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Entrepreneurship education has become a trending topic among higher education institutions in Indonesia as the government pushes for more entrepreneurs through its Kampus Merdeka (campus freedom) policy. This trend gets amplified with the recent burst of technology startups growing and scaling in Indonesia to heights that have never been seen by the country before. A couple of the home-grown startups eventually become publicly listed companies, increasing the overall startup fever across the nation. Lies beneath the success of this educational policy to support entrepreneurship in Indonesia is how to have a relevant curriculum and ecosystem to support student entrepreneurs. Prior research papers have proposed several aspects to be measured, namely, entrepreneurial skills, attitude, environment, and intentions. However, those studies still lack the holistic analysis regarding entrepreneurship education in the country and mostly only involved students. This dissertation studies the applicability of undergraduate entrepreneurship education and ecosystem to support startup founders by interviewing educators, students, alumni, and school leaders at selected public and private universities in Indonesia. I employ a qualitative study with open-ended interview questions for data collection and analysis. My research contributes to the gaps in the literature as this paper is the first of its kind research publication with a holistic approach, involving relevant stakeholders and more variables in the analysis. The findings of this research suggest educational policy makers and university leaders can support the applicability of the entrepreneurship curriculum and ecosystem by focusing on ecosystem building, collaboration with the broader communities, student engagement, government support, faculty development, and alumni community. [The dissertation citations contained here are published with the permission of ProQuest LLC. Further reproduction is prohibited without permission. Copies of dissertations may be obtained by Telephone (800) 1-800-521-0600. Web page: http://www.proquest.com/en-US/products/dissertations/individuals.shtml.]

In this paper, the researcher presents the findings of this original qualitative study on the human experience of the participants of The Purkal Project, change-makers in social innovation that provide free, world-class education and vocational development in an economically challenged rural community in the Himalayan region of Northern India. In this paper, the researcher explored the history of the conditions of poverty for women in India, reviewed the development of the Purkal Project, and shared personal perspectives from participants. Societal engagement through family and education are core fundamentals of development and community empowerment; however, social conditions exist which contribute to and perpetuate women's state of poverty in this region. The researcher addressed the unprecedented challenges to the international research process, as well as the effect on the Purkal Project's participants, based on the lockdown conditions created by the COVID-19 global pandemic. An examination of these past and present conditions was essential before presenting the participants' stories to determine their perception regarding social intervention projects, which can have a lasting impact on societal development in rural Northern India. Changes in rural societies must begin with the examination of women's status, which is related to other components of development that benefit children and society, as well as oppositional factors which could impede women's agency. The purpose of this study was to explore the history of the conditions that created and continue to perpetuate the feminization of poverty. The researcher also examined participants' perspective on the effect of the Purkal Project as a social intervention which has developed sustainable methods of poverty alleviation, thereby encouraging agency and empowerment for women and their families in economically challenged rural communities in the Himalayan region of Northern India. [The dissertation citations contained here are published with the permission of ProQuest LLC. Further reproduction is prohibited without permission. Copies of dissertations may be obtained by Telephone (800) 1-800-521-0600. Web page: http://www.proquest.com/en-US/products/dissertations/individuals.shtml.]

This dissertation is published in the format a white paper series which tells the story about Butler Tech's Fifth Day Experience across six issues. FDE is a student-centered initiative that was launched in the spring of 2020, and aims to operationalize deeper learning by exploring student voice, teacher agency, equity, personalized learning and innovation. FDE also aims to serve as a catalyst to redesign schools. A mixed methods approach was used to capture the action research process. Each white paper issue ranges between 12-15 pages and focuses on different themes within the research. Each issue include narratives, trends, and patterns from the data and highlights the evolution of FDE as it moves in real-time from a 1.0 model, to the 2.0, and eventual 3.0 versions. Issue one focuses on the origin of FDE. Issue two unpacks student voice in the design process. Issue three centers on the student experiences during the implementation process. Issue four focuses on an unexpected Covid-19 influenced model. Issue five captures the structural changes and highlights the rich programming. Issue six offers an executive summary, compares the three design models and provides a vision for the future of FDE. My hope is that school leaders, policymakers, and change agents use this white paper series as a vehicle to influence their own efforts to transform the educational world. Each publication is practical, applicable and offer critical insights into the FDE journey.

In the world of hybrid organizations, an important and under-examined phenomenon is the process of transforming from a hybrid structure to an organizational form with fewer logics. This research introduces the concept of dehybridization, which I define as a process through which an organization transforms in a way that integrates fewer institutional logics than previously. To examine the phenomenon of dehybridization in the context of social enterprises, I draw on the hybridity and hybrid organizations literatures. These literatures are integral in gaining a conceptual understanding of the challenges of hybrids and their transformations. Building upon this theory, I propose a conceptual framework that describes how dehybridization occurs in hybrid organizations and empirically study this phenomenon in a three-paper dissertation. The first paper introduces and defines the concept of dehybridization and illustrates the potential process for hybrid organizations. The second paper draws on a dataset of 33,350 Community Interest Companies in the United Kingdom from 2006-2020 to examine the relationship between organizational governance and dehybridization. The third paper draws on the same dataset and examines how three exogenous shocks (2007-2008 Financial Crisis, Brexit Vote, and Covid-19 Lockdown) affected the management of hybrid tensions in social enterprises.

The growing interest in the processes and practices of entrepreneurship has been dominated by a consideration of temporality. Through a thirty-six-month ethnography of a technology incubator, this thesis contributes to extant understanding by exploring the effect of space. The first paper explores how class structures from the surrounding city have appropriated entrepreneurship within the incubator. The second paper adopts a more explicitly spatial analysis to reveal how the use of space influences a common understanding of entrepreneurship. The final paper looks more closely at the entrepreneurs within the incubator and how they use visual symbols to develop their identity. Taken together, the three papers reject the notion of entrepreneurship as a primarily economic endeavour as articulated through commonly understood language and propose entrepreneuring as an enigmatic attractor that is accessed through the ambiguity of the non-verbal to develop the 'new'. The thesis therefore contributes to the understanding of entrepreneurship and proposes a distinct role for the non-verbal in that understanding.

Chapter 1: In this paper I investigate whether the effect of access to finance on females differs between selfemployed and business-owning women. I adopt a linear probability model with instrumental variables, using the receipt of windfall income and inheritances as instruments. The dataset being used is the German Socio-Economic Panel (GSOEP) for the period 2001 to 2012. I find that the probability that a woman enters into business ownership increases by 7.09 percentage points after experiencing a one percent increase in her level of wealth. This wealth effect is 0.6 times the size for female self-employed, at 4.2 percentage points. This paper is one of the first to describe the difference in size of wealth effects and constraints to finance for these two types of self-employed women. These results are consistent with findings in the literature, and add to it by showing that the impact of access to finance is underestimated when using the group of self-employed as a proxy for entrepreneurs. Chapter 2: In this paper we examine differences in access to finance and business value by gender. Using recent data from the German Socio-Economic Panel, instrumented linear probability models show that an increase in personal wealth substantially affects the probability of being a business owner only among females. This is indicative of differential access to finance by gender. Among business owners, fixed-effects regressions reveal that obtaining a bank loan increases mean total business value more for females than for males. Thus, possession of a bank loan appears to be a critical factor in explaining the business value gender gap. Chapter 3: In this paper I develop a life-cycle model of entrepreneurship, which captures the impact of borrowing constraints, business capital and entrepreneurial human capital. I include two types of entrepreneurs in the set of occupational choices, where I separate out business owners from otherwise self-employed individuals. Using the estimated model I perform three counterfactual policy evaluations. I find that lowering the borrowing constraint for every individual reduces the percentage of the population in entrepreneurship overall, whereas it increases longevity of businesses but not necessarily other self-employment. Providing a business subsidy as well as increasing entrepreneurship-specific human capital boosts the percentage of individuals in entrepreneurship, but slightly lowers the persistence of business owners over otherwise selfemployed.

The main objective of this three-paper thesis is to explore the role of emotions in the production of culture, examining how books and writers are selected to be part of the production of literature. It focuses on small companies and entrepreneurs because they are the most common type of organisation in the creative industries, and also because of the high level of involvement they have with their ventures. These circumstances provide this thesis with a context in which social interactions and networks are as important as the business ideas and opportunities identified as compatible with the ethos of these micro and small organisations. This dissertation reflects the interdisciplinarity needed to understand the complex relationship between entrepreneurship, creative industries and emotions, whose different facets are arguably best studied adopting different theoretical lenses. The three papers of this thesis show the evolution, as the dissertation moves from the initial research questions to the last ones, of the framework developed to achieve a holistic view of the role of emotions in the selection and production of cultural goods. This thesis adopts a qualitative approach to map out the most relevant networks and actors of a creative entrepreneurial ecosystem. The data collection consisted of historical data, policy reports, participant and non-participant observation of professional events and 33 semi-structured interviews with professionals belonging to the different networks of Edinburgh's publishing industry. The first paper is based at the individual level and it considers the psychological factors influencing the selection of creative goals and the creative processes of entrepreneurs, making a series of propositions within which the concept of emotional innovation is developed to explain the socio-emotional features of the production of culture. The second paper explores a creative entrepreneurial ecosystem, as opposed to the dominant literature on high tech entrepreneurial ecosystems. It focuses on the macro-level, investigating its socio-emotional characteristics and how emotions influence the way in which entrepreneurs engage in social interaction to access resources and knowledge. In the third empirical paper of this dissertation, the processes of social interaction between stakeholders of the publishing industry are examined in depth by unpacking the development of a literary festival. This study is based at the meso-level of analysis and examines how stakeholders capitalise on their emotions and personal connections to mobilise resources, engaging in entrepreneurial activities beyond the political arena of the festival. The thesis concludes reflecting on the theoretical contributions and findings, the under-researched areas that may be explored in the future, the limitations of this research and the implications it has for practitioners and policymakers. The inclusion of emotions as part of the framework that explains how creative goals are selected by creative industries' entrepreneurs, allows us to unpack a key entrepreneurial process that remains under-theorised. It is important to recognise the inevitable weight emotions have on the recognition of business opportunities and also as part of the soft skills that allow entrepreneurs to materialise these creative projects. Along the same lines, the study of social interaction would benefit from a more nuanced view on emotions, linked to specific entrepreneurial processes, to reach a better understanding of our situated activities and contribute to the advances of the literature on creative industries entrepreneurship. Finally, acknowledging the socio-emotional characteristics of creative entrepreneurial ecosystems would enable a more nuanced view of the collaborative relations among its different elements and networks. It will help understand the importance of its local characteristics, target public support and potential opportunities to improve professional practices.

Entrepreneurial ecosystems (EEs), understood as a type of organisational environment conducive to fostering high-growth and technology oriented startups, are currently deemed important for economic and employment growth. However, while the flagship case of Silicon Valley is widely researched and invoked, our knowledge of variation in how EEs develop is limited, and insufficiently theorised. In response, this thesis adopts an institutional perspective, conceptualising EEs as organisational fields, and addressing how the interplay between agency and structure result in different developmental trajectories of location-based EEs. The thesis consists of three empirical papers that examine several cases of EEs in Japan and India focused on Information and Communication Technology. The in-depth inductive studies are anchored in interview and participant observation data generated during multiple fieldwork visits. The findings illuminate key novel concepts: 1) a field development mechanism of intra-field cross-generational support (uncovered in an emerging field of Tokyo EE examined in relation to domestic large corporations); 2) a comparative framework of Varieties of Entrepreneurial Ecosystems (derived from an analysis of Tokyo and Bangalore - the biggest EEs in their respective countries); 3) an institutional infrastructure-related element of place cohesion (identified from a comparison of Osaka-Kyoto and Fukuoka - smaller EEs developing within one institutional context where the dominant EE is already present). Together, the papers show that differences in EE developmental trajectories stem from the interplay of EE stakeholders' agency to develop a desired EE institutional infrastructure (which is similarly conceptualised across locations), and the underlying elements for such infrastructure (which can be very time- and location-specific). Particular agency-related mechanisms that are crucial to EE development, depend on the EE relations to other fields. Overall, the thesis contributes to the scholarship on EEs and organisational fields, enhancing more contextualised understanding of EEs, and suggesting how to better study fields in a comparative and interconnected perspective.

Abstract: Academics and practitioners tend to accept that people found new ventures only primarily for economic reasons, but is that always true? Emerging work in the field suggests other non-economic key motives that may drive entrepreneurial decisions. My dissertation explores one such critical non-economic motive, namely, founders’ feelings of constraint. A puzzle addressed in this research is whether constraints help or hinder entrepreneurial behaviors. The literature is unclear, with evidence supporting both positive and negative views. To solve this theoretical puzzle, this dissertation offers three separate empirical papers, each examining the role of constraints in different stages of a typical entrepreneurial process (i.e., idea generation, idea selection, and resource acquisition). In doing so, it developed and validated three theoretically meaningful original measures (i.e., chronic and acute constraints, and perceived constraint). Moreover, this research looked at and tested the moderating effects of one’s regulatory focus on the relationship between constraints and the entrepreneurial process. Using MTurk panels, three papers found support for the main hypotheses. As such, this dissertation makes several significant contributions to the study of entrepreneurship. While many previous studies limit their analyses to a single stage of the entrepreneurial journey, this work shows how a phenomenon (i.e., constraints) affects entrepreneurial decision-making in different stages of venture creation. Such a multi-stage perspective enhances our understanding of constraints and their roles in the entrepreneurial process. Second, this research helps us realize the conditions under which, even after facing diverse constraints, some entrepreneurs successfully meet various challenges associated with new venture creation. Third, to the best of my knowledge, this is the first empirical testing of the notion that a founder’s ability to exhibit both promotion- and prevention-oriented behaviors are instrumental for entrepreneurial success.

Nigeria's development efforts since independence have accentuated poverty and inequality reduction through economic growth, employment creation, and financial sector development. Although the basic commitment to tackling poverty remains high, these efforts have not always yielded expected results. About 40% of Nigerians remain mired in poverty, with women and rural households most affected. One poverty alleviation intervention that has received significant interest in the research and policy space is access to finance, as not having access to basic financial services is considered as one of the biggest barriers to poverty and inequality alleviation, as well as other measures of economic prosperity. Although prolific literature has developed on the role of finance for poverty alleviation, controversies continue to plague the literature on the microeconomic links between access to finance and a range of measures of economic prosperity. In addition, a number of policy-relevant issues have remained significantly under-researched. For instance, although the literature conclusively suggests that access to finance has positive implications for poverty alleviation in developing countries, less conclusive evidence is available on the role of access to finance on inter-household inequality and occupational choices. Furthermore, due to data limitations, little policy-relevant knowledge has accumulated in specific contexts, such as that of Nigeria. Till date, no rigorous analysis has explored the role of financial sector development on inequality and entrepreneurship, despite the importance of its linkages for both sustainable growth and social stability in Nigeria. To address the academic and policy gap in the literature this thesis consists of three independent but closely linked studies investigating the implication of access to formal finance for household welfare in Nigeria using the GHS-Panel sub-section of the Nigeria's Living Standard Measurement Study (LSMS) surveys for 2010-2011 and 2012-2013. The first study examines the effects of access to formal finance on welfare and inter-household inequality, measured by the disparity in per capita household expenditures. We employ a treatment effects model to decompose the links between access to finance, proxied by owning an account with a formal financial institution, and household per capita expenditures. Thereafter, the study uses an innovative decomposition methodology, based on the treatment effects model, to explore the distributional effect of access to finance on households' per capita expenditures in Nigeria. The methodology allows for the computation of the relative contribution of different explanatory variables to the inter-household disparity in living standards. While there is a prolific research on the effect of access to finance on poverty, the implications for inequality at the micro level remain under-studied. Our results indicate that although access to formal finance improves household welfare, it tends to increase inter-household inequalities, despite ameliorating the inequality-enhancing effect of urban versus rural residence and enhancing the inequality ameliorating the effect of greater educational attainment. We also find that the contribution of access to formal finance on inter-household inequality is substantially smaller than the effect of unobserved household characteristics, suggesting that welfare and inequality-enhancing strategies in Nigeria should be holistic, as opposed to addressing one policy variable at a time. For years, the conventional paradigm in poverty analysis ignored the dynamic nature of household welfare. This conventional paradigm assumes that household poverty is static, thereby overlooking the fact that households inevitably move in and out of poverty over time. In a departure from the conventional welfare analysis paradigm, this second paper builds on the first paper and explores the role of access to formal finance in household welfare dynamics in Nigeria, drawing on two waves of household panel data sets covering 2010-2011 and 2012-2013. Consistent with the contemporary approach to poverty analysis, the study relies on two complementary empirical approaches, which have been widely used in poverty dynamics analyses - a multinomial logit model and a bivariate probit model. While a multinomial logit model, which is our baseline model, treats the factors associated with the household's initial conditions as exogenous, a bivariate probit model treats the factors associated with the household's initial conditions as endogenous, instead of taking them as given, which is argued in the literature may introduce selection bias into our specification. Our results indicate that contrary to expectations, given the country's growth and financial sector development performance, poverty incidence is increasing in Nigeria, as the share of Nigerians living in poverty increased between 2010-2011 and 2012-2013. Access to formal financial services is found to reduce the likelihood of consistently poor households remaining in poverty and consistently non-poor households slipping into poverty. The study also found that access to finance and its improvement reduces transient poverty in Nigeria. Finally, the third paper explores the implication of access to finance for household head's entrepreneurial choices and household enterprise growth. The study goes beyond the conventional use of self-employment as a measure of entrepreneurship, by disaggregating entrepreneurship choices into part-time entrepreneurship and full-time entrepreneurship. It then examines the role of access to finance on entering these two occupational statuses after accounting for the potential endogeneity of access to finance. The results indicate that these two categories of entrepreneurs are conceptually very different, especially with respect to their access to and potential use of formal finance for entrepreneurship purpose, which has potentially interesting policy implications. The study also investigates the role of access to external credit in household enterprise growth, once again after correcting for the endogeneity of the access to credit variable. We find that formal finance does not conclusively improve post-entry enterprise growth in Nigeria and other factors, mostly related to enterprise performance and potentially to social norms, are more important for enterprise growth.

Drawing inspiration from lateral thinking, synergetics, psychology, creativity, and business, this research project employs an interdisciplinary approach to investigate the research process which drives innovation in the field of artificial intelligence. This research project explores methods for harnessing the synergy present in the latest, neuro-symbolic paradigm of artificial intelligence, while noting similarities between the first two waves of AI and dual process theory. It attempts to integrate unconventional, yet potentially promising interdisciplinary ideas into a proof of concept, including creative tools and techniques like the Six Thinking Hats, methods of psychotherapy, including cognitive behavioral therapy and internal family systems, as well as principles related to conflict resolution and ``tensegrity". The proof of concept is a hybrid semantic search system for research papers in computer science, constructed using a process of rapid prototyping and iteration, with special consideration for evaluating how more modular, interpretable, and human-centric approaches to system design can help narrow the gap between cutting-edge AI research and ethical, practical application in business. This research is conducted with the hope of opening the research field to greater creative possibility, as well as deliberate action towards creating more sustainable and human-centric artificial intelligence systems.

The general purpose of this thesis was to explore the different roles enacted by entrepreneurs when developing their firm in the market. In their daily attempts to develop their firm, entrepreneurs “wear many different hats” because they are involved in multiple situations which require their interaction with different networks of social relationships (i.e. customers, employees, suppliers, investors). Through this research, we attempt to make three related and distinct contributions: (1) identification and definition of different roles enacted by entrepreneurs within their firm; (2) development of a measurement scale for the different roles entrepreneurs enact within their firm; and (3) proposal of a model explaining the relationship between entrepreneurs’ roles, Entrepreneurial Orientation, and firm performance. The thesis is presented in the form of three related papers. Paper 1 focuses on the qualitative study of the self-reported perceptions, behaviors, and attitudes that entrepreneurs relate to their efforts of developing their firm in the market. Through in-depth interviews and following thematic analysis methodology, we identified and analyzed patterns within the qualitative data. Conceptualizing the entrepreneurial firm as a proximate social structure that represents a context in which the entrepreneur establishes close relationships and thus enacts role identities, we identify and define seven different sets of behaviors or roles. In addition, we propose a conceptual framework to explain the entrepreneurs’ agency within their firm. Based on the previously identified and defined roles, in Paper 2 we develop the measurement scale for the entrepreneurs’ roles. The items generated from the literature review and the in-depth interviews were evaluated for content validity by a group of serial entrepreneurs. A pilot test was then conducted with a network of international entrepreneurs (N=55), followed by a pre-test using an online panel of U.S. entrepreneurs (N=157) who were owners and managers of a running business that had paid salaries to the owner(s) for more than two years. Finally, the main study (N=202) was conducted utilizing the same sampling frame as the pre-test. After Confirmatory Factor Analysis and measure validation, we propose a seven-construct measurement model for the roles that entrepreneurs enact within their developing firm. In Paper 3, following the development of the measurement scale, we explore the links between the roles enacted by entrepreneurs, Entrepreneurial Orientation, and firm performance. Understanding Entrepreneurial Orientation as a way in which entrepreneurs behave when creating and developing their firm, we propose a model in which Entrepreneurial Orientation mediates the relationship between entrepreneurs’ enacted roles and the performance of their firm. Our findings suggest that Entrepreneurial Orientation mediates the relationship between at least five roles enacted by entrepreneurs and firm performance. The influence of several of the enacted roles of entrepreneurs on Entrepreneurial Orientation suggests that the entrepreneur’s agency, facilitated through the use of roles, needs to be taken into account as an antecedent in a model of entrepreneurial strategic orientation and firm performance.

The dissertation presents an institutional perspective on the role of values and meaning for organizations focusing on the institutional logic of religion. At its core are Chapter III, a conceptual paper, and Chapters IV and V, empirical papers based on an in-depth two-years long ethnographic case study on the founding process of the first Islamic Bank in Germany. They are framed by an introductory chapter and a conclusion that address the overarching research question of how diverse institutional demands are managed within and beyond the boundaries of organizations, as well as a general literature review chapter that embeds the papers within the wider institutional theory literature. Chapter III presents a conceptualization that integrates religion, specifically Islam, with entrepreneurship along three interconnected pillars: the entrepreneurial, socio-economic/ethical and religio-spiritual; and outlines how Islam shapes entrepreneurship at the micro-, meso- and macro-level. It suggests the institutional logics perspective to further analyze the impact of religion on organizations, which the subsequent papers build on. Chapter IV extends theory on organizational hybridity by outlining polyphony and polysemy as two mutually reinforcing organizational responses, that allow competing logics to coexist without structurally separating or blending them, and that produce elastic hybridity, showing how hybrid organizations can accommodate competing logics that are both central and incompatible. Chapter V shows how organizations collectively and dynamically co-generate and co-resolve institutional complexity through four combinatory mechanisms: pushing, pulling, clarifying and tolerating. These are subsequently integrated into a framework based on their desired versus required and actual versus perceptual nature. Overall, this dissertation contributes to a better understanding of how organizations manage diverse institutional demands including religion.

While there is a large amount of literature on the socio-cognitive theory of technology evolution, most has focused on the interpretations of technologies that are already in existence. The literature has barely attended to the role of forward-looking cognition—mental representations of possibilities in the future. How do innovators and entrepreneurs envision the possible, and how do they translate those abstract concepts into new material and social reality? This dissertation first synthesizes the vast literature on technology evolution, and offers a theoretical framework for understanding the role of forward-looking cognition in the evolution of technology. Using a large amount of historical archival data on the US robotics industry, my two empirical papers investigate (a) how a distant vision co-evolves with the actual technologies at the level of the organizational field (b) how entrepreneurial solutions and entrepreneurial search problems are co-constructed at the firm level. In the first paper of my dissertation, I review the literature on the evolution of technology. Over the last decades, scholars from a broad range of theoretical and methodological traditions have generated a vast yet dispersed body of literature on technology evolution. This essay offers a comprehensive synthesis of the major streams of scholarship on technology evolution by dividing the literature into four perspectives: technology realist, economic realist, cognitive interpretivist, and social constructionist. I further show that each perspective offers a divergent account of three central mechanisms—variation, selection, and retention—that drive discrete, continuous, and cyclical patterns of technology evolution. I integrate these perspectives by highlighting that they all emphasize recombination, environmental fit, and path dependence as central drivers of those three mechanisms. I emphasize the need for a co-evolutionary framework that cuts across the four perspectives to push the literature forward. In the second paper of my dissertation, I examine how technological visions—mental representations of technological possibilities in the future—co-evolve with the actual technologies. This paper is set in the robotics industry. The existing literature has focused on how backward-looking interpretations of technology shape its subsequent trajectory, but has rarely examined the role of forward-looking cognition in technology evolution. To examine this, I conducted an extensive archival qualitative study covering the evolution of the field of robotics during the 100-year period from 1921 to 2020. I find that in a future-oriented field, the direction of technology evolution is largely shaped by the field participants’ attempts to narrow the vision-reality gap—the perceived temporal gap between the distant vision and present reality. I identify six distinct mechanisms—linking means to the distant vision, constructing a medium-term vision, envisioning sequences, decomposing, reconstructing, and reintegrating—through which field participants strive to narrow the vision-reality gap. I also find that the vision-reality gap is extremely volatile, and can rapidly expand and contract when salient artifacts (or reverse salients) emerge. In this study, I contribute to the socio-cognitive view of technology by highlighting the role of forward-looking cognition in technology evolution. In the third paper of the dissertation, I study the process through which an entrepreneurial search problem is constructed. Previous studies have focused on search for solutions to a given problem. However, literature on entrepreneurship suggests that many entrepreneurs often start from formulating a very broad, abstract problem that a novel technological means is envisioned to be able to solve in the future. Forward-looking cognition, the mental representations of possibilities in the future, lies behind the process of problem formulation. In order to examine how construction of problems affects search for solutions, I conducted a qualitative analysis of archival data about 58 entrepreneurial firms founded by 42 entrepreneurs in the robotics industry. I find that most entrepreneurial firms start by linking a novel technological means to an abstract problem, and then proactively identify a core constraint in the solution space. In order to bypass the constraint, they engage in decomposing and reconstructing a core problem. In the stage of pursuing product-market fit, the issue of identifying core attributes, or core evaluation criteria weighted by users is brought to the fore. This paper contributes to our understandings of entrepreneurial search by highlighting the cognitive underpinnings of problem formulation.

The improvement of digital technology and human drive to connect and communicate have made social media an ever-present part of social life and, increasingly, organizational life. By reshaping the ways people interact, organize, take collective action, create and learn, social media both challenges our current understanding of individual and organizational phenomena and lends importance to the exploration of how these phenomena occur through digital-mediation. Despite this, few studies have explored the role of social media in processes of organization creation and emergent identity formation. Of research conducted on social media, more generally, Twitter and Facebook have attracted the most attention, with few studies conducted within the context of Instagram, a visually-rich social networking platform with over a billion users. Responding to increasing calls for the study of social media’s implications for organization studies and for more-specific study of the Instagram platform, this dissertation addresses the role that Instagram plays in affording new ways of organizing, the generative nature of user interactions, and responses to social media visual content in collective identity construction. To accomplish these goals, I have elected to organize my dissertation into three papers. An introductory chapter and literature review set the stage for this work, providing both the theoretical framework for this research and justification of its import to organization studies. The first paper employs qualitative content analysis to understand how users of the social networking platform Instagram enact communication affordances in practice and draws on the social and collective concept of entrepreneuring to explain their implications for organization creation. The second paper draws on narrative thematic and visual analysis to examine how user engagement within the visually-rich context of Instagram fosters the development of collective identity, revealing the important roles of resonance and play to this process. The third paper develops the concept of small social data and illustrates its use in the study of organizational phenomena on Instagram. I conclude this dissertation by integrating the main contributions of these papers to theory, highlighting opportunities for future study, and discussing practical implications for organizations in the digital age more-broadly.

This is a paper that records the changing thoughts of a Chief Technology Officer in a major telecommunication company in the Middle East. The initial problem was whether to outsource or not, but this led to reflections on decision making, systems thinking, cybernetics and many other ethical, political and professional issues. These thoughts can serve as a roadmap for decision makers and stimulate critical reflection on their actions.

The past decade has been marked by widespread social movements. While we know a great deal about how large public firms are affected by social movements, we know little about how entrepreneurs process social movements’ pressures and decide whether or not to take action, along with the eventual consequences for their businesses. In the first essay, I theorize about the connections between social movements and social entrepreneurship, focusing on how social movements encourage entrepreneurs to use their vehicles as firms to solve social problems. This paper lays a foundation to understand how social movements serve as catalysts for social entrepreneurship and the associated organizational and field implications. In my second essay, I ask the question: Whether, how, and why do entrepreneurs react to the social movements’ spillover effects, and with what consequences to their businesses? Through a qualitative study, I study how the racial justice movement has spilled into in the fiber craft industry (e.g., knitting and crochet pattern designers, yarn dyers, yarn shop owners, content creators), largely centering the experiences of Black business owners. I find that social movements prompt entrepreneurs to reconsider their personal and relational identities which results in a change of stakeholder relationships and diverse personal and business outcomes. My findings provide valuable insight into how entrepreneurs—particularly those who share an identity with a social movement—respond to social movement spillover effects. Small and young businesses numbering in the tens of millions are making strategic choices for their businesses in the wake of mass social movements. These decisions have important implications for the survivability and success of their firm. I seek to build theories at the intersection of social movements and social entrepreneurship, and to inform young and small business owners, social movement organizations, and community stakeholders about the broad reaching effects social movements have in many corners of the market.

Scholars often focus on the beginning or ending stages of new venture development without attending to the “middle stage of entrepreneurship, where innovations are developed, but lack market traction. While scholars recognize that innovations travel tenuous pathways that initiate at idea conception and culminate in commercialization, less research investigates the role entrepreneurs play in fostering the adoption of their own innovations within incumbent organizations. How do novel technologies and innovations gain organizational adoption and grow in market relevancy? To examine this overarching question, I conducted a 24-month field study of 54 entrepreneurial firms matriculating through a digital health accelerator, and the customer organizations (health systems, pharmaceutical companies and insurers), investors, government officials (local and state) engaging with the entrepreneurial firms to further their innovations. Each chapter of my dissertation draws upon this data to explore derivatives of this overarching question at different levels of analysis: (1) entrepreneurial firm; (2) the evolution of each firm’s underlying innovation; and (3) dyadic - between an entrepreneurial firm and an adopting organization.In the first paper of my dissertation, I focus on how entrepreneurial firms engage in market search: information gathering activities that probe whether an innovation can meet market needs, to gain traction for their innovations. By tracing each firms’ search and learning practices, I identified three market search processes. Transactional searchers engaged in selective search, reluctantly revising their innovations in response to limited feedback. Confirmatory searchers engaged in broad search but selective learning, resisting adaptation of their innovations. Diagnostic searchers engaged in broad search and learned from ambiguous feedback to adapt their innovations, discovering new sources of value and revenue. By attending to all three search processes, I contribute a grounded theoretical explanation of how entrepreneurial firms vary in the ways they make progress toward market traction. In doing so, I reveal the hidden costs of market search and show how only some entrepreneurs surmount those costs.In the second paper, I examine how entrepreneurial firms repurpose their existing innovations to develop new use-cases and expand their market scope. Scholars frequently suggest that to grow, entrepreneurial firms must stay the course and scale existing capabilities, or pivot in entirely new directions. Yet these prescriptions neglect the recombinant process by which firms decompose and repurpose their existing innovations without straying from their strategic course. With detailed analysis of 58 use-cases from 54 entrepreneurial firms innovating in digital health, I show how entrepreneurial firms varied in their pursuit of organizational adoption. I show that when entrepreneurs pursued a customer centric process, they developed disruptive ways to repurpose their innovations, but strategically paced the introduction of these extensions to seed adoption. Firms that leveraged a market centric process, also developed novel ways to repurpose their innovations, but immediately deployed all aspects of their innovations in attempt to beat the competition. Only a customer centric process aided entrepreneurs in gaining organizational adoption for their innovations. By unpacking the recombinant process by which entrepreneurial firms create new uses for existing innovations, I contribute a critical mechanism that helps explain how entrepreneurial firms gain adoption for their innovations as they grow. The third paper explores how novel innovations are adopted when they threaten to displace adopting organizations’ work practices. With a novel data set of 13 dyadic pairs formed between six entrepreneurial firms and three prospective customer organizations, I analyze how entrepreneurs revised and repositioned their innovations to address each organization’s concerns. All six entrepreneurial firms had developed innovations that utilized machine learning to perform medical diagnostics work. By exploring the process of adoption between pairs of entrepreneurs and adopters, I induct the contingencies that trigger different strategies within the same firm. I show how outside innovators can play different roles in determining how digital innovations displace work and power relations.

This paper studies research concerning the field of Indigenous entrepreneurship and entrepreneurs of the Pacific with particular emphasis given to the Kanaka Maoli of the Hawaiian Islands. It discusses the notion of Kanakanomics as informed by the traditional ahupuaʻa system based in indigenous approaches to organizational behavior and theory. It delves into how these epistemologies then influence contemporary Kanaka Maoli entrepreneurs. Lastly, this paper provides a brief case analysis of the Puʻuhonua o Puʻuhuluhulu as an example of an indigenous start-up organization that has implemented the aforementioned organizational behaviors and theories.

Millennials are often scrutinized for what appears to be generational differences. However, the Millennials might not be as different as the older generations think, although they have one overwhelming challenge: technology. This paper analyzes the advantages and disadvantages that entrepreneurs have experienced across several generations. In addition, the paper discusses whether the influence of social media is harmful or helpful to Millennial entrepreneurs. Overall, it is difficult to determine whether Millennials are at a disadvantage compared to previous generations. Millennials face monetary challenges, education barriers, and unsupportive home lives just as entrepreneurs of older generations. Though the effects from overuse of technology can be negative, it offers Millennials certain advantages that previous generations did not have. Through new methods such as online businesses, franchising, and personal branding, Millennials are continuing the ingenuity that defines entrepreneurship.

Special Purpose Acquisition Companies (SPACs) are simply enterprises that raise money from the public with the intention of purchasing an existing business and becoming publicly traded in the securities markets. If the SPAC is successful in raising money and the acquisition takes place, the target company takes the SPAC’s place on a stock exchange in a transaction that resembles a public offering. Also known as “blank-check” or “reverse merger” companies, this process avoids many of the pitfalls of a traditional initial public offering. During late 2020 and 2021 an unprecedented surge in the popularity and issuance of Special Purpose Acquisition Companies (SPACSs) took place. John Coates, the SEC’s Acting Director of the Division of Corporation Finance, observed, “Concerns include risks from fees, conflicts, and sponsor compensation, from celebrity sponsorship and the potential for retail participation drawn by baseless hype, and the sheer amount of capital pouring into the SPACS, each of which is designed to hunt for a private target to take public.” We discuss this popular approach to capital formation within the context of the securities issuance process and examine the robust market for SPAC issuance during 2020 and 2021. Financial reporting and auditing considerations are examined, along with regulatory concerns. Several examples of these offerings are provided. We believe this paper adds to the discussion and understanding of this widely employed financing mechanism.

This paper presents a survey of possible applications for the MicroZed Timekeeping and Geolocating Sensor (TGS) developed by Professor Corbin Covault of Case Western Reserve University and his team. Professor Covault prototyped the device in 1996 at the Pierre Auger Observatory as a tool to count cosmic rays in his research and he has continued to develop the device. The paper investigates possible current markets for the device and considers its patentability. Markets considered include Box Synchronization for usage in Travelling Wave (TW) Fault Detection, electric trading markets, the Smart Grid, Microgrids, potential defense applications, Aviation and Unmanned Aerial Vehicle (UAV) technology, Internet of Things, Geofencing, Microlocation, and Microlocation of Live Rescue Personnel. Although the author concludes that the device may not be patentable, the paper offers insight and a recommended path for the professor to take should he decide to commercialize the device for use in any of the mentioned applications.

Digitalization is the process of making digital everything that can be digitised to change a business model and provide new revenue and value-producing opportunities. However, difficulties exist in evaluating the value created by digital technology investments in organisations, industry structures, economies and society, at large. My dissertation illustrates how the distinct characteristics of digital technologies are implicit in an evolution from stable to fragile product innovation; while highlighting the need for a dynamic approach to entrepreneurial innovation within national innovation systems. The foundations for my work are bound up in the digitalization of value networks, and the context for this research is digital cinema - a process that began in 2000. Digital cinema offered a new value proposition to distributors and significant cost reductions for the US studios. With a reliance on a highly developed value chain to protect intellectual property, these studios sought to learn from the disruption digitalization caused to the music industry, by cultivating digital technology as an, incremental innovation, in replacing celluloid with bytes to project content to cinema audiences. Global digital cinema penetration in 2014 stood at 90 per cent of the total screen footprint. The dissertation assesses features of this digital rollout that have been under-explored; including the role digital technology has assumed in process and product innovation; and, the behavioural responses of both incumbents and new entrants during the diffusion and adoption phase. My dissertation is supported by eight published papers, which highlight the need for domestic policymakers to focus their attention on emerging entrepreneurial innovations; the utilisation of current knowledge and strategies for novel solutions in order to strengthen their respective national innovation systems. Taken together they help explain the creation, diffusion and adoption of digital cinema, explore the new content creation opportunities they support, and explain how three nations in particular have sought to innovate and reorientate themselves in relation to these novel phenomena. The wider implications of the findings of the project build on the innovation literature in examining the diffusion, adoption and knowledge acquisition during the rollout of digital cinema technology. These findings suggest a radically different reading of both disruptive innovations and national innovation systems than has been offered in previous accounts, viewing the digital cinema rollout as a case study of an increasingly mobile sector, in which technological factors retreat in importance behind entrepreneurial innovation as a key driving force in reaching audiences. Finally, in exploring the phenomenon of the digitalization of value networks I have made a significant contribution to knowledge in the design of an innovative mixed method; specifically in the area of field research - a qualitative data collection method designed for considering, observing, and interacting with individuals in their natural environments. Over time, I have established that digital cinema was capable of delivering novel supply and demand solutions - starting with a few unrelated scraps of data, through the establishment of personal networks with communities of practice (in the UK, US & Norway) to building rich, and complex quantitative data sets capable of measuring the entire diffusion and adoption phase of the digital cinema rollout, right across Europe.

A key distinguishing feature of cities is that the population density is high relative to non-urban areas. Arising from this density is the frequent contact between various socioeconomic actors, which provides for the means of social interactions as well as productivity gains accrued through agglomeration economies. This collection of papers begins on the premise that social interactions underlie economic forces, which constitute the ingredients of the complex system that is the urban economy, jointly determining the outcome of cities as a whole. With such a view of the urban economy, this dissertation attempts to answer a series of key questions regarding the interface between social interactions, agglomeration economies, new firm formation, and economic growth. The first paper proposes an agent-based model of social network formation that explicitly considers space and untangles the complex relationship between social interaction dynamics and inequalities in socioeconomic resources. The second paper builds upon the insight that social interactions and economic outcomes are related and addresses the question of how social interactions and agglomeration economies jointly determine new firm formation in cities. Finally, the last paper attempts to answer the critical question of how urban economies should grow, under the premise that growth takes place through changes in industrial structure brought about by entrepreneurship in particular industries. Knowledge of the underlying mechanisms of social interactions, and how such interactions bring about new firm formation and economic growth provides for both a theoretical and empirical framework for which planning interventions can be made within the realm of community and economic development. The findings could be used to assist planners in better understanding the workings of the urban economy and inform decision making that aims to promote sustained economic growth.

Fundamentally, entrepreneurship is about acting under uncertainty. For entrepreneurial firms willing to bear the risks of developing novel innovations from new technology knowledge, that uncertainty is amplified. To succeed at launching innovations that could bring industry and technology change, these firms need significant resources, time, and technology development, but they are weak, under-resourced, and dependent on funders and partners to survive. Entrepreneurial firms are theorized and advised to be flexible, unencumbered by the organizational inertia that limits their established counterparts and therefore able to adapt. Yet, we understand little about how these firms manage the uncertainties they face. In this dissertation, I explore how and why entrepreneurial firms developing novel technology evolve their strategies and technology products. The research study for this dissertation is a multi-year longitudinal field study of strategy and technology product evolution at seven early stage energy and cleantech hardware firms. In the first paper, I examine when and how entrepreneurial firms decide to make strategic change and when that change constitutes a ‘pivot’. In the second paper, I examine how entrepreneurial technology firms in a dynamic and uncertain context learn from the process of choosing not to change their strategies. Lastly, in the third paper, I examine how these entrepreneurial firms manage the challenges of partnering with established firms to develop their novel technologies. This dissertation contributes to the entrepreneurship, strategy, and technology innovation literatures with a grounded theoretical understanding how early stage technology firms manage uncertainty through strategic change, learning, and interorganizational relationships.

The aim of this paper is to analyze the role that nonprofit organizations can play in utilizing economic development to alleviate poverty. The thesis components will be analyzed by answering six research questions (RQ): (1) What is economic development in developing countries? (2) What is the connection between economic development and poverty alleviation? (3) What are some examples of economic development lessening poverty? (4) What are the essential features of a nonprofit organization? (5) What can nonprofit organizations do to create economic development? and finally, (6) What are archetypical examples of nonprofits creating economic development and reducing poverty? To understand economic development, this paper will show that many tools are necessary, including: trade, entrepreneurship, education, and political stability – to name a few. Secondly, it will be explained how these tools can be used not only for growth but even to better the living conditions of every participant in an economy. A few examples of each will be provided. Next, the essential features of a nonprofit organization will be provided. With this comprehensive understanding, the primary objective can be more fully appreciated. The thesis looks at how two of the major tools of economic development – trade and entrepreneurship – can be applied by nonprofit organizations (NPOs) to provide opportunities for the low-income individuals to better their own circumstances. Finally, specific NPOs will be provided that are carrying this vision out in their operations. Throughout this thesis, it will be seen how nonprofits can utilize economic development to alleviate poverty.

Roll-A-Rack, a small business based in Cleveland, Ohio, is addressing the unmet needs for solar panel mounting services and Li-ON Care, a student based startup, is addressing the unmet needs that exist in lithium ion battery's health management systems. This paper reviews the scientific and commercial developments of these two entrepreneurial ventures in the solar and the energy storage industries.

The following paper overviews an empirical approach to business planning methods with a practical application in the form of a traditional business plan. The paper identifies the main methods for approaching entrepreneurial bio-technology ventures and strategic actions necessary for successful commercialization. The study correlates a business plan being written concurrently with the study taking place. The entirety of the business plan for the bio-technology startup is held within this document. The conclusion looks at how academic institutions assist in the creation of successful biotechnology business plans and aid in the commercialization of bio-technology.

In July 2011, I began to lay the foundation of the Taneycomo Festival Orchestra (TFO) in Branson, Missouri, and we completed our fourth successful concert season in June 2015. The TFO is a two-week classical music festival in Branson, Missouri that thrives on experimentation—both programmatically and institutionally—and community building through music. I wanted to create something that is satisfying for musicians and accessible to modern audiences. This is its mission: The Taneycomo Festival Orchestra is a nonprofit organization that provides a free two-week concert series of classical music in Branson, Missouri. We seek to break the 19th century tradition that attending a symphony concert is a formal and elitist event by providing an accessible and casual series of concerts and educational programs while continuing to preserve these great works of art in our destination city. Come as you are and enjoy the beautiful music! I embarked on this adventure with little administrative experience. However, I had a strong background in clarinet performance and music composition, a great network of friends and colleagues, and determination to bring my dream to fruition. In laying the TFO's foundation, I completed almost every administrative task on my own. I filed all of the legal documents (Articles of Incorporation, Employee Identification Number, and 501(c)(3)) successfully and without any legal aid. In the first year, I also recruited thirty-five musicians to perform in the orchestra and programmed eight concerts (two orchestral, six chamber) for the two-week series. In 2015, we had one hundred musicians and gave fourteen concerts (four orchestral, nine chamber, one big band) over the course of our two-week series. Our programming is diverse and includes standard repertoire, contemporary repertoire, commissioned repertoire, children's programming, and jazz. Our venues are eclectic and include schools, hotels, cafés, bars, shops, churches, and homes. We save a lot of money while simultaneously engaging the community by placing each of our traveling musicians with host families and providing the orchestra with nightly dinner parties at various community members' homes. The Festival continues to grow and is immersed deeper into the community each year. After our fourth season, community members have remarked that the TFO is no longer a luxury but a necessity. This paper is a concise guide to music festival creation for performers. It discusses the path that I took to create the Taneycomo Festival Orchestra and reveals the successes and failures of the process. I started the Taneycomo Festival Orchestra to make classical music more accessible, enjoyable, and relevant to a modern, rural community. The events created under these circumstances are often high-quality musical experiences that are fun for audiences. I also aspired to separate music festival creation from traditional institutional structure. If a performer takes a similar path and wishes to create such an organization, he or she will have little to no familiarity with the traditional or nontraditional institutional structures. My unique perspective offers a multidisciplinary approach to music festival foundation. Most of this paper is structured around a narrative about my experiences in running TFO, but also refers to many valuable resources to aid the beginning arts administrator in the creation and management of a music festival.

The decision to be self-employed has been studied in numerous scholarly papers. In particular, there has been interest in the decision to become an entrepreneur in relation to the macroeconomic climate. Scholars reference the potential for an economic boom to "pull" entrepreneurs into self-employment. On the other side of the debate, scholars argue that recessions "push" individuals with low skills into working for themselves. This paper finds no evidence of either theory when looking at state level growth rates in real gross domestic product and state level growth rates in unemployment claims. However, there is evidence of a differing effect of the macro environment by age and educational attainment

The supply of public interest journalism that serves the needs of citizens in a democratic society has always been scarce in the media marketplace when compared with sensationalism, gossip, entertainment, propaganda, and misinformation. This scarce commodity, whose market value lies in its credibility and depends on costly investments of time and money in professional research, has frequently required a subsidy, which for more than a century was provided by advertising. Now that this subsidy has mostly been devoured by technological platforms such as Google and Facebook, the industry and profession are developing new models focused on user needs and wants with a trend toward public service rather than profit. This paper uses deductive and critical methodologies to identify the most promising business models used by media companies to counteract the decline in public-interest journalism. Our proposal is that an appropriate business model can be the best way to revitalize media companies. The research is based on Chesbrough’s business model framework applied to 20 leading digital news publications from 16 countries. In addition, we analyze how Covid-19 has impacted those business models.

This dissertation consists of three chapters empirically analyzing how public policy affects firm behavior, with a particular emphasis on small, entrepreneurial firms. The first chapter analyzes how occupational licensing affects firm entry and employment decisions. Occupational licensing is a government permission to work within a specific job classification. The costs to firms of paying to license employees can be a substantial consideration when firms are making location and hiring decisions. Using individual firm-level data I analyze how these costs affect firms by determining how differences in costs across state borders affect the likelihood of firms entering on a particular side of a state-pair. I find firms are less likely to enter in an expensive state if a substantially cheaper state is within a short distance. I also utilize a geographic regression discontinuity design and determine that firms on the more expensive side of a state border pair have approximately 2.3 employees fewer on average. Comparing similar licensed and unlicensed industries I find evidence of a persistent decrease in average employment for licensed firms in high cost states relative to unlicensed firms. The second chapter investigates potential gender related bias in equity, debt, and philanthropic contribution financing decisions for early-stage African entrepreneurial ventures. Utilizing a series of individual estimations and a two-stage Heckman Selection Model on questionnaire results from 2,812 early-stage entrepreneurs in Ghana, Kenya, Nigeria, Tanzania, Uganda, and South Africa, I find substantial evidence of a negative effect of having a female primary founder on the probability of being selected for equity funding but that this bias does not persist in the amount of equity funding the venture attracts. I find that in the case of debt and lending finance, female entrepreneurs are subject to a lower probability of being selected for funding and smaller total amounts of debt financing. Philanthropic contributions present an interesting alternative, and do not have any related gender bias in the initial selection or funding amount. This paper provides policy recommendations for encouraging female entrepreneurship, which has been shown to contribute to long-term sustainable economic growth. The third chapter explores the unintended consequences of the Bankruptcy Abuse Prevention and Consumer Protection Act of 2005 (BAPCPA) on the entry and exit behaviors of small businesses. BAPCPA implemented significant changes to consumer bankruptcy law which had many unintended consequences for debtors, creditors, and consumers. Since small businesses are often unincorporated and therefore the financial assets and debts of the company cannot be separated from the owner, bankruptcy serves as a crucial form of partial wealth protection for self-employed and small business owners. This study focuses on how the implementation of BAPCPA affected small businesses entry and exit rates by utilizing a Difference-in-Difference methodology. A Triple-Differencing method is also incorporated to account for potential differences in small business entry and exit behaviors in low and high personal homestead exemption states. I find that BAPCPA decreased the entry rate of small businesses by approximately 4.91% and increased exit rates by 2.74%. These effects vary substantially across industries.

This dissertation consists of three chapters. In the first essay of my thesis, I document a marked declined in the share of entrepreneurial households in the United States and I propose and quantify a mechanism to account for such decline. Using individual-level data, I provide evidence on the decline in the population share of entrepreneurs and in the entry rate into entrepreneurship. I also show that the decline is most concentrated among college graduates. Then, using an otherwise standard entrepreneurial choice model with two skill groups of individuals, I show that the decline in entrepreneurship is the equilibrium outcome of two forces that have increased the returns to high skill labor: the skill-biased technical change and the decrease in the cost of capital goods. I find that these two technological forces jointly account for three-quarters of the decline in the share of entrepreneurs observed in the United States over the last 30 years. In the second essay of this thesis, Nicholas Bloom, Fatih Guvenen, and I study the cyclicality the distribution of firm-leve outcomes over the business cycle. Using firm-level panel data from the US Census and for more than forty other countries, we show that the skewness of the growth rate of employment and sales is procyclical. In particular, during recessions, they display a large left tail of negative growth rates (and during booms, a large right tail of positive growth rates). These results are robust to different selection criteria, across countries, industries, and measures. We find similar results at the industry level: industries with falling growth rates see more left-skewed growth rates of firm sales. We then build a heterogeneous agents model in which entrepreneurs face shocks with time-varying skewness that matches the firm-level distributions we document for the United States. Our quantitative results show that a negative shock to the skewness of firms’ productivity growth (keeping the mean and variance constant) generates a significant and persistent drop in output, investment, hiring, and consumption. In the third and last essay of this thesis, Mons Chan, Min Xu, and I, study the importance of fluctuation of firm-level productivity in explaining the fluctuations in workers’ wages. In particular, we use matched employer-employee data from Denmark to analyze the extent to which firms’ productivity shocks are passed to workers’ wages. The richness of our dataset allows us to separately study continuing and non-continuing workers, to correct for selection, and to investigate how the passthrough varies across narrow population groups. Our results show a much larger degree of passthrough from firms’ shocks to workers’ wages than reported in previous research. On average, an increase of one standard deviation in firm-level TFP commands an increase of 3.0% in annual wages ($1,500 USD for the average worker). Furthermore, we find that the effect of productivity shocks on wage growth for workers who switch firms is larger relative to workers that stay within the same firm. Finally, we find large differences in the passthrough for workers of different income levels, ages, industries, and firms of different productivity levels. In the second part of our paper, we estimate a stochastic process of income that captures the salient features the data. We then embed the estimated stochastic process into a life-cycle consumption savings model to evaluate the welfare and distributional implications of the passthrough from firms’ TFP shocks to workers’ wages.

Every film, from the smallest indie to the biggest studio blockbuster, must be funded, and all investors who finance a movie expect that the movie will give them a return on their investment. In order to seek funding, many filmmakers create a business plan to present to potential investors. Beginning with the film industry as a whole, this paper will define a specific target audience and distribution plan for one film in order to create a business plan. The film, titled Intertwined, is an independent low budget family drama that will primarily raise funds through equity investors. This is a crucial time to test and prove the marketability of a film before it goes into production.

This thesis examines the Israeli Defense Force (IDF) military intelligence Unit 8200 and its propensity for producing successful high-tech entrepreneurs. The paper begins with a historical background of Unit 8200 and a description of its current state. It then introduces Entrepreneurial Orientation (EO) as a conceptual framework for analysis. To assess the EO of Unit 8200 alumni, three methods are utilized: semi-structured interviews with members of Israel’s startup community supplemented by relevant media reports, computer-aided-textual-analysis (CATA) of Initial Public Offering (IPO) prospectuses from firms founded by Unit alumni, and financial ratio analysis of those same firms. The results show that these companies have a higher propensity for autonomy, risk-taking, and innovativeness than industry peers. It also showed a negative propensity for proactiveness.

In contact sports like football and ice hockey, concussions are a common occurrence. Over 10% of athletes experience at least one concussion per season. Recent discoveries have emphasized the disastrous neurological consequences for people with a history of concussions, which include dementia, depression, and early-onset Alzheimer’s disease. Today’s helmet technology is woefully inadequate at mitigating concussions, especially in where the athlete’s head experiences rotational acceleration. With lawsuits mounting against leagues like the NFL, the survival of football may depend on solving the concussion problem. The startup Hedgemon, LLC has begun developing a promising impact protection technology based on hedgehog spines. If integrated into a football helmet liner, it could substantially reduce the concussion-causing acceleration of the brain induced by frequent in-game collisions. Adapted from a recently submitted SBIR Phase I grant proposal, this paper discusses in detail the technology at its current state of development and the exciting commercial opportunity.

Over the past few decades, many of the most significant contributions to the field ofmagnetic resonance imaging have been made by Dr. E. Mark Haacke, his collaborators, andmost recently his company. In 1994, Dr. Haacke founded Magnetic Resonance InnovationsInc., which now creates software for advanced MRI postprocessing, DICOM viewersoftware, sequence design, and more. The company is in the process of pivoting toward adirect sales business model to hospitals and imaging centers. This paper will present multiplemodels concerning revenue, staffing, and investment strategies being considered for theimmediate future. It is the opinion of the author that assuming key milestones are reached,executive staffing needs are satisfied, and clinical research supporting the need for advancedanalysis continues, that the proposed business plan accurately represents the future of thecompany, specifically reaching over $20MM in revenue selling software to hospitals andimaging centers within five years.

In the 21st century, where disease outbreaks occur, how quickly they spread, and how difficult they are to treat, are all heavily influenced by human organization and behavior. Here, I examine the case of Swaziland to evaluate potential pathways towards recovery in the face of a sustained epidemic. This paper draws from an extensive review of existing literature and selective interviews with local stakeholders to explore the pervasive impacts of HIV/AIDS on Swazi society and to evaluate possible entry points to bolster resilience. Current responses, including improved access to education and distribution of Anti Retro Viral medication, are useful in theory but implementation has been highly fragmented. This Thesis suggests that significantly improving human health and wellbeing in this context will require a comprehensive reassessment of what governance should look like in a post HIV Swaziland. Based on this analysis, I propose potential avenues towards recovery including strengthening the national education system, promoting local governance and, crucially, enabling coordination across national objectives.

Small businesses often have a difficult time obtaining funding. With no credit history and little collateral, obtaining funding can be an insurmountable obstacle for small businesses. Because of this, many entrepreneurs are turning to a newer funding method, crowdfunding. Crowdfunding can broadly be defined as “the financing of a project or a venture by a group of individuals instead of professional parties” (Larralde and Schwienbacher, 2012). Typically, individuals or businesses create a campaign seeking to raise funds on a crowdfunding website. Equity crowdfunding to unaccredited investors was previously inaccessible in the United States due to securities regulations pertaining to equity offerings. The JOBS Act of 2012 made equity crowdfunding legal, and following the passage of this act, the SEC issued several regulations for crowdfunding issuers and “funding portals.” This paper focuses on equity crowdfunding and its practicality in light of these new regulations. Upon examination of the JOBS Act, it seems that the regulation, costs, and risks involved with equity crowdfunding inhibit its long-term potential to be a viable funding method for early stage ventures and also as an investment vehicle for unaccredited investors. While the idea is promising, the burdens put upon the intermediaries and entrepreneurs severely diminish the practicality of equity crowdfunding.