FG ABWL, insbesondere empirische Unternehmensforschung und Transformation
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We examine how external endorsements help new ventures with varying degrees of innovativeness to attract funding. According to optimal distinctiveness theory, new ventures should be as different from competitors as legitimately possible. However, initial research suggests that new ventures can also buffer their legitimacy through external endorsements. We clarify that effects of such legitimacy buffers depend critically on an audience's unique legitimacy-distinctiveness relationship. Specifically, external endorsements lead to different predictions about shifts in optimal distinctiveness for return-seeking audiences compared to novelty-seeking audiences as relevant new venture funders. For return-seeking audiences, new ventures are perceived as less legitimate when they are non-innovative or radically innovative so that incrementally innovative new ventures are most attractive without endorsements. External endorsements can thus buffer the legitimacy of non-innovative and radically innovative new ventures, but they lead to different performance implications for a return-seeking audience. While non-innovative new ventures increase their attractiveness, only radically innovative new ventures can become optimally distinctive and outperform other distinctiveness configurations. In contrast, novelty-seeking audiences already have a higher tolerance for radically innovative new ventures, so the effects of external endorsements are less pronounced. Four empirical studies, using observational data and experiments in equity and reward-based crowdfunding, provide strong support for this theory and account for alternative explanations such as risk perceptions. In turn, we shed new light on the crucial, audience-specific function of external endorsements, namely, as a means to alter optimal distinctiveness levels.
Existing research focuses on hope as a motivational driver for personal effort. We argue that hope can facilitate individuals’ decisions for and against effort, depending on specific conditions. Based on a vignette study with 350 subjects, we test this suggestion with a scenario where a person decides for or against an effortful training that experts consider appropriate for that person, presuming that one could hope for success based on training but also for success without training. We find that hope can leverage individuals’ decisions to engage in and avoid effortful behavior. Moreover, ambiguity in a behavioral outcome strengthens the effect of hope on the likelihood of choosing the corresponding behavior. Separating internal from a more general kind of hope, we find that hope for success by training is mainly driven by internal hope but hope without training relates less to internal hope. Carefully separating the effects of hope from the effects of optimism, our study highlights the relevance of hope beyond optimism.
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.
While we have a great deal of scholarship on legitimacy, our understanding of how stigmatized actors seek to (re-)gain legitimacy remains quite limited. We seek to enhance our understanding of such processes through a qualitative, in-depth case study of a radical soccer fan community that, when faced an identity-threatening event, launched a crowdfunding campaign that ultimately succeeded in enhancing their legitimacy for their cause and enabling them to have a voice in a central strategic decision on the redesign of their club's soccer stadium. We leverage this case to develop a model on how stigmatized groups might be able to enhance their legitimacy in the eyes of certain audiences. We show that first, the crowdfunding campaign created a digital and temporal space allowing them to disassociate stigmatized and associate legitimate elements (i.e. artifact-based affiliation). Second, we theorize how various association tactics were drawn upon over time, facilitating an interrelated set of dynamics between what we label manual and forced association. We conclude with a discussion of the implications of our study for future research on legitimation processes related to stigmatized groups.
Previous research examining the link between individuals’ preferences for competition and occupational choice has not taken explicitly into account how the level of competition in various occupations is perceived by individuals. In contrast, we argue that individuals’ perception of intensity of competition is of key importance for linking theoretically and empirically individual competitiveness to occupational choice, particularly entrepreneurial entry. Using two datasets, one obtained from a student sample and the other from a general population sample, we provide empirical evidence that the relationship between individual competitiveness and occupational choice is moderated by perceived intensity of competition. Moreover, entrepreneurship is, on average, perceived as more competitively intense than paid employment in both samples implying that individuals shying away from competition and at the same time perceive particularly entrepreneurship as competitively intense are more likely to select into paid employment than into entrepreneurship.
We examine how radical innovativeness affects how new ventures can establish legitimacy. While legitimacy research often assumes that new ventures similarly suffer from the liability of newness, radically innovative new ventures face stronger liabilities and are less successful when raising early-stage equity financing. Consequently, they may benefit more from identity-related, associative, and organizational legitimacy-building mechanisms, which mitigate the adverse effect and may turn radical innovativeness into an asset. Campaign-level observations for technology ventures and complementary individual-level experimental analyses of financial resource providers’ legitimacy assessments suggest that legitimation mechanisms are less effective for less radically innovative ventures and might even be counter-productive.
We examined firm-level and country-level antecedents of R&D internationalization strategies, focusing on differences between enterprises in emerging and advanced economies. Previous research often focuses on the relative importance of home-base-exploiting versus home-base-augmenting knowledge transfer strategies. We suggest that country-level and firm-level effects differ for the two strategies, and hence, we examined each strategy independently. Collecting data in China, India, the United States, and Germany, we demonstrated that firms' relative technological position as a firm-level characteristic can explain differences in home-base-exploiting strategies between emerging and advanced economies. In contrast, home-base-augmenting is more closely related to exploratory institutional environments, a country-level factor. Thus, either firm- or country-level antecedents can gain a dominant role, depending on the strategy implemented.
Can radicals get a seat on the negotiation table? A Dynamic Perspective on Legitimation Processes
(2021)
The growing body of the cultural entrepreneurship literature seeks to understand how actors facing the liability of newness gain legitimacy in the eyes of resource holding audiences. However, less is known about how dynamics play out overtime when an actor with a lack of legitimacy seeks to regain it. In this paper, we conduct a qualitative, in-depth case study of a radical soccer fan community facing an identity-threatening political decision (i.e., relocating their fan zone within their stadium). Realizing that they lack a seat on the negotiation table and their traditional forms of protest bore no fruits, they launched a crowdfunding campaign to promote their cause (i.e., keeping the fan zone). The radicals successfully raised money and - even more important - convinced several national and international audiences, ultimately resulting in a legitimacy gain in the critical local political audience's eyes. This paper demonstrates how digital artifacts such as crowdfunding serve as a mechanism for dissociating with illegitimate elements while reconfiguring the links with the environment to gain legitimacy. Moreover, we demonstrate that actors with a lack of legitimacy first need to gain endorsements from other actors before turning to the actor holding the most critical resource.
Emerging market multinational enterprises (EMNEs) increasingly access foreign technology and knowledge by internationalizing their R&D activities. Since technological laggardness hinders efficient knowledge transfer, a successful catch-up with advanced-economy multinational enterprises
(AMNEs) requires EMNEs to transfer foreign knowledge across national boundaries more effectively. However, we lack a clear understanding of how EMNEs manage this knowledge transfer and integration and to what extent the employment and effectiveness of corresponding facilitation mechanisms may differ from AMNEs. Adopting a sender-recipient model and drawing on arguments from learning theory and transaction costs economics, we suggest that EMNEs benefit more from and, consequently, are more likely to engage in mechanisms to increase
recipient capabilities and sender motivation. In a comparative analysis of Chinese, Indian, German, and U.S. MNEs and focusing on frequent international exchange of R&D personnel regarding recipient capabilities and the governance of foreign R&D activities regarding sender motivation, we observe positive relationships with home-market innovation for EMNEs, but not for AMNEs. Moreover, we observe that EMNEs exploit this positive effect and are more likely to use these mechanisms when focusing on technology- than on market-seeking.