Drawing on the theory of planned behaviour, this study tests the effect of entrepreneurship programmes on the entrepreneurial attitudes and intentions of science and engineering students. This is necessary in order to confirm (or disconfirm) conventional wisdom that entrepreneurship education increases the intention to start a business. The results show that the programmes raise some attitudes and the overall entrepreneurial intention and that inspiration (a construct with an emotional element) is the programmes' most influential benefit. The findings contribute to the theories of planned behaviour and education and have wider implications for a theory of entrepreneurial emotions and also for the practice of teaching entrepreneurship.

Citation: Souitaris, V. & Maestro, B. M. M. (2010). Polychronicity in top management teams: The impact on strategic decision processes and performance of new technology ventures. Strategic Management Journal, 31(6), pp. 652-678. doi: 10.1002/smj.831 This is the accepted version of the paper.This version of the publication may differ from the final published version. Permanent POLYCHRONICITY IN TOP MANAGEMENT TEAMS: THE IMPACT ON STRATEGIC DECISION PROCESSES AND PERFORMANCE OF NEW TECHNOLOGY VENTURES ABSTRACTThis study focuses on polychronicity as a cultural dimension of top management teams (TMTs). TMT polychronicity is the extent to which team members mutually prefer and tend to engage in multiple tasks simultaneously or intermittently instead of one at a time and believe that this is the best way of doing things. We explore the impact of TMT polychronicity on strategic decision speed and comprehensiveness and, subsequently, its effect on new venture financial performance. Contrary to popular time-management principles advocating task prioritization and focused sequential execution, we suggest that TMT polychronicity has a positive effect on firm performance in the context of dynamic unanalyzable environments. This effect is partially mediated by decision speed and comprehensiveness. Our study contributes to research on strategic leadership by focusing on a novel value-based characteristic of the top management team (polychronicity) and by untangling the decision making processes that relate top management team characteristics and venture performance. It also contributes to the attention-based view of the firm by positioning polychronicity as a new type of attention-structure.

Spinouts, Universities, Technology transfer, Literature review, L20, M13, O32,

This is the accepted version of the paper.This version of the publication may differ from the final published version. Permanent repository link

Creating new ventures is one of the most central topics to entrepreneurship and is a critical step from which many theories of management, organizational behavior, and strategic management build. Therefore, this review and proposed research agenda are relevant to not only entrepreneurship scholars but also other management scholars who wish to challenge some of the implicit assumptions of their current streams of research and extend the boundaries of their current theories to earlier in the organization’s life. Given that the last systematic review of the topic was published 16 years ago, and that the topic has evolved rapidly over this time, an overview and research outlook are long overdue. From our review, we inductively generated 10 subtopics: (a) lead founder, (b) founding team, (c) social relationships, (d) cognitions, (e) emergent organizing, (f) new-venture strategy, (g) organizational emergence, (h) new-venture legitimacy, (i) founder exit, and (j) entrepreneurial environment. These subtopics are then organized into three major stages of the entrepreneurial process: co-creating, organizing, and performing. Together, the framework provides a cohesive story of the past and a road map for future research on creating new ventures, focusing on the links connecting these subtopics.