41Entrepreneurship-the recognition and exploitation of opportunities-is valuable within organizations as well as in the establishment of new ventures. Some studies have addressed the issue why some individuals take advantage of opportunities and some do not. While some studies find that psychological variables, personality traits and demographic factors may distinguish entrepreneurial activity, these findings are equivocal. Other research has looked to the importance of social capital and network ties to new venture creation. Yet, there is little discussion regarding the possibility that social capital and personal factors interact and influence entrepreneurial behavior. this paper advances a model suggesting that entrepreneurial behavior is a result of the interplay of environments (i.e., social networks) and certain cognitive biases in entrepreneurs. We propose that both individual cognition and social capital are important in understanding entrepreneurial behavior. If the domain of entrepreneurship is ". . . the nexus of two phenomena: the presence of lucrative opportunities and the presence of enterprising individuals" (Shane & Venkataraman, 2000) then our model suggests an explanation of this nexus through exploring how both external (i.e., social capital) and internal factors (i.e., cognition) affect why some people and not others exploit opportunities.

Why does social capital influence the progress of new venture creation for some entrepreneurs more than others? Our investigation suggests that social capital is not enough; that the type of person involved in network relationships matters to new venture creation. We test the effects of the interplay of social capital and cognition on a sample of 269 entrepreneurs.Our results confirm that social networks and relational capital enhance levels of illusion of control, which is directly related to the progress of new venture creation. We find marginal support for the relationship between social capital and risk propensity.

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Two research questions are addressed in this article. First, does technological competence enhance firm performance. Second, does competitor imitation of firm knowledge hurt performance. The relationships between technological competence, imitability and performance are basic premises in the resource-based view, yet there has been little empirical testing of them. Measures of technological competence and imitability are developed. These variables, together with measures of marketing and regulatory competence, are tested for their impact on firm performance in the pharmaceutical industry. Imitability has a negative and significant impact on accounting and market-based performance measures. Contrary to expectations, technological competence is inversely related to market-based performance measures and positively related to accounting measures. Research and managerial implications for the findings are discussed.