory mechanisms and develops a theoretical model that helps explain individual-level factors that enable the budding entrepreneur to cross the intent-action-gap and persevere in the venturing process. Paper 2 takes as a starting point the belief that resources are essential to the success of firms. To the extent that those resources are fungible, i.e. can be amended to several different services and linked to different market applications, they are an important driver of value creation and the trajectory of new firms. In fact, recent research highlights that new firms derive performance benefits when identifying multiple opportunities prior to market entry. However, it remains hitherto understudied as to which factors play a role in this process of leveraging technological competences. We approach this topic by focusing on the identification of new technology-market- linkages through person-resource-interaction. While previous research has predominantly studied the impact of the person in terms of competencies and prior knowledge, this paper looks at the resource and examines how resource properties shape the human perception of opportunity spaces. Building on 24 in-depth case studies of different early-stage technologies from the labs of EPFL, this study provides detailed insights on how differences in the value creation potential of resources emerge from the interplay between several factors pertinent to the resource itself and the subsequent human reasoning. This work contributes to the microfoundations of the resource-based view of the firm and thus has implications for several areas of research, most notably strategic management, organization and innovation studies, and entrepreneurship. Paper 3 finally shifts focus onto specific managerial practices. From the vantage point that firms develop market strategies and application portfolios built on technological resources, current research has yet to address how the strategic and practical needs of the firm align with the requirements of protecting the intellectual property and inventions comprising those resources and what means of protection provide optimal avenues for future exploitation. Traditionally, protecting IP is associated with patenting. However, the procedural requirements and the high cost of the patenting process often act as a barrier for small firms to obtain legal property rights. This puts them at a potential disadvantage in appropriating returns from their inventions. It is hence surprising how little is known, both in the practical and the research domains, as to the uses of IP defense regimes that combine patenting and non-patenting mechanisms, notably alternative disclosure through defensive publication. This paper advances a framework that helps identify under which circumstances firms may benefit from the strategic use of defensive publication in their IP management. Through survey data from a sample of 89 innovative European SMEs we provide initial empirical evidence on the prevalence of such complementary IP strategies, and thus prepare the ground for further detailed studies. This work advances current literature on IP management by SMEs, introducing the hitherto understudied mechanism of strategic disclosure, and it will ultimately help identify a potential source of performance differences of innovative SMEs. In summary, this dissertation takes up three interesting and hitherto understudied phenomena of the multi-faceted venturing process. Through cross-disciplinary theory- driven inquiry and multi-method approaches, this dissertation adds new perspectives and generates new insights that extend our understanding of how entrepreneurs think and act.

EPFL2012

Entrepreneurship across Sociocultural Contexts: Empirical and Theoretical Perspectives

Shirah Eden Foy

Entrepreneurship is a highly contextualized process. Yet, the vast majority of entrepreneurship research has focused on Western contexts, yielding a skewed picture of global entrepreneurial behavior. Moreover, theories of mainstream psychology explaining the development of individual characteristics and worldviews - which have important implications for venture creation - have shown limited transferability to the eighty-five percent of the world's population that does not inhabit Western, Educated, Industrialized, Rich, Democratic societies. Much of this variation in social processes has yet to be explored in organization studies, meaning that our understanding of the vast firm creation activities taking place globally is sorely limited. Contributing to a more nuanced understanding of entrepreneurship, this thesis offers two contextualized empirical studies and a review of the main approaches to studying organizations, their founders and members, across sociocultural contexts. Study I, a qualitative study, develops and presents theory to explain how key venture decisions are shaped by the dynamics produced when entrepreneurs' identities interact with the surrounding social structure. Based on 50 in-depth interviews with Taiwanese entrepreneurs, we show that the (mis)alignment between an entrepreneur's identity structure and the perceived social structure of their environment produces tensions or reinforcement for the individual that frame their overarching attitude toward firm creation. These attitudes fundamentally shape the founder's strategic orientation, offer, production, and distribution. We extend theorizing on founder identity and discuss the limitations of theorizing based on a single sociocultural context or a single period in history. Study II reviews the psychological literature's various approaches to studying culture, presenting four packaged approaches that management scholars may adopt in their studies of organizational phenomena. While compelling evidence of wide variation in psychological orientations across cultures calls for deeper and broader studies of organizations both within and across cultural settings, the diversity of conceptualizations of culture and directives for its study create considerable barriers to entry for management scholars aiming to do rigorous work. In this study, I discuss key elements of the various approaches available, presenting the merits and limitations of each, and providing examples of how management scholars may employ each packaged approach to extend theories of organization. Study III, a qualitative study, examines venturing in the context of grand societal challenges--a context characterized by high complexity, requiring high impact, highly scalable solutions that generally engage multiple institutional actors. In an in-depth, longitudinal study of Swiss celebrity founder Bertrand Piccard and the Solar Impulse Foundation, we discover latent hybridity at play as the organization accelerates its sustainable mission with the brand of its celebrity founder--a brand which requires maintaining over time in order to provide continued support to the organization. We refine the concept of latent hybridity and develop a model of organizational awakening and response to latent hybridity, extending the literature on hybrid organizing as well as entrepreneurship in the context of grand challenges.

EPFL2020