Student entrepreneurs face a variety of challenges in building their ventures. In this process, the student founders experience profound changes to their identities as they transition from traditional students to student entrepreneurs. Drawing on the social cognitive theory of self-regulation and utilizing a partially grounded theory approach we develop a two-stage process model to elucidate how mentor relationship and student founders affective state impacts entrepreneurial identity and venture progress. Our findings indicate that effective mentoring and positive founder's affect enables students to transition to entrepreneurs. This allows them to assemble resources and take necessary action to move their venture forward. We develop propositions to guide future empirical research in this area.

In a study of 257 new ventures from China, India, Mexico, and South Africa, we find support for the mediating effect of strategic early internationalization on international sales intensity. We argued that when new ventures from emerging markets internationalize early and with commitment, the legitimacy they acquire helps them overcome liabilities of newness and foreignness. We develop a typology of international new ventures that, based on strategic intent and timing of internationalization, distinguishes strategic early internationalizers from persistent, serendipitous, and long-term internationalizers. We show that strategic early internationalization accounts for over half of the explained variance in international sales intensity and either fully or partially mediates the effects of managerial knowledge and market orientation on international sales intensity.

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