Entrepreneurship education

Entrepreneurship education seeks to provide students with the knowledge, skills and motivation to encourage entrepreneurial success in a variety of settings. Variations of entrepreneurship education are offered at all levels of schooling from primary or secondary schools through graduate university programs. Objectives Entrepreneurship education focuses on the development of skills or attributes that enable the realization of opportunity, where management education is focused on the best way to operate existing hierarchies. Both approaches share an interest in achieving "profit" in some form (which in non-profit organizations or government can take the form of increased services or decreased cost or increased responsiveness to the customer/citizen/client). Entrepreneurship education can be oriented towards different ways of realizing opportunities: *The most popular one is regular entrepreneurship: opening a new organization (e.g. starting a new business). The vast majo

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

Julia Katharina Binder, Emmanuelle Fauchart Foray

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.

ELSEVIER2021

Navigating the validity tradeoffs of entrepreneurship research experiments: A systematic review and best-practice suggestions

Jérémy Binder

Experimental methods provide important advantages for advancing academic understanding of entrepreneurship. Yet, the complex and comingled relationships between some of entrepreneurship's key characteristics pose thorny methodological challenges to entrepreneurship researchers notably to negotiate important tradeoffs between the ideals of external and construct validity. To facilitate the sound mobilization of experimental methods in entrepreneurship research, we present an overview of critical validity challenges plaguing entrepreneurship research experiments and assess the validation practices mobilized in 144 studies using such methods. Building on these findings, we develop a practical guide of actionable validation strategies to help experimenters navigate the above tradeoffs and conduct entrepreneurship research experiments that are realistic, theoretically meaningful, and that help establish the causal effects of their focal variables. By doing so, we contribute a set of pragmatic means to support the mobilization of experimental methods for advancing entrepreneurship research. Executive summary: Experimental methods hold important advantages for advancing the theoretical and practical understanding of entrepreneurial action. The power of research experiments lies in their ability to yield convincing evidence supporting the causal effects of the factors they investigate. Unfortunately, entrepreneurship research experiments are often criticized for offering pale copies of both the realities they attempt to model and the theoretical constructs they aim to study. The entrepreneurial process and its related activities count many intertwined characteristics-such as radical uncertainty, temporal dynamics, high personal stakes and other constraints-that can prove difficult to integrate in experimental studies. Moreover, these characteristics' comingled relationships raise important tensions with experimental methods' core principle of surgically focusing on the causal effects of a few manipulated variables. As a result, entrepreneurship research must overcome a number of validity challenges and tradeoffs in order to successfully leverage experimental methods and offer findings that convincingly support the causality of their theoretical developments. Compounding these difficulties, the guidance typically offered in research methods textbooks tends to focus on generic issues that are altogether separate from the specific challenges of conducting valid entrepreneurship research experiments. Because of this, many research manuscripts mobilizing experimental methods arrive at the review process with important shortcomings. This threatens the field's knowledge accumulation and typically calls for authors to refine their work and collect additional data. To help researchers face these challenges, we offer a three-part compendium focused on bolstering the validity of entrepreneurship research experiments. First, we complement the generic observations of research methods monographs by presenting an overview of the validity tradeoffs inherent to mobilizing experimental methods in entrepreneurship research - and of strategies for addressing these. Second, and to demonstrate that overcoming these challenges is not a trivial task, we conduct a structured literature review of the external and construct validation strategies deployed in a comprehensive corpus of 144 relevant articles published in both entrepreneurship-focused journals and broader generalist journals from the applied behavioral and social sciences. Among the most positive elements emerging from our analyses, we note upward trends in the mobilization of pilot tests, in the conduct of multiple experiments within single papers as well as in the use of parallel studies using different data collection methods. We also observe increased efforts to explain the practical relevance of experimental findings. To our surprise, however, our analyses uncover downward trends in the mobilization of pre-tests to examine the research material's external validity and representativeness, as well as the continued publication of studies that do not report empirical evidence regarding their focal manipulations' construct validity. This is concerning. Such practices undermine these experiments' abilities to yield convincing evidence in support of their theorized causal effects - and for what these imply for fostering entrepreneurial action. Third, and in light of the results obtained, we develop a practical guide of actionable strategies for navigating the validity tradeoffs of entrepreneurship research experiments. Grouping these strategies together allows us to systematize recommendations typically found across various methods monographs, thereby offering an overall scheme to help entrepreneurship researchers navigate the validity tradeoffs inherent to conducting realistic and theoretically meaningful experiments. To make our recommendations as actionable as possible, we develop an extensive step-by-step guide of design and assessment strategies relevant to entrepreneurship research experiments. The guide spans the entire research process - from conceiving an experimental study to collecting, analyzing and reporting the results. The guide also includes a number of relevant exemplars from many different studies we analyzed. By discussing these entrepreneurship-specific validity tradeoffs and combining that with an overview of strategies for addressing them, our study offers an entrepreneurship-centered synthesis that equips entrepreneurship researchers with the necessary tools for conducting experimental research that advances understanding of the causal effects supporting entrepreneurial action and its related phenomena.

ELSEVIER SCIENCE BV2019

Entrepreneurship across Sociocultural Contexts: Empirical and Theoretical Perspectives

Shirah Eden Foy

EPFL2020

Navigating the validity tradeoffs of entrepreneurship research experiments: A systematic review and best-practice suggestions

Jérémy Binder

ELSEVIER SCIENCE BV2019

Entrepreneurship across Sociocultural Contexts: Empirical and Theoretical Perspectives

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

Navigating the validity tradeoffs of entrepreneurship research experiments: A systematic review and best-practice suggestions

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

Entrepreneurship across Sociocultural Contexts: Empirical and Theoretical Perspectives

Navigating the validity tradeoffs of entrepreneurship research experiments: A systematic review and best-practice suggestions