Volume 16, Issue 1

Education intricately shapes human behavior, including entrepreneurial endeavors. Recent academic discussions have focused on entrepreneurial education programs and their effects on firm’s performance, thereby overlooking behavioral implications. However, this research domain is particularly important for entrepreneurs without academic entrepreneurship-related education, potentially lacking theoretical skills, knowledge, and access to resources. Adopting grounded theory methodology, this study analyzes interview data from 41 entrepreneurs. The findings demonstrate the interplay of education-related starting challenges, entrepreneurial motivation and entrepreneurial characteristics, influencing entrepreneurial behavior. In a new conceptual framework, the three identified coping mechanisms using self-learning opportunities, learning through practical experience and actively looking for support, play a central role in overcoming potential disadvantages. This study thus contributes to the academic discussion of entrepreneurship education and entrepreneurial behavior opening various avenues for further research. Furthermore, it provides practical implications for entrepreneurs, policy makers, organizations and institutions.

As major exogenous shocks and polycrises become the new normal, digital start-ups face heightened vulnerability due to scarce resources, yet they also benefit from inherent flexibility. While entrepreneurial resilience is increasingly recognised as crucial for survival, the intersection of digital entrepreneurship, resilience, and dynamic capabilities remains underexplored. To address this gap, we conduct a case study of Israel – a country exposed to multiple overlapping and subsequent shocks in recent years. Drawing on interviews with 10 digital start-up leaders and extensive secondary data, we find that digital start-ups, during crises, shift from routine-based digital capabilities to heuristic-based dynamic capabilities that enable swift adaptation. In post-crisis phases, they bounce forward by institutionalising some of these heuristics, thereby strengthening preparedness for future shocks. Our study defines and empirically substantiates digital entrepreneurial resilience as an emerging construct, demonstrating how dynamic capabilities drive resilient digital entrepreneurship in polycrisis environments.

This study investigates the impact of founder gender and gender anonymity on online fundraising through a field experiment conducted by Pitch Perfect, a platform connecting founders and potential venture capital (VC) investors. The platform randomly assigns seasoned VC investors to conditions where founder gender is either revealed or kept anonymous. Analyzing 159 matched investor-founder observations, we predict and find that investors express a higher level of intention to invest in female founders than in male founders, but only when the founder gender is revealed. Furthermore, we observe that when founder gender is revealed, investors tend to assign higher ratings to female-led projects in the relatively subjective area of problem quality, but not in the relatively objective area of solution quality, as compared to male-led projects. Such differences in ratings no longer exist when the founder gender is not revealed. These results suggest that in online VC settings, investors are more likely to favor and invest in female founders, even when there are no actual characteristic differences between female-led and male-led projects. This finding has implications for both the literature on founder gender effect in fundraising and platforms aiming to create a gender-neutral investment environment.

Why are most entrepreneurial activities not innovative? We conceptually illustrate the motivational obstacles of entrepreneurs with fear of failure to recognize innovative opportunities. We test our theoretical arguments using data from the GEM survey of 65,782 early-stage entrepreneurs in 31 countries from 2013 to 2018. Our analysis shows that fear of failure is negatively related to the innovativeness of opportunities. Entrepreneurial self-efficacy positively moderates the inverse relationship between fear of failure and the innovativeness of opportunities. Furthermore, government support plays an inverted U-shaped moderating role in the relationship between fear of failure and the innovativeness of opportunities, which underscores the dual nature of government support and sheds light on how it impacts innovation. Empirically, the study provides robust evidence that fear of failure negatively impacts entrepreneurs’ innovative opportunities. It also contributes to further scope of research on individual factors and the recognition of different attributes of opportunities. The results provide important insights for the recognition of innovative opportunities, offering practical implications for entrepreneurs and policymakers.

Acknowledging the potential of social entrepreneurship in addressing social and environmental issues, the government provides various forms of support, both directly to particular social enterprises and indirectly to foster social entrepreneurship overall. Nevertheless, prior research lags behind in illuminating the impact of government support on the financial performance of social enterprises. Using the Resource Dependence Theory and the sample from 267 social enterprises in South Korea, this study examined the effects of the government financial support and non-financial support on the financial performance of these enterprises. This study further explored the extent to which the tenure period of the CEO in the social entrepreneurship context affects these focal relationships. This study aims to contribute to the literature regarding social entrepreneurship performance and the role of government for this sector, while aiding policy makers in promoting social entrepreneurship.

Since firms struggle to achieve green innovation by merely relying on internal resources, the director network has emerged as a critical channel through which to address this challenge. We explore how network features, specifically bonding and bridging ties, affect green innovation from a meso-level network community perspective. For Chinese Shanghai and Shenzhen A-share listed firms, we discover that bridging ties have a more positive effect on green innovation than do bonding ties. Mechanism tests show that this phenomenon is related to heterogeneous knowledge. Further analysis shows that firms with greater dynamic capability and a strong guanxi culture can better leverage bridging ties rather than bonding ties to enhance green innovation. We provide further empirical evidence on driving green innovation by clarifying the significantly different roles of bonding and bridging ties.

Equity crowdfunding (ECF) platforms rely heavily on visual information while operating under pronounced information asymmetries, raising the question of whether founder facial attractiveness functions as a consequential signal in retail investors’ decision making. Drawing on signaling theory and dual-process/thin-slice accounts, we investigate whether and why founder facial attractiveness influences perceived venture success, investment amounts, and expectations of reciprocity. Using an eight-round, incentive-compatible ECF-like task, 229 lay investors evaluated AI-generated founder portraits that were rigorously pretested to manipulate facial attractiveness while holding perceived leadership suitability constant, thereby isolating the effect of attractiveness. Investor decisions were analyzed using generalized estimating equations to account for repeated measures and to control for individual risk propensity and demographic characteristics. Across outcomes, founders depicted as more attractive elicited higher expectations of venture success, larger investment amounts, and stronger expectations of reciprocity. These effects were robust and did not vary as a function of founder or investor sex. The findings advance signaling theory in entrepreneurial finance by demonstrating that non-diagnostic visual cues can systematically shape investor judgments when information is sparse and cognitive elaboration is constrained. In the image-forward, retail-investor context of ECF, facial attractiveness operates as a powerful platform-visible signal despite lacking intrinsic diagnostic value. Practically, the results suggest that platforms should surface diagnostic information earlier and consider debiasing prompts, while founders should complement professional imagery with verifiable signals of quality. More broadly, the study highlights the importance of ethics-by-design approaches to visual presentation in entrepreneurial finance environments involving retail investors.