Given that stakeholders often commit more than capital to a startup, they commonly stress how important it is for entrepreneurs to be “coachable.” To date, however, coachability has received little attention in entrepreneurship research. We address this gap by first establishing the entrepreneurial coachability construct and validating a measurement scale. Then, drawing on social exchange and signaling theories, we develop and test a novel framework in which coachability influences a potential investor’s willingness to invest. We find that entrepreneurial coachability functions as a viable signal in a pitch setting, but this impact is conditional on the investor’s prior coaching experience.

Research Summary Companies sponsor platform ecosystems as an open innovation strategy to encourage complementors to develop complementary products, services, or technologies that can add value to the platform ecosystem. In this study, we develop and test an information‐based theory of entrepreneurial activity within platform ecosystems. We postulate that ecosystems produce different types of information—a subset of which will foster entrepreneurship in the form of the commercialization of complementary products that were previously released for free. Our results indicate that product‐specific information is associated with commercialization, but we fail to detect a relationship between market information and subsequent commercialization activity. Managerial Summary The digital economy has led to a proliferation of platform ecosystems that harness external innovation. These ecosystems rely on complementors who enhance the value of platforms by creating complementary technologies. Hence, complementors' commercial viability is important. One such type of ecosystem is an app store, which enables complementors to introduce software that improves the platform product. App stores exist for a variety of software platforms, ranging from mobile phone operating systems (iOS and Android) to electronic medical record systems (Epic and Cerner). In this research, we find that complementors who introduce a free version of a mobile app are more likely to commercialize their app in response to specific types of information and platform designers should manage information in their platforms to foster platform viability.

Over the past 25 years, scholars have produced a wide variety of organizational improvisation (OI) scholarship from multiple fields that has improved our understanding of the OI phenomenon. However, because of its complexity and the heterogeneity of approaches used to study it, OI remains challenging to grasp. This makes it difficult for scholars to understand the contributions of this literature both in terms of extant findings as well as potential gaps and future areas of inquiry. Accordingly, we take stock of the extant literature by reviewing 186 peer-reviewed scholarly articles on OI primarily from management and related fields such as entrepreneurship and marketing as well as other disciplines such as information systems and communications. We introduce an aggregate framework that emphasizes the sequential process of OI. We also identify specific theoretical and associated empirical gaps in each of the pre-, during, and post-phases of an OI episode. We specifically address questions surrounding the origination and content of initial improvisational actions, conceptual ambiguity regarding the prevalence of OI, and the confounding of causal factors that impact the outcomes following an OI episode.

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