Volume 4, Issue 3 -

Actors in a position to broker and connect otherwise disconnected parts of a social network are spanning structural holes. The spanning of structural holes can leverage performance, but in this paper I study if it can also influence entrepreneurial decision making. Studying a network of entrepreneurs – mostly farmers – who have built their own hydroelectric micro-power plants in rural Nozrway, I find that actors spanning structural holes tend to build relatively large plants. The use of instrumental variables indicates that the spanning of structural holes is a cause, and not an effect, of entrepreneurs’ decisions about plant size. The paper discusses how the finding can have implications for our understanding of decision making and entrepreneurial risk taking beyond the studied context. I also find that the entrepreneurs’ formal level of education is positively associated with the size of the plants being built.

Studies of diversification strategy in the venture capital (VC) market have shown that VC firms apply both specialization and diversification strategies. This study builds on the early results and investigates how the nature of diversification – related and unrelated – affects firm performance. We draw arguments from efficient knowledge management and a perspective of structural coordination needs. The secondary data of VC investment from 2002 to 2012 were collected, and regression analysis was performed. Our results suggest that related diversification is associated with better firm performance, and venture capitalists seem to prefer related to unrelated diversification at early stage.

This study examines how a university’s support impacts students’ entrepreneurial intentions and finds that entrepreneurship education, concept-development support, and business-development support increase such intentions. The university role is critical to the growth of entrepreneurial intentions, and we argue that an individual’s decision in favor of or against becoming an entrepreneur depends on the multi-level context provided by the university. Our findings suggest that students perceive the education and concept-development support (educational and cognitive) from their universities as highly influential on their entrepreneurial intentions. We conclude that a multi-level perspective offers a meaningful understanding of entrepreneurship and offer suggestions for university management and policy-makers for enhancing entrepreneurship. A sample of 805 undergraduate students in universities in Pakistan took part in the study.