Entrepreneurship Seminar Series

The Entrepreneurship Cross-Enterprise Leadership Centre (ECELC) will be hosting a series of research seminars with Entrepreneurship faculty from institutions across North America. For more information on visit schedules and paper sessions, contact the centre at iveyentre@ivey.ca

• March 23, 2015
  Becky Reuber | University of Toronto
  
  

  The Dynamics of Opportunity Creation

  Studies of opportunity creation have shed limited light on the factors prolonging opportunity creation.  This study, based on a longitudinal analysis of Twitter, identifies four factors that prolong the process: proliferation of heterogeneous elements in the business model; frictions between these elements; vacillation in the actor-action arrangements by which the opportunity is enacted; and material embeddedness in external market entities.  Moreover, we find that forestalled opportunity creation is recursively reproduced.

• April 13, 2015
  Henry Renski | University of Massachusetts Amherst
  
  

  Externalities or Experience? Localization Economies and Start-up Business Survival
  
  This study examines whether spatial variations in the human capital of business owners help explain why the failure rates of new businesses tend to be lower in areas where similar businesses are concentrated. More specifically, I test whether the prior industry experience of the firm’s owner/founder has a mediating influence on the relationship between industrial localization and new business failure for six industry sectors. Localization is found to have either a beneficial or a damaging relationship to new firm survival, depending on the industry in question. Localization reduces the likelihood of failure in two sectors, while competition effects prevail in two others. When industry experience is added to the models, the benefits of localization diminish, but only for entrants in the business, professional, and information services sector and only by a small amount. This suggests that at least some of the observed benefits of localization are due to regional differences in embodied human capital, but localization economies remain significant. Further study is needed to see if such mediating effects are common among a wider array of more narrowly defined industries and for other forms of entrepreneurial human capital.

• May 4, 2015
  Brett Gilbert | Rutgers University
  
  

  Institutional Barriers to Technology Adoption: Insights from an Emerging Clean Technology
  Brett Anitra Gilbert, Joanna Tochman Campbell & Li Dai
  
  U.S. adoption of clean technologies, which have emerged to correct the deficiencies associated with the use of incumbent energy technologies, has been slow and varied. While common reasons advanced for the slow diffusion of radical technologies point to performance and cost rationalizations, in this paper we investigate the equally important but often ignored factor of institutional barriers. Specifically, this study examines the emergence of transportation and stationary fuel cell technologies, which represent competence-enhancing and competence-destroying technologies respectively, and the institutional barriers they face to widespread technological adoption. It employs a qualitative methodology and relies on primary and secondary data to explicate the cognitive, sociopolitical, and competitive barriers that impede technological adoption. This study complements recent research on regulatory institutional barriers with an expanded view of  significant institutional influences that affect industry emergence, and thus offers important implications for both theory and practice.

• May 25, 2015
  Dan Forbes | University of Minnesota
  
  

  Born, Not Made” And Other Beliefs About Entrepreneurial Ability: A Lay Theory Perspective

  Entrepreneurial behaviors are shaped by the beliefs people hold about their entrepreneurial abilities (e.g., their entrepreneurial self-efficacy). But we know relatively little about how and why ability beliefs are formulated, especially among potential (as opposed to existing) entrepreneurs. In this paper I introduce a construct that captures people’s belief in the idea that “entrepreneurs are born and not made,” and I propose that this belief is likely to have significant – and often dysfunctional – implications for entrepreneurial behavior. The resulting model broadens our understanding of the cognitive context within which people make decisions about entrepreneurial entry, persistence and selection.