This technical note explores the broadening role of entrepreneurship as both an economic and societal force. Students learn that as a distinct problem-solving method, entrepreneurship is teachable and applicable to a wide variety of issues central to human well-being and social improvement. It is akin to the scientific method in its capability to generate both the means to achieve yesterday's ends and the reasons to reject them in favor of new ends undreamed of previously. In this sense, it pervades and intervenes in every sphere of human hope - from economics and social welfare to the very definition of who we are and what we want for ourselves and the societies we live in.

We build upon a recent stream of research that has proposed entrepreneurship as a solution to, rather than a cause of, environmental degradation. Our proposition is that under certain conditions entrepreneurs are likely to supplement, or surpass, the efforts of governments, NGOs and existing firms to achieve environmental sustainability. Entrepreneurs can contribute to solving environmental problems through helping extant institutions in achieving their goals and by creating new, more environmentally sustainable products, services and institutions. Our model illustrates how entrepreneurs 1) address environmental uncertainty, 2) provide innovation and 3) engage in resource allocation to address environmental degradation.
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Affordable loss involves decision makers estimating what they might be able to put at risk and determining what they are willing to lose in order to follow a course of action. Using the entrepreneur's new venture plunge decision, this article combines insights from behavioral economics to develop a detailed analysis of the affordable loss heuristic. Specifically, we develop propositions to explain how individuals: (1) decide what they can afford to lose; and (2) what they are willing to lose in order to plunge into entrepreneurship. The article also discusses the implications of affordable loss for the economics of strategic entrepreneurship. Copyright © 2009 Strategic Management Society.

Using insights from institutional theory, sociology, and entrepreneurship we develop and test a model of the relationship between centralized and decentralized institutions on entrepreneurial activity. We suggest that both decentralized institutions that are socially determined as well as centralized institutions that are designed by governmental authorities are important in promoting firm foundings in the environmental context. In a sample of the U.S. solar energy sector we find that state-sponsored incentives, environmental consumption norms, and norms of family interdependence are related to new firm entry in this sector. Our findings also suggest that the efficacy of state-level policies in the sponsoring of entrepreneurial growth is dependent upon the social norms that prevail in the entrepreneur's environment. We expand entrepreneurship theory and the study of institutions and the natural environment by demonstrating the integral role that social norms play in influencing the creation of new firms and by illustrating the potential effect social norms have on the effect of policy that seeks to encourage environmentally responsible economic activity.

A key metric for the assessment of innovative activity at the firm level is R&D intensity. R&D intensity is the ratio of a firm's R&D investment to its revenue (the percentage of revenue that is reinvested in R&D). Empirical and anecdotal evidence suggests that R&D intensity within an industry is remarkably consistent. Despite this consistency in R&D spending, firms tend to be differentiated with respect to their NPD portfolio strategy and overall performance. This study aims to explain the observed consistency in R&D intensity for firms within an industry, despite the varying choices in terms of how much the firm invests in R&D and how resources are allocated among projects in a portfolio. We consider the implications of firm level factors, such as NPD portfolio composition, as well as industry level factors, such as competition intensity and environmental stability. We find that R&D intensity alone does not explain firm performance. Rather, it is the proper alignment between R&D intensity (how much the firm invests) and NPD portfolio strategy (how the firm invests the money) that drives profitability. More importantly, the proper alignment critically depends on two industry factors - competition intensity and environmental stability.

In support of theory, this study demonstrates that entrepreneurial experts frame decisions using an "effectual" logic (identify more potential markets, focus more on building the venture as a whole, pay less attention to predictive information, worry more about making do with resources on hand to invest only what they could afford to lose, and emphasize stitching together networks of partnerships); while novices use a "predictive frame" and tend to "go by the textbook." We asked 27 expert entrepreneurs and 37 MBA students to think aloud continuously as they solved typical decision-making problems in creating a new venture. Transcriptions were analyzed using methods from cognitive science. Results showed that expert entrepreneurs framed problems in a dramatically different way than MBA students.

Geographic and environmental influences on economic action have a long history in managerial research. This paper develops and estimates a model of the potential of a broad set of U.S. racial minority groups to enter self-employment based on individual, household, and metropolitan area level factors. The model allows for an analysis of two distinct residential segregation processes on self-employment likelihood. Results indicate that clustering by race has group-specific influences, increasing the likelihood of self-employment for some groups and diminishing for others. Higher levels of racial exposure raise the likelihood of entrepreneurial careers for all groups, but especially for blacks.

This article outlines why highly confident entrepreneurs of focal ventures are better positioned to start and succeed with another venture; and therefore why overconfidence in one's capabilities functionally persists and pervades amongst entrepreneurs. By combining cognitive perspectives on confidence in decision making with Fredrickson's [Fredrickson, B.L. 1998. What good are positive emotions?. Review of General Psychology, 2, 300-319.; Fredrickson, B.L. 2001. The role of positive emotions in positive psychology: the broaden-and-build theory of positive emotions. American Psychologist, 56, 218-226.; Fredrickson, B.L. 2003. The value of positive emotions. American Scientist, 91: 330-335] 'broaden-and-build' theory of positive emotions, this paper elaborates the manner in which such entrepreneurs can develop emotional, cognitive, social and financial resilience that can be marshaled and mobilized for a subsequent venture.

Venture investing plays an important role in entrepreneurship not only because financial resources are important to new ventures, but also because early investors help shape the ventures' managerial and strategic destiny. In this study of 121 angel investors who had made 1038 new venture investments, we empirically investigate angel investors' differential use of predictive versus non-predictive control strategies. We show how the use of these strategies affects the outcomes of angel investors. Results show that angels who emphasize prediction make significantly larger venture investments, while those who emphasize non-predictive control experience a reduction in investment failures without a reduction in their number of successes.

Developing the "right" new products is critical to firm success and is often cited as a key competitive dimension. This paper explores new product development (NPD) portfolio strategy and the balance between incremental and radical innovation. We characterize innovative effort through a normative theoretical framework that addresses a popular practice in NPD portfolio management: the use of strategic buckets. Strategic buckets encourage the division of the overall NPD resource budget into smaller, more focused budgets that are defined by the type of innovative effort (incremental or radical). We show that time commitment determines the balance between incremental and radical innovation. When managers execute this balance, they are often confounded by: (i) environmental complexity, defined as the number of unknown interdependencies among technology and market parameters that determine product performance; and (ii) environmental instability, the probability of changes to the underlying performance functions. Although both of these factors confound managers, we find that they have completely opposite effects on the NPD portfolio balance. Environmental complexity shifts the balance toward radical innovation. Conversely, environmental instability shifts the balance toward incremental innovation. Risk considerations and implications for theory and practice are also discussed.

The first step in transforming strategy from a hopeful statement about the future to an operational reality is to allocate resources to innovation and new product development (NPD) programs. We explore how funding authority affects a manager's allocation of resources between multiple programs in a portfolio. Funding may be either fixed or variable depending on the extent to which the manager is free to use revenue derived from existing product sales to fund NPD efforts. Our results indicate that the allocation of resources between existing product improvement (relatively incremental projects) and new product development (more radical projects) depends critically on the funding authority. We find that the use of variable funding drives higher effort toward improving existing products and developing new products. However, variable funding induces the manager to focus on existing product improvement to a greater degree than new product development, and leads to an incremental balance in the NPD portfolio. In addition, we highlight a substitution effect between explicit incentives (compensation parameters) and implicit incentives (career concerns). Explicit incentives are reduced as career concerns become more salient.

In A Behavioral Theory of the Firm (BTF), Cyert and March [Cyert, R.M., March, J.G., 1963. A Behavioral Theory of the Firm. Prentice-Hall, Englewood Cliffs, NJ] present a clutch of ideas for explaining the behavior of established firms within an environment of well-defined markets, stakeholder relationships, technologies, and so on. In this paper, we outline a behavioral theory of the entrepreneurial firm that emphasizes transforming environments rather than acting within extant ones. In particular, we explicate three ideas that parallel key concepts in BTF: (1) accumulating stakeholder commitments under goal ambiguity (in line with a political conception of goals), (2) achieving control (as opposed to managing expectations) through non-predictive strategies, and (3) predominately exaptive (rather than adaptive) orientation.

This paper develops and estimates a model of potential to enter self-employment based on individual and community-level factors. Of particular interest is the influence of racial residential segregation processes and segregation's tendency to concentrate people with similar demographic profiles in geographical space. It has been argued that segregation processes can also concentrate poverty and its associated social dislocations. An analysis of a database of 8,917 households in four U.S. metropolitan areas revealed that two residential segregation processes (clustering and exposure) limit and enhance potential entry into self-employment for blacks, and provides a partial explanation for the long-standing gaps in white and black self-employment rates.

This paper estimates a model of potential to enter self-employment based on individual, household and community-level factors. This paper focuses on the impact of segregation on the likelihood of black and white working-age adults to be self-employed workers rather than wage or salary workers. A multilevel analysis combined answers of over 400,000 respondents to the 1990 and 2000 Integrated Public Use Micro Sample (IPUMS) [Ruggles, S., Sobek, M.,Alexander, T., Fitch, C.,Goeken, R.,Hall, P.,King, M.,Ronnander, C., 2004. Integrated Public Use Microdata Series: Version 3.0 [Machine-readable database]. Minnesota Population Center [producer and distributor], Minneapolis, MN] with structural measures from 327 metropolitan areas from the U.S. Census Bureau's Housing Patterns files [Iceland, J.,Weinberg, D., Steinmetz, E., 2002. Racial and ethnic residential segregation in the United States, 1980-2000. Special Report Series, CENSR no.3, U.S. Census Bureau, Washington, DC] to test the influence of each segregation process. The two residential segregation processes (relative clustering and exposure) were found to limit and enhance potential entry into self-employment, but in unique ways for each group.

A key role of corporate managers is to encourage subsidiaries to adopt innovative practices. This paper examines the conditions under which corporate managers use information provision to encourage subsidiaries' adoption of advanced management practices. Focusing on the distribution of expertise across subsidiaries, we propose that corporate managers elect an information provision strategy when (i) subsidiaries, on average, possess moderate levels of related expertise, (ii) subsidiaries exhibit significant heterogeneity in this expertise, and (iii) the subsidiaries are more diversified and less concentrated. We examine the efforts to diffuse pollution prevention practices exhibited by manufacturing firms in the information and communication technology sector in the United States, and find empirical support for the four hypotheses developed here. The research presented in this paper has implications for our understanding not only of who adopts advanced environmental management practices, but more broadly, of when firms adopt information provision strategies to encourage knowledge transfer within the organization.

Component sharing-the use of a component on multiple products within a firm's product line-is widely practiced as a means of offering high variety at low cost. Although many researchers have examined trade-offs involved in component sharing, little research has focused on the impact of component sharing on quality. In this paper, we examine how component sharing impacts one dimension of quality-reliability-defined as mean time to failure. Design considerations suggest that a component designed uniquely for a product will result in higher reliability due to the better fit of the component within the architecture of the product. On the other hand, the learning curve literature suggests that greater experience with a component can improve conformance quality, and can increase reliability via learning from end-user feedback. The engineering literature suggests that improved conformance in turn increases reliability. Sharing a component across multiple products increases experience, and hence, should increase reliability. Using data from the automotive industry, we find support for the hypothesis that higher component reliability is associated with higher cumulative experience with a component. Further, we find support for the hypothesis that higher component reliability is associated with a component that has been designed uniquely for a product. This finding suggests that the popular design strategy of component sharing can in some cases compromise product quality, via reduced reliability.

Human artifacts lie on the interface between their inner environments and their outer environments. Organizations, therefore, are apt subjects to be studied through a science of the artificial. Furthermore, organizational design happens at two interfaces: first, at the interface between organizational founder(s) and the firms they design, and second, between the firms and the environments in which they operate. We use recent developments in the study of entrepreneurial expertise to show why an effectual logic of design is necessary at the first interface, and what its consequences are for designing at the second. In particular, we use the exemplar case of Starbucks to codify three key characteristics of the design problem at the first interface - namely, Knightian uncertainty, goal ambiguity and environmental isotropy. We then use an `alternate histories' method to trace four strategic options - namely, planning, adaptation, vision and transformation - for designing at the second interface. In the final analysis, organizational design is important because effectuators using transformational approaches not only design organizations, but concurrently end up designing the environments we live in.

In their article on entrepreneurship, effectuation, and over-trust, Goel and Karri suggest relationships between effectuation, over-trust, and certain psychological characteristics of entrepreneurs. In this response we debate their article. Goel and Karri are correct in claiming that effectuation supposes over-trust. However, we argue that effectual logic works in a different way than they presented because it neither predicts nor assumes trust. Goel and Karri's article also draws attention to the behavioral assumptions underlying constructs such as over-(under) trust. Our suggestion is that effectuation is based on alternative behavioral assumptions that open up interesting avenues for future research in entrepreneurship.