The objective of this research is to deepen in the role played by formal institutions on the different types of entrepreneurship (opportunity and necessity) as well as in its relative importance. The institutions we analyze are property rights, business freedom, fiscal freedom, labor freedom, financial capital and educational capital. Our results show that, in general, opportunity entrepreneurship benefits from an improvement of these institutions, while necessity entrepreneurship is damaged. This will positively influence the relative presence of opportunity entrepreneurship that is usually considered to be of greater quality and is more clearly related to economic development in a country.

This paper analyzes opportunity entrepreneurship through the interplay between formal and informal institutions. It seems evident that not all entrepreneurial initiatives have the same quality, thus the goal of a society should be to encourage the activities that best contribute to innovation and value generation. We theorize that informal institutions are contingent to the formal institutional environment where the new ventures operate. Our empirical results, using GEM data, confirm that, in countries with a more individualistic orientation, the relationship between formal institutions and opportunity entrepreneurship is more intense, as happens in societies with lower levels of uncertainty avoidance.

Entrepreneurs play a key role in introducing innovations into the market. However, the extant literature has found that the degree of innovation within new ventures varies considerably and that these differences can be related to the individual factors of entrepreneurs. In this article, we go one step further and suggest that the influence of individual factors on innovation is contingent on the institutional context. We use a sample of more than 140,000 entrepreneurs from 101 countries that have participated in the Global Entrepreneurship Monitor (GEM) project between 2005 and 2015. Our results show that individual characteristics of the entrepreneur, such as risk tolerance, entrepreneurial alertness, education and previous entrepreneurial experience, influence innovation in new ventures but that their effect is reinforced by an institutional context with high economic freedom.

The institution-based view of strategy has emerged as a leading perspective in Strategic Management. It incorporates the institutional dimension when offering relevant answers to the fundamental questions of strategy. One of the challenges of this perspective is to develop stronger measures of institutions (Peng et al., 2009). This paper seeks to contribute in this direction by offering a detailed analysis of the main measures of institutions that previous works in Strategic Management have used. Our aim is to offer a guide that will help researchers to decide how they should incorporate the institutional dimension into their empirical work.

This article extends previous research on network industries by analyzing the role that firm strategy plays in markets where network effects are important. The authors postulate that firms can benefit from the existence of network effects through their strategic choices. The main premise of this article is that companies, by influencing expectations, coordination, and compatibility, can leverage network effects and network value. The authors empirically test their hypotheses in the mobile telecommunications industry, a paradigmatic example of a network industry. This study not only seeks to understand the impact of firm strategy on network value but also analyzes the impact of the latter on firm performance.

This article examines the influence of complementary resources on the performance of incumbents after a radical technological change. In investigating this relationship, we join the technological management literature and the institution‐based view of strategy and maintain that the value of complementary resources is contingent on the institutional environment in which the firm operates. In particular, we submit that formal institutions, both economic and political, moderate the relationship between the stock of complementary assets and firm performance. We test our hypotheses in the context of the world mobile telecommunications industry (39 countries and 134 mobile service providers). Our findings reveal how these resources are more valuable for incumbents in markets where market‐supporting institutions are weaker and political stability is higher. Copyright © 2014 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.

This is the accepted version of the paper.This version of the publication may differ from the final published version.Permanent repository link: http://openaccess.city.ac.uk/15193/ Link to published version: http://dx.We advance first mover advantages literature by adding novel insights into the conditions that affect the persistence of first mover profitability and market share. We investigate the role of two industry dynamicsmarket growth and technological discontinuityand we argue that they will negatively affect the persistence of first mover performance. We test our hypotheses in the context of the European mobile communications industry by estimating System GMM models on a longitudinal panel of 65 companies in 19 markets over the period 1998-2008. Model estimations confirm that industry dynamics affect the persistence of first mover advantages. For instance, we find robust empirical evidence that technological discontinuity is detrimental to both first movers' market share and profitability.

The purpose of this paper is to test the effectiveness of switching costs as an isolating mechanism in the context of the first-mover advantage theory. Whereas both the literature on switching costs and on pioneering propose this as a mechanism through which firms could obtain sustainable competitive advantage, other authors offer a rationale for thinking that this is not the case. We test our hypotheses in the context of the European mobile telecommunications industry. This is a sector that has been characterized by high rates of growth in the number of subscribers, which could reduce the effectiveness of switching costs from being effective as an isolating mechanism. Our results show that switching costs are an important tool through which first-mover advantages materialize. and the United Kingdom. 2 Note, as one of the anonymous referees pointed out, we do not follow the industry from the beginning. Accepting that first-mover advantages decline over time, this could reduce the likelihood of detecting them.