Innovating firms may acquire foreign knowledge and improve their innovation performance by offshoring their R&D activities to their own foreign affiliates (captive offshoring) as well as by contracting out their R&D to external foreign parties (contract offshoring). This study examines the impact of both R&D offshoring strategies on innovation performance. Based on a panel dataset of 2421 R&D-active firms in Germany, we demonstrate that captive offshoring and contract offshoring differ fundamentally in their impact on firm innovation performance. At low degrees of offshoring, contract offshoring positively affects innovation performance and is preferable over captive offshoring. At larger degrees of offshoring, captive offshoring becomes more beneficial while contract offshoring is disadvantageous. Both offshoring strategies eventually harm innovation performance when excessively employed. Furthermore, the R&D offshoring-performance relationship is leveraged by R&D intensity, such that firms with a larger knowledge stock benefit stronger from both captive and contract offshoring.
Despite the high prevalence of hybrid entrepreneurs among multiple job holders, research on hybrid entrepreneurship and multiple job holding has largely evolved independently from each other. We take a first step for a fruitful exchange between both research streams by building on hybrid entrepreneurship theories to explain why multiple job holders frequently have higher hourly earnings in their second job compared to their main job. Consistent with these entrepreneurship theories, our empirical analysis, based on the British Household Panel Survey (1991–2008), demonstrates that engaging in self-employment as second job significantly increases the probability of having higher average earnings in this second job, compared to being paid employed in both occupations. Furthermore, we explore the roles of gender and household composition in explaining multiple job holders’ earnings structure.
While previous studies demonstrated that, in many settings, women tend to be less willing than men to engage in interpersonal competition, this study focuses on selection into self-competition. Competing against own past performances can be an integral part of life, including job and sports. Using data obtained from a lab-in-the-field experiment, we find empirical evidence that women are, on average, more reluctant than men to compete against their own past performance. Our results suggest that this difference can be mainly explained by gender differences in risk preferences.
We draw on a variety of research areas that explain why individuals combine paid employment and self-employment. We provide a comprehensive empirical comparison of the relevance and co-occurrence of multiple motives. Our analysis shows that motives can be meaningfully distinguished according to whether a motive is endogenously transitory or not, and suggests the presence of three dominant classes of hybrid entrepreneurs. In particular, learning and growth constraints, which we refer to as transitory motives resolving over time, play a crucial role in distinguishing between the three classes. Based on an analysis of 3,868 hybrid and pure entrepreneurs, we show that our typology helps better understand the potentially heterogeneous relationships between being a hybrid entrepreneur and entrepreneurial performance and innovation behavior.
As innovation policy targets innovations suffering from underinvestment, we examine the effect of public grants on innovation. While innovation involves a lot of uncertainty, we suggest public grants as the best option bearing no obligations. But not all innovations are alike as they differ by newness level. Hence, we distinguish between ""new-to-world"" explorative and ""new-to-firm"" explotation innovation. Making use of (inter)national knowledge flow, some exploitative innovations are not ""new-to-firm"" but rather ""new-to-region or -country"" leveraging existing knowledge from another region or country. Allocating grants to the most promising startups, we evaluate startups' quality by high-tech industry and ""entrepreneurial orientation"" (EO). Within over 4,000 early-stage German startups, we find that explorative innovations benefit the most from grants, especially high EO startups. Also, grants help low EO firms to become innovative at all and to launch exploitative innovation with (inter)national knowledge flow.
Hybrid entrepreneurs are entrepreneurs who are simultaneously working as paid employees. Although they constitute a systematic and large part of new firm creation, their possibly distinct responsiveness to public policy is not yet studied. Arguing for the need to consider hybrid entrepreneurs in public policy, we analyze the introduction of one-stop shops for faster and simplified firm registration in Mexico. We find that hybrid entrepreneurs are more responsive to changes in entry regulation than full-time entrepreneurs. While both the best and least educated people respond to the reform, the effect is most pronounced for highly educated hybrid entrepreneurs.
Come on and Take a Free Ride: Contributing to Public Goods in Native and Foreign Language Settings
(2016)
Business schools around the world must prepare their students for two realities: operating in an English-speaking business world and working in teams. As yet, there is limited understanding of how operating in a native or a foreign language impacts students’ propensity to free ride in group settings. Building on general dual process theory of higher cognition and using a unique dataset of 276 Dutch business school students, we find that students are more inclined to free ride in a foreign language setting than in a native language setting. A student’s conscientiousness attenuates this relationship such that this effect is stronger for students who are less conscientious, and weaker and almost absent for those who are more conscientious. After a student decides not to free ride but to positively contribute to the group, the specific level of contribution is not affected by foreign language. We discuss implications for practice, policy, theory, and future research.
This study examines the relationship between prenatal testosterone exposure (PTE) and selection into entrepreneurship. We argue that the relationship between PTE and entrepreneurial intent is positive and mediated by general and domain–specific risk–taking related to financial investment and professional career. Using the second–to–fourth digit ratio (2D:4D) as noninvasive retrospective marker for PTE, we identify two–step mediation effects of PTE on entrepreneurial intent through both general and domain–specific risk–taking. To account for possible socialization–based effects, we control for gender and parental self–employment. Applying ordinary least squares (OLS) regression analyses and structural equation models, we provide empirical evidence for a biological association between 2D:4D and entrepreneurial intent.
For a sample of 1243 European companies, we analyse the link between firm type and foreign direct investment (FDI) locations. We find substantial empirical evidence that being a family firm does not only affect the overall propensity for FDI, but that this effect is also specific to target regions. Overall, family firms invest more than managerial-led firms, particularly in Europe and North America. Furthermore, the BRIC countries, Brazil, Russia, India and China do not constitute a homogeneous attractiveness cluster for FDI.
There's no fox like an old fox: Dimensions of entrepreneurial orientation and venture closure
(2023)
Only a few scholars examined downsides of EO and suggest it may negatively affect survival. Previous research, which mainly focuses on mature companies, assumes that the relationship between EO and survival is constant. However, because firm characteristics and causal mechanisms change as young venture survive and grow into mature firms, the relationships between EO and survival could also change over time. We extend the EO literature by considering changing EO effects when venture grow into mature firms and by employing a multidimensional view on EO and identify isolating independent mechanisms for the influence of each dimension (i.e. innovativeness, proactiveness and risk-taking) on the survival of young ventures. While the nature of proactiveness on performance is rathe positive, risk-taking and innovativeness increases the variance of firm performance and thus the chances of failure. However, the latter can be separated according to whether the increase in variance occurs at a single point in time (risk-taking) or over time (innovation) and whether the survivors have more money or more innovations. For young firms, innovativeness and risk-taking inhibit survival, while proactiveness promotes it, so the dimensions have divergent effects. As a consequence of the attrition of young ventures, the associations of innovativeness and risk-taking reverse when they grow older. Our empirical analyses are based on panel data of 8,518 young firms.