The lean startup framework is one of the most popular contributions in the practitioner-oriented entrepreneurship literature. This study seeks to generate new insights into how new ventures are ...started by describing the five main building blocks of the lean startup framework (business model, validated learning/customer development, minimum viable product, perseverance vs. pivoting, market-opportunity navigation), enriching the framework with existing research findings, and proposing promising research opportunities in a way that reduces the academic−practitioner divide. In so doing, we hope to enhance researchers’ understanding of the startup process; provide knowledge for educators; and, ultimately, improve the startup process for practitioners.
Theory Building Shepherd, Dean A.; Suddaby, Roy
Journal of management,
01/2017, Volume:
43, Issue:
1
Journal Article
Peer reviewed
Building theories is important for advancing knowledge of management. But it is also a highly challenging task. Although there is a burgeoning literature that offers many theorizing tools, we lack a ...coherent understanding of how these tools fit together—when to use a particular tool and which combination of tools can be used in the theorizing process. In this article, we organize a systematic review of the literature on theory building in management around the five key elements of a good story: conflict, character, setting, sequence, and plot and arc. In doing so, we hope to provide a richer understanding of how specific theorizing tools facilitate aspects of the theorizing process and offer a clearer big picture of the process of building important theories. We also offer pragmatic empirical theorizing as an approach that uses quantitative empirical findings to stimulate theorizing.
Judgment and decision-making research has a long tradition in management and represents a substantial stream of research in entrepreneurship. Despite numerous reviews of this topic in the ...organizational behavior, psychology, and marketing fields, this is the first review in the field of entrepreneurship. This absence of a review of entrepreneurial decision making is surprising given the extreme decision-making context faced by many entrepreneurs—such as high uncertainty, time pressure, emotionally charged, and consequential extremes—and the large number of studies in the literature (e.g., 602 articles in our initial screen and 156 articles in a refined search). In this review, we (1) inductively categorize the articles into decision-making topics arranged along the primary activities associated with entrepreneurship—opportunity assessment decisions, entrepreneurial entry decisions, decisions about exploiting opportunities, entrepreneurial exit decisions, heuristics and biases in the decision-making context, characteristics of the entrepreneurial decision maker, and environment as decision context; (2) analyze each context using a general decision-making framework; (3) review and integrate studies within and across decision-making activities; and (4) offer a comprehensive agenda for future research. We believe (hope) that this proposed review, integration, and research agenda will make a valuable contribution to management scholars interested in decision making and/or entrepreneurship.
Mental disorders are prevalent, place considerable burden on the economy, and lead to suffering for those with the disorders and their loved ones. However, there is a flipside. Evidence suggests that ...people with mental disorders can flourish and productively contribute to society through entrepreneurship. This paper explores the relationship between mental disorders and entrepreneurship. It builds a research agenda to propose that researchers explore the role of mental disorders in the entrepreneurial context. We show how such research will advance this new field of research, but also how it can develop novel insights and theories in entrepreneurship and contribute to theories on the psychology of work, career choice, and clinical psychology.
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.
Disaster events threaten the lives, economies, and wellbeing of those they impact. Understanding the role of emergent organizations in responding to suffering and building resilience is an important ...component of the grand challenge of how to effectively respond to disasters. In this inductive case study we explore venture creation initiated by locals in response to suffering following the 2010 Haiti earthquake. In exploring six ventures we found that two distinctive groups emerged in terms of their identification of potential opportunities to alleviate suffering, their access to and use of key resources, the action they took, and ultimately their effectiveness in facilitating resilience. We offer an inductive, grounded theoretical model that emerged from our data that provides insight into and an extension of literature on resilience to adversity and the disaster literature on emergent response groups, opening pathways for management scholarship to contribute in a meaningful way to this grand challenge.
Entrepreneurship is multifaceted. The purpose of this review is to acknowledge and critically assess the many and varied dependent variables (DVs) of entrepreneurship over the last 17 years. By ...focusing exclusively on systematically reviewing entrepreneurship’s DVs, this paper maps out, classifies, and provides order to the phenomena that scholars consider part of this self-defined field of research. Using a systematic selection process and an inductive approach to categorization, we offer a meta-framework for organizing entrepreneurship’s DVs. On the basis of this meta-framework, entrepreneurship involves the (a) initiation, (b) engagement, and (c) performance of entrepreneurial endeavors embedded in (d) environmental conditions in which an entrepreneurial endeavor is the investment of resources into the pursuit of a potential opportunity. For each category, we offer both a review of the different DVs and opportunities for future research.
Although scaling is a “hot topic” in the practitioner literature, it has largely been ignored (at least explicitly) in the academic literature. This editorial highlights the importance of ...organizational scaling, which we define as “spreading excellence within an organization as it grows.” Specifically, the entrepreneurship field would benefit greatly from future studies that explain how knowledge management facilitates scaling; how scaling is influenced by founder replacement; and how current scaling influences the drivers of subsequent scaling. We eventually link the scaling of organizations to the scaling of social impact.
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