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Research Summary: This study explores the impact of parent university linkages on the market performance of university spin-off firms (USOs). We argue that spin-offs' performance is not only affected by competencies inherited from their parent universities at start-up but also by linkages maintained over time. We longitudinally study 551 USOs established between 2000 and 2008 in Italy. Using estimations that account for attrition and endogeneity, we find that equity-based university linkages increase USOs' market performance and that geographical proximity strengthens this effect. Furthermore, increasing technological ties between USOs' entrepreneurial teams and their parent universities has a detrimental effect on performance, especially for companies that remain geographically proximate to their parent universities. The results have implications for theory and practice related to strategic linkages, alliances, and academic entrepreneurship. Managerial Summary: This study explores the extent to which university spin-off firms (USOs) benefit from maintaining linkages with their parent universities over time. We study 551 USOs established between 2000 and 2008 in Italy, assessing their market performance (i.e., sales revenues) up to 2012. We find that USOs that maintain equity shares with their parent universities have better market performance. This positive effect is stronger for USOs located near their parent universities. In contrast, USOs that maintain close technological ties to their parent universities have worse market performance, especially if located near their parent universities. These findings are relevant to policymakers, university managers, and academic entrepreneurs interested in understanding how to effectively design and manage the different linkages between USOs and their parent universities.

This study reviews the presence of articles related to Central and Eastern Europe (CEE) in Web of Science (WOS). Bibliometric analysis first reveals the trends of CEE-related articles in the areas of international business (IB), management and economics up to 2016. The results show steady growth in absolute and relative numbers after 1990, intensifying since 2010. Second, we conduct topic research using network analysis with blockmodeling. We identify a network of topics and their interrelations over time and used them to periodise the CEE-related research in IB. The most-cited CEE-related IB articles and the main citation path are also presented. The analysis adds to the discussion of how the CEE region is explored in IB research, its contributions, impacts and the challenges facing regional research in the future. In this study, a methodology and framework for performing a comprehensive bibliometric analysis on regional IB research is applied.

The aim of this paper is to investigate the growth dynamics of young small firms (in contrast with larger and older incumbents) in a developing country context, using a unique and comprehensive dataset of non-agricultural Tunisian companies. Our results suggest that significant differences between young and mature firms can be found as far as the drivers of their growth are concerned. The key finding being that-while consistently with the extant literature Gibrat's law is overall rejected-the negative impact of the initial size is significantly larger for young than mature firms. This result has interesting policy implications: since smaller young firms are particularly conducive to employment generation, they can be considered good candidate for targeted accompanying policies addressed to sustain their post-entry growth.

International audience; This paper examines listing location as a managerial decision by using a sample of IPOs of Chinese entrepreneurial firms in mainland China, the United States and Hong Kong. We find that Chinese entrepreneurial firms managed by CEOs with international experience are more likely to undertake foreign IPOs, especially those returned from countries with more advanced legal institutions and those operating in high-tech industries. The credibility crisis for Chinese firms in 2010 switched the focus of foreign IPOs from the US to Hong Kong. These results are consistent across returnee CFOs and other senior executives with international experience.

What explains how entrepreneurial firms organise digital product innovation? A unique characteristic of digital artefacts is their perpetual incompleteness, as they are “constantly in the making”. This study examines the role that this constant change that characterises digital artifacts plays in explaining how small, entrepreneurial firms manage digital product innovation. Drawing from research on founder identity and employing a cognitive frame theoretical lens, we conduct a multi-case study research design involving 15 founders of small size digital ventures. Our analysis finds that the entrepreneurs developed substantive interpretations about change in the content of their product, and about the nature of the process involved in the development and commercialisation of their products. Based on combinations between product change frames (minor versus major) and change in process frames (stable versus dynamic process frames), we identify four distinct approaches entrepreneurial firms take to manage digital product innovations. These approaches include: strategic innovation, experimental innovation, content innovation and learning experiments. Our findings contribute to product innovation research by developing a typology that provides a new conceptualisation of the approaches to manage innovation in digital products that takes into account the continuous change that characterises the content and process involved in digital artefacts.

This study uses the patent applications of alternative energy organizations, including companies, universities and research institutions, to explain the dynamic evolutions of organizational resource portfolios. We study organizational resource portfolios from two dimensions: internal knowledge portfolio and external partner portfolio, and we capture the dynamic evolutions of two portfolios through the emergence of new partners and the growth of knowledge elements, and explain these from a diversity perspective. We propose inverted-U shaped relationships between diversities (collaborative and knowledge) and organizational portfolio dynamics (new partners and knowledge elements). Analyzing alternative energy patents from 3601 organizations during the time period 2000–2012, we find that organizations having too high or low collaborative diversity have less novel knowledge elements and new collaborative relationships than those having moderate collaborative diversity. We also suggest that knowledge diversity contributes to two types of portfolio dynamics. However, the positive effects of knowledge diversity on evolutions of partner and knowledge portfolios diminish, and even become negative and detrimental beyond certain levels of knowledge diversity. Our findings have theoretical implications for dynamic evolutions of organizational portfolios and diversity literature, and are also useful for firms’ managers striving to develop valuable collaborative partners and pursuing novel innovations.

It is evident that supply chain management (SCM) practices are widely practiced by large scale and established business organizations as benchmark. Not only the large firms but also the small and medium scale businesses are required to follow these practices to achieve the growth. Further, present business environment is very competitive and organizations should face this as a challenge. This study is undertaken to empirically investigate the impact of supply chain management on competitiveness. Sample consists of 327 production managers of medium scale entrepreneurial firms (manufacturing sector) in Colombo district. The analyzed data supports the hypotheses revealing that higher the level of involvement in SCM practices higher the competitiveness. Further, it is found that except level of information quality and lean practices, other practices of SCM (Strategic partnership with suppliers, customer relationship, level of information sharing and internal supply chain process are significant factors that affect firm competitiveness.

We explore the innovation performance benefits of alliances for spin-off firms, in particular spin-offs either from other firms or from public research organizations. During the early years of the emerging combinatorial chemistry industry, the industry on which our empirical analysis focuses, spin-offs engaged in alliances with large and established partners, partners of similar type and size, and with public research organizations, often for different reasons. We seek to understand to what extent alliances of spin-offs with other firms (either large- or small- and medium-sized firms) affected their innovation performance and also how this performance may have been affected by their corporate or public research background. We find evidence that in general alliances of spin-offs with other firms, in particular alliances with large firms, increased their innovation performance. Corporate spin-offs that formed alliances with other firms outperformed public research spin-offs with such alliances. This suggests that, in terms of their innovation performance, corporate spin-offs that engaged in alliances with other firms seemed to have benefitted from their prior corporate background. Interestingly, it turns out that the negative impact of alliances on the innovation performance of public research spin-offs was largely affected by their alliances with small- and medium-sized firms.

This systematic review covers the extant literature on corporate governance in entrepreneurial firms. Using a sample of 137 research papers published from pre-1990 through June 2018 in 60 journals, we categorize outlets, research methods (quantitative, qualitative, review, and non-empirical), theoretical perspectives, and research questions, highlighting key patterns. We then summarize the concepts under study in the sample literature, and the geographical sources and model specification of quantitative empirical studies. The conclusion highlights the quite fragmented nature of the field and the substantial knowledge gaps, and then proposes an actionable agenda for future research in terms of theories, research questions, research settings, and research designs. In particular, we describe the need to explore how corporate governance mechanisms interact with one another and affect firm outcomes, by applying novel theoretical perspectives and methods that could provide a better understanding of entrepreneurial firms’ functioning.

International audience; Research Summary: We develop a two-step selection model between entrepreneurial ventures and venture capital (VC) investors in a thin VC market. The model predicts that in a thin VC market, the availability of VC reduces the propensity of firms to self-select into the market for VC (demand-side selection) but not the probability that firms entering the market for VC will receive financing (supply-side selection). We test these predictions using survey-based data on 190 new technology-based firms in Italy during the late 1990s and early 2000s. The empirical evidence supports the predictions of the model. Managerial Summary: Venture capital (VC) is an important ingredient of an environment that is conducive to the birth and the growth of entrepreneurial ventures, but VC markets are often highly local and thin in terms of participants. We show that the scarcity of VC supply may cause a drop in the demand for VC because entrepreneurs, anticipating that competition for VC money will be tough, will not seek VC in the first place. The more a market is thin, the more the demand-side selection is likely to become more important than the supply-side selection of VC investors. Demand-side selection may involve a significant number of otherwise good targets for VC investment, which will not be in the radar of VC investors. In turn, this may deter new VC investors from entering the local market, thus creating a vicious cycle that raises concerns for both policy makers and VC general partners.

Background: Entrepreneur was the key factor of venture capital-backed star-ups, and control rights serve as an important incentive to attract entrepreneurs’ human capital investment. Objective: In this article, we investigate the ways in which the specificity and exclusiveness of entrepreneurs’ human capital impact the allocation of residual control right (RCR) and specific control right (SCR) in entrepreneurial firms, based on the comprehensive effect of various control right benefits. Methods: Using panel data for a mixed regression model, we test theoretical hypotheses with survey data collected from entrepreneurial firms in various industries in China. Results: We find that when the venture capitalist’s (VC) strategic benefits are less than the entrepreneur’s private benefits, the VC’s RCR is negatively related to the specificity of the entrepreneur’s human capital and is positively related to the exclusiveness of the entrepreneur’s human capital. The VC’s SCR is positively related to the specificity and is negatively related to exclusiveness. When the VC’s strategic benefits are greater than the entrepreneur’s private benefits, the VC’s RCR is positively related to the specificity of the entrepreneur’s human capital and is negatively related to the exclusiveness. The VC’s SCR is positively related to both the specificity and exclusiveness. Conclusion: The impacts of specificity and exclusiveness of human capital are more significant for high-tech companies than for traditional companies. It is necessary for different types of VC-backed firms to implement classified governance over the control rights.

Recent entrepreneurship research emphasise the importance of the emerging knowledge in business model and business model innovation as they can be considered critical for businesses to disrupt and compete effectively in the dynamic international business markets. To date, there still is incongruence in conceptualisation of these terminologies and inconsistent empirical findings, conclusions and implications. This study reviews definitions/concepts that influence and present significant implications to scholars in the field and implications to entrepreneurial firms following the narrative literature review approach. The study presents a more congruent trend of understanding of the concepts while justifying their implications to contemporary entrepreneurial firms. Refereed/Peer-reviewed

We investigate the effect of public (PUVC) and private (PRVC) venture capital funds on the sales growth of 6513 European New Technology-Based Firms (NTBFs) during the period from 1992 to 2009. Our results show that PUVC-backed NTBFs underperform with respect to PRVC-backed ones and do not grow more than non–venture capital-backed companies. The impact of PUVC is still not statistically significant (even though it is positive) when PUVC funds target young NTBFs. The only notable exception suggesting a positive and statistically significant impact for PUVCs is when PUVC funds cofinance with PRVC funds, and both target young firms

Cooperative agreements are important tools to improve the competitive position of small and medium-sized firms.this explorative conjoint analysis study simultaneously examines the importance of firm, environmental and partner motives on the formation of two types of sme-alliances. In addition, we study the influence of the sector of industry and the ceos' characteristics. Results indicate that alliance formation is determined by a combination of organizational, partner-and industry-related motives, and that each of these factors should not be studied in isolation. Moreover, motives differ across functional area types of alliances, and both the sector of industry and a ceo's experience affect the probability of alliance creation.los acuerdos cooperativos son importantes instrumentos para mejorar la situación de las pequeñas y medianas empresas con respecto a la competencia. Este estudio preliminar de análisis conjunto examina simultáneamente la importancia de los motivos empresariales, ambientales y sociales para la formación de dos tipos de alianzas de pyme. Se estudia, además, la influencia del sector secundario y las características de los directores ejecutivos. Los resultados indican que la formación de alianzas es determinada por una combinación de motivos organizativos respecto a la relación sociedad-industria, y que cada uno de estos factores no se debería estudiar aisladamente. Los motivos también varían dentro de los tipos de funciones de las alianzas, y tanto el sector secundario como la experiencia del director ejecutivo afectan la probabilidad de formar alianzas.

Do entrepreneurial ventures that adopt an open business model obtain VC finance from higher quality VC investors in comparison with entrepreneurial ventures that adopt a closed business model? Are VC investments in open business model ventures are more likely to be syndicated and more frequently staged? In this paper we consider these questions on a sample of 6,555 VC investments in 514 software entrepreneurial ventures that received the first round of VC finance in the period 1994-2008. Of these ventures, 124 adopted an open business model based on open source software (OSS) and the remaining ventures adopted a closed business model based on the development and sale of proprietary software. Our findings indicate that OSS entrepreneurial ventures received funding from higher quality VC investors, with VC quality being measured by general experience, industry-specialization, IPO success, raised capital and connectedness in syndication network. Also, VC investments in OSS entrepreneurial ventures were more frequently staged. Conversely, we do not find any difference between OSS and proprietary software entrepreneurial ventures as number of VC participated in syndication.

We aim to ascertain to what extent the better performance of European venture capital (VC)‐backed firms in high-tech industries is due to either ‘screening’ or ‘value added’ provided by VC investors. We compare portfolio firms' productivity growth before and after the first VC round, using a matched control group as benchmark. We show that productivity growth is not significantly different between VC and non-VC-backed firms before the first round of VC financing, whereas significant differences are found in the first years after the investment event. We also find that the value-adding services provided by VC investors ‘imprint’ the portfolio firm.

The open innovation paradigm emphasises the importance of alliances for improving the innovation performance of firms. However, existing empirical research on innovation performance implications of alliances is dominated by cross-sectional studies. As a result, we do not know how the time frame of alliances might influence innovation performance. In this study, we therefore examine the impact of different time frames of alliance strategies on innovation performance. In order to do so, we collected panel data on 217 Flemish startup firms. The results show a positive association between ‘discontinuous alliance strategies’ with suppliers, customers and competitors and ‘incremental’ innovation performance. In addition, we find a positive impact of ‘continuous alliance strategies’ with suppliers, competitors and universities and other research institutes on ‘radical’ innovation performance. These findings encourage startup firms to balance their alliance portfolio not only in terms of different kinds of partners but also in terms of different kinds of time frames.

In this paper we examine the moderating affect of age on the relationship between cooperation and new product success for entrepreneurial firms in the high technology region in and round Jena in the former East Germany. Cooperative strategy has already been shown in a variety of research settings to be an important strategic alternative for entrepreneurial firms to support growth strategies. We develop hypotheses that such cooperative relationships will also lead to higher new product development success; however, the type of successful cooperation will vary with the age of the start-up firm. Younger firms are shown to be more successful when they cooperate with other firms, while older firms will profit more from cooperation with research institutions. This study adds to a growing literature on the importance of cooperative strategy for entrepreneurial firms.