Research summary: Entrepreneurs develop innovations, fulfill customer needs, and spur economic growth by recognizing, evaluating, and exploiting opportunities. Despite progress, scholarly understanding of how entrepreneurs achieve these objectives may be incomplete. For instance, little explanation exists for why entrepreneurs may pursue activities seemingly at random, nor is there a clear endpoint to the entrepreneurship process. To address these concerns, we present a framework that integrates sensemaking and structuration perspectives to specify the cognitive and behavioral influences on the entrepreneurship process. Within this framework, entrepreneurs ultimately pursue opportunities through developing and deploying capabilities to create value for customers.Managerial summary: While entrepreneurs' initial insights regarding innovations and customer needs are important, these insights are only the beginning of an interactive, iterative path that ends with the formation of an organization that can reliably produce value for customers. One of entrepreneurs' most important tools along this path is their set of scripts. Scripts help define how entrepreneurs act and interact so they can fully understand market needs and develop the means for solving these needs. In this paper, our objective is to describe how these scripts help entrepreneurs do the hard work of thinking and acting to effectively create new venture capabilities and to explain how entrepreneurs, who may possess similar sets of scripts, may nevertheless conceptualize different opportunities and solutions. Strat. Entrepreneurship J., : 21-42 (2016) 10 1 As process-based perspectives, both sensemaking and structuration discuss individuals' activities. As noted, although both perspectives recognize the importance of cognitive and behavioral activities, sensemaking predominately emphasizes cognitive activities and structuration predominately emphasizes behavioral activities. For the sake of clarity, we discuss sensemaking 'activities' and structuration 'behaviors.'C. Pryor et al.

Firms differ in the extent to which they scan their environments, which ultimately affects their performance. Although upper echelons theory suggests that top executives’ individual-level attributes affect firm strategy and performance, our understanding of how these attributes affect firms’ environmental scanning remains weak. Advancing knowledge in this area is important because such scanning is a key first step in strategic decision making. We theorize that top executives’ goal orientations (i.e., inherent motivations that shape what individuals generally seek to accomplish when engaging in challenging tasks) affect their firms’ environmental scanning. Specifically, firms whose top executives exhibit higher learning goal orientations (i.e., they seek knowledge in an effort to improve) or higher performance prove goal orientations (i.e., they seek to demonstrate their competence to others) might engage in more environmental scanning than firms whose top executives have higher performance avoid goal orientations (i.e., they seek to avoid demonstrating incompetence). We also theorize that these relationships differ between founders (who have more status and influence in their firms) and nonfounders (who are under more pressure from owners). As firm environmental scanning is found to relate positively to firm performance, understanding how top executives shape this activity has important theoretical and practical implications. This study contributes to the growing stream of upper echelons research that examines top executives’ personality and cognitive, as opposed to demographic, characteristics. It also enriches understanding of the situational nature of goal orientations’ effects, which differ according to top executives’ status as founder or nonfounder.

Nearly half of the population in Africa lives on less than $1.25 per day in what scholars refer to as base-of-the-pyramid (BOP) markets. More broadly, BOP markets account for two billion of the world's population living in extreme poverty. Household enterprises, a dominant organizational form in BOP markets, draw upon significant levels of family involvement. In order to cope with poverty, the involvement often includes inputs from elderly to young family members. Yet, we have little understanding of how family embeddedness influences household enterprise outcomes in BOP markets. The article presents a model that explains how the institutional environments with BOP markets influence family embeddedness in the household enterprise, and how family embeddedness influences household enterprises' povertyrelated outcomes (i.e., subsistence and child well-being). It also examines how household enterprises can draw upon income diversification strategies to reduce their vulnerability to poverty. The theory presented herein provides a foundation for scholars to examine family firm-related issues in BOP markets.

University-wide entrepreneurship is introduced as a logical consequence of the rapid development of entrepreneurship in post-secondary institutions across the globe. While sometimes approached simply as a redefinition of the boundaries for an entrepreneurship program on college campuses, in this article we conceptualize university-wide entrepreneurship as a transformational, multi-dimensional force that enables universities to be more innovative, risktaking and proactive. The underlying nature of this conceptualization is explored together with reasons for the emergence of entrepreneurship across campuses. Ways in which entrepreneurship is manifested within a university are investigated, key stakeholders for the university-wide approach are identified, and obstacles to implementation of these initiatives are specified. Five dimensions of university-wide entrepreneurship are introduced: inter-disciplinary research, a curriculum and degree programs, co-curricular programming, community engagement, and university operations. An integrative model is proposed of key elements that contribute to a climate where successful universitywide efforts can be pursued. Included here are an academic champion, a consistent definition, a clear statement of purpose, a governance structure, supporting infrastructure, a curricular model, co-curricular programming, a resource model, incentives, proactive publicity, and targeted outcomes and metrics. Alternative approaches to program governance are reviewed, including those centered within and outside of a business school. Implications are drawn for the ongoing development of the university-wide concept.

Despite scholars’ early emphasis on the role people play in fostering firms’ absorptive capacity (AC), research has not deeply explored the individual-level antecedents of this important capability. We draw on adaptive-innovative theory to explain how top decision makers’ cognitive styles can influence the degree to which their firms develop AC. Top decision makers who have high adaptive cognitive style prefer to adhere to existing norms, follow established procedures, and rely on current knowledge, and we argue that these attributes will strengthen those dimensions of AC based on firms’ existing knowledge and knowledge-assimilation abilities. Top decision makers who have high innovative cognitive style are more likely to reframe information, experiment with new problem-solving approaches, and take risks by violating norms, and we argue that these attributes may strengthen those dimensions of AC based on firms’ acquisition of new knowledge and the assimilation of knowledge throughout the firm. We also argue that gender differences may moderate these effects. Empirical results support our hypotheses.

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Ambidextrous firms are those that can simultaneously manage exploitative and explorative innovation, which is why ambidexterity is key for firms that desire to pursue strategic entrepreneurship. Researchers have explored many of the reasons why some firms are more ambidextrous than others. However, little attention has been devoted to understanding how attributes of top decision makers can influence their firms' ambidexterity. By drawing on upper echelons theory and goal orientations research, we explain how firms' ambidexterity can be affected by top decision makers' motivations in achievement situations (i.e., goal orientations). Testing our hypotheses on a sample of 274 top decision makers of firms in the United States, we find that top decision makers' learning goal orientation – their desire to take risks and maximize learning–has an inverted U-shaped relationship with ambidexterity while top decision makers' performance prove goal orientation – their desire to demonstrate competence with existing skills – has a U-shaped relationship with ambidexterity. These effects are weaker for top decision makers who have greater role experience.

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