...stage ventures’ development. Yet, while recent research indicates that some accelerators have a causal treatment effect, questions remain about why some accelerators seem to have a greater effect than others...
When employees use public settings such as team meetings to engage in voice—the expression of work ideas or concerns, they can spur useful discussions, action planning, and problem solving. However, we make the case that managers, whose support is essential for voice to have a functional impact, are averse to publicly expressed voice and prefer acting on voice that is privately brought up to them in one-on-one settings.
We examine firms' technological investments during an industry's incubation stage—the period between a technological breakthrough and the first instance of its commercialization. We develop stylized findings regarding knowledge evolution preceding product evolution in an industry's life cycle, and highlight the importance for managers to think about “success” and “failure” across multiple yardsticks of performance, rather than only as product commercialization.
What do accelerators do? Broadly speaking, they help ventures define and build their initial products, identify promising customer segments, and secure resources, including capital and employees. More specifically, accelerator programs are programs of limited-duration—lasting about three months—that help cohorts of startups with the new venture process.
Most retailers operate under the assumption that stabilizing employees’ schedules would hurt their financial performance because instability is an inevitable outcome of variable demand patterns in retail stores. We tested the validity of this commonly held belief. The goal of our experiment was to determine if it is possible to improve schedule stability without hurting financial performance.
Acquisitions are notoriously difficult to execute successfully. Poor implementation of the post-acquisition integration process is a major source of acquisition value destruction. To surface new solutions for this vexing problem, we leverage the emerging triadic view of M&A activities, which emphasizes the interconnectedness between sellers, acquirers, and the units that are transferred between them.
We examine how mission-oriented grand challenges—formed to address the public sector’s unmet needs through development of new technologies and products for high potential impact—originate and catalyze industry incubation. Our analysis of six prominent cases identifies the incubation process, consisting of identification of unmet needs as a grand challenge, championing and articulation of a mission, leverage of private enterprise, and success or failure of the mission for subsequent industry emergence.
Entrepreneurs making decisions under uncertainty are encouraged to evaluate their initial ideas through hypothesis testing, but entrepreneurial approaches vary in their emphasis on ex-ante theory development prior to collecting evidence. In this paper, we examine whether and how entrepreneurs benefit from adopting an evidence-based approach or a theory-and-evidence-based approach to decision-making.
Theories of crowdsourced search suggest that firms should limit the search space from which solutions to the problem may be drawn by constraining the problem definition. In turn, problems that are not or cannot be constrained should be tackled through other means of innovation. We propose that unconstrained problems can be crowdsourced, but firms need to govern the crowds differently.
While the literature highlights the benefits of internally redeploying resources, there is less empirical guidance on which resources are most likely to be redeployed. We examine the relationship between inventor characteristics and redeployment decisions, motivated by the tension between costs and benefits of keeping a resource at the source unit versus moving it to a new target unit.
Following state-level legal changes that increase labor dismissal costs, firms increase their innovation in new processes that facilitate the adoption of cost-saving production methods, especially in industries with a large share of labor costs in total costs. Firms with high innovation ability exhibit larger increases in process innovation and capital-labor ratios, an effect driven by both increases in capital investment and decreases in employment. By facilitating the adjustment of the input mix when conditions in input markets change, innovation ability allows firms to mitigate value losses and is a key driver of their performance.
Introduction If employing a strategy map makes it sound as if you’re heading out on a trip, that’s because in many ways it’s exactly what you’re doing. To successfully lead...
We analyze how frivolous patent-infringement claims made by non-practicing entities (NPEs, or "patent trolls") affect startups' ability to grow and create jobs, innovate, and raise capital. Our identification strategy exploits the staggered adoption of anti-troll laws in 32 U.S. states.
This paper investigates the causal impact of entrepreneurs' prior experience on startup success. Employing within-country changes in Green Card wait lines to instrument for immigrant first-time entrepreneurs' experience, we uncover that startups led by more experienced founders demonstrate superior funding, patenting, and employee growth.
To be effective, experts need to simultaneously develop others (i.e. provide advice and feedback to novices) and advance their own learning (i.e. seek and incorporate advice and feedback from others). However, expertise, and the state of efficacy associated with it, can inhibit experts from engaging in these activities or doing so effectively. We discuss when and why cognitive entrenchment and reduced perspective taking lead experts to hold misperceptions about others. We then explain how these misperceptions lead experts to provide less helpful advice and feedback to novices and to be less likely to seek and take input from others. We offer insights to overcome these barriers, enhancing experts’ ability to provide and propensity to seek advice and feedback.
The Kenan Institute is proud to work in partnership with Gallup to explore a more holistic view of entrepreneurship in the U.S. with a focus on those who are driving economic growth in new ways. This work was featured at an event co-hosted by the Kenan Institute and held at Gallup headquarters in Washington, D.C. on Oct. 30, 2018.
CEO successions represent critical junctures for firms. Although extant research explores the performance consequences resulting from different succession types, what remains underexplored is what happens when the firm rehires a former CEO (e.g., a “boomerang CEO”).
Using U.S. venture capital investment data from 1985 to 2008 and qualitative interviews, we examine how group dynamics influence the growth of interorganizational collaborations through the addition of new members.
Multinational companies increasingly rely upon the work of virtual teams to manage their global intellectual assets and encourage innovation. Spanning functional, geographical and corporate boundaries, virtual team members work together on various projects but are based in different locations nationwide or worldwide.
The Small Business Investor Alliance surveyed the small business portfolios of Small Business Investment Companies to measure the impact the pandemic is having on their operations and employment. Small businesses are facing extreme cash flow concerns. Small businesses are already laying off a substantial number of employees and without a significant change in trajectory, layoffs are anticipated to increase tremendously. Data analysis provided by the Kenan Institute of Private Enterprise.