Many are Called, but Few are Chosen: An Evolutionary Perspective for the Study of Entrepreneurship

Abstract

More than a decade ago, Low and MacMillan identified three elements indispensable to an understanding of entrepreneurial success: process, context, and outcomes. Since their critique, three important advances include (a) a shift in theoretical emphasis from the characteristics of entrepreneurs as individuals to the consequences of their actions, (b) a deeper understanding of how entrepreneurs use knowledge, networks, and resources to construct firms, and (c) a more sophisticated taxonomy of environmental forces at different levels of analysis (population, community, and society) that affect entrepreneurship. Although our knowledge of entrepreneurial activities has increased dramatically, we still have much to learn about how process and context interact to shape the outcome of entrepreneurial efforts. From an evolutionary approach, process and context (strategy and environment) interact in a recursive continuous process, driving the fate of entrepreneurial efforts. Thus, integrating context and process into research designs remains a major challenge. Such integration constitutes a necessary step to a more complete evolutionary approach and a better understanding of entrepreneurial success.

Barriers to Social Enterprise Growth

“…A relationship between access to resources and venture growth is also well established in the literature (Penrose 1959). The combination of physical, financial, and human capital has repeatedly been found to explain differences in venture growth (Aldrich and Martinez 2001;Dodd, Jack, and Anderson 2006;Ireland, Hitt, and Sirmon 2003). Financial constraints are consistently the most difficult barrier to overcome (Moy and Luk 2003;Orser, Hogarth-Scott, and Riding 2000;Tagoe, Nyarko, and Anuwa-Amarh 2005), and render entrepreneurs reliant on their savings (Leff 1979), informal loans from friends and family (Allen et al 2006), or short-term bank funding (Freel 2000).…”

“…However, lack of entrepreneurial competences and awareness of venture financing options has been mooted as an influential variable in perceptions of finance availability (Doern 2009;Orser, Hogarth-Scott, and Riding 2000). Similarly, the social capital embedded in networks is increasingly recognized as an important resource for entrepreneurs to overcome other barriers to growth (Aldrich and Martinez 2001;Cooper, Folta, and Woo 1995;Jack and Anderson 2002;Spence and Schmidpeter 2003). Other organization-level barriers to commercial venture growth include firm size (Acs et al 2012;Almus 2002), location (Davidsson et al 2002;Robson and Obeng 2008), and type of premises (Felsenstein and Schwartz 1993;Lee 2014).…”

The Improvisational Entrepreneur: Improvisation Training in Entrepreneurship Education

“…Pursuing entrepreneurship implies a seemingly endless path of unknown events, risk-taking, and uncertainty that requires entrepreneurs to improvise (Aldrich and Martinez 2001). Because improvisation has been identified as critical to the entrepreneurial process (Hmieleski and Corbett 2008), substantial research has sought to identify an improvisation process (e.g., Baker, Miner, and Eesley 2003;Baker and Nelson 2005).…”

Distinguishing Types of Entrepreneurial Ventures: An Identity-Based Perspective

“…Relatedly, it can help explain non-linear and bi-directional relationships. In addition, proper consideration of various aspects of the entrepreneurial firm is vital for understanding "person 3 situation" interactions, and hence for addressing the individual-opportunity nexus (Shane and Venkataraman 2000) and the various micromeso-macro linkages in the domain of entrepreneurship research (Aldrich and Martinez 2001;Dess et al 2003). Further, where aspects of the entrepreneurial firm (e.g., growth rate) are simply specified as a control variable, Zahra et al (2014) warn of the potential oversimplification of the micro foundations of entrepreneurial behavior.…”