Small businesses are an undeniable engine of growth for the United States, comprising 99 percent of all U.S. firms and driving nearly half our total economic activity. Yet small business owners across the country lack sufficient capital to succeed, grow and scale. The Kenan Institute has conducted a new analysis on the role of the Small Business Administration’s SBIC program in providing capital to the often-overlooked small businesses operating outside of metropolitan centers, as well as those owned by women and underrepresented minorities. You can access an overview of our findings, as well as key takeaways for business and policy leaders, by clicking below.
On Sept. 9-11, 2019, the Kenan Institute and the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill’s Institute for African-American Research will co-host the second Black Communities Conference, an international gathering of scholars and community leaders from across the African diaspora. The conference's core mission is to connect academics from a variety of disciplines with black communities, with the goal of enhancing the life of those communities. Hear more from Kenan Institute Managing Director and conference co-chair Mark Little.
On Sept. 9-11, the Kenan Institute co-hosted our second Black Communities Conference with the Institute of African American Research in downtown Durham, North Carolina. Attendees came from around the world to collaborate across disciplines. Black Communities is a a vibrant and uniquely important gathering featuring panel discussions, local tours, film screenings, workshops, keynotes and more. Our core mission is to foster collaboration among Black communities and universities for the purpose of enhancing Black community life.
The Black Communities Conference, a.k.a. #BlackCom2019, is a vibrant and uniquely important gathering featuring panel discussions, local tours, film screenings, workshops, keynotes and more. Our core mission is to foster collaboration among Black communities and universities for the purpose of enhancing Black community life and furthering the understanding of Black communities. Black Communities: A Conference for Collaboration is co-hosted by the Institute of African American Research and the Kenan Institute of Private Enterprise.
Analogies can help people make sense of technological change and other innovations. Using them effectively relies on recognizing both their benefits and pitfalls.
Academics and innovators recently convened at the institute's wealth inequality conference to discuss the effects of income disparity and how education and research can create opportunities for more equitable access.
Do founders actually assimilate and leverage the knowledge from the seasoned executives who surround them? Or do they shrug it off and march to the beat of their own drum? To better understand whether founder CEOs incorporate or ignore advice from their leadership team, we collected and analyzed data on more than 2,000 companies that went public from 1997 to 2013, roughly half of which were led by founders and the other half by hired (nonfounder) CEOs.
Accelerators are entrepreneurial programs that attempt to help ventures learn, often utilizing extensive consultation with mentors, program directors, customers, guest speakers, alumni and peers. While accelerators have rapidly emerged as prominent players in the entrepreneurial ecosystem, entrepreneurs, policy makers, and academics continue to raise questions about their efficacy.
We examine the impact of logistics performance metrics such as delivery time, and customer’s requested delivery speed on logistics service ratings and third-party sellers’ sales on an e-commerce platform.
Do founder-CEOs have an expiration date? In the wake of Jack Dorsey’s resignation from Twitter, some have begun asking whether the move could herald a new era, in which founders voluntarily step aside rather than sticking around for decades or waiting to be ousted. To explore the value added by a founder-CEO, the authors analyzed stock price and financial performance data from more than 2,000 publicly traded companies.
Collective action is critical for successful market formation. However, relatively little is known about how and under what conditions actors overcome collective action problems to successfully form new markets. Using the benefits of simulation methods, we uncover how collective action problems result from actor resource allocation decisions interacting with each other and how the severity of these problems depends on central market- and actor-related characteristics.
In this paper we argue that task design affects rule breaking in the workplace. Specifically, we propose that task variety activates deliberative (Type 2) processes as opposed to automatic/intuitive (Type 1) processes, which, in turn, helps prevent individuals from breaking rules in order to serve their own hedonic self-interest.
To scale service operations requires sharing knowledge across the organization. However, prior work highlights that individuals on the periphery of organizational knowledge sharing networks may struggle to access useful knowledge at work. A knowledge repository (KR) has the potential to help peripheral individuals gain access to valuable knowledge because it is universally available and can be used without social interaction.
We examine the impact of four classes of workplace interruptions on short-term (working hours) and long-term (across-shifts) worker performance in an agribusiness setting. The interruptions are organized in a two-by-two framework where they result (or do not result) in a physical task requirement and lead to a varying degree of attention shift from the primary task.
Companies are turning to ideation contests to engage ideators outside company boundaries to solve their complex problems. Our research focuses on how articulating the problem, specifically the number and type of constraints described within the problem statement (brief), is related to the number of ideas submitted by participants in ideation contests.
A growing body of rigorous academic literature empirically demonstrates that high-skilled immigrants provide a range of long-lasting and material benefits to the U.S. economy through entrepreneurship and innovation. Recent research has quantified the impact of foreign-born founders on key economic indicators such as firm creation, job creation and overall business innovation. Likewise, a growing body of literature documents how skilled immigrants have more broadly facilitated technological innovation. Kenan Institute Executive Director Greg Brown discusses the findings of he and his colleagues in this Institute Insights.
In this paper, we provide a theoretical and empirical framework that allows us to synthesize and assess the burgeoning literature on CEO overconfidence. We also provide novel empirical evidence that overconfidence matters for corporate investment decisions in a framework that explicitly addresses the endogeneity of firms' financing constraints.
Industry evolution scholars define industry inception as first instance of product commercialization, focusing on subsequent time periods of growth and maturity. Left understudied are the triggers, actors, and actions preceding industry inception.
Extant literature highlights the importance of specific choices such as pricing and particular strategieslike “get big fast” for strategy in two-sided markets. Yet it leaves open how executives form a viable strategy in entrepreneurial settings, particularly when buyers, sellers, and product may be uncertain. With an inductive case study of 8 two-sided marketplace ventures in multiple industries, we developa theoretical framework that describes how entrepreneurs address this challenge: by focusing on successive strategic domains, beginning with supply.
Common wisdom suggests that when it comes to launching a startup, you need co-founders. But a new study finds that solo founders can in fact be successful — if they have the support of co-creators. Co-creators are individuals or organizations that play a critical role in helping a founder build their business, but without receiving the control or equity of a formal co-founder.