Volume 6, Issue 4 -

After highlighting the importance of small companies to the UK economy, new archival evidence is provided from an exploratory study which investigates the financing and failure of 21,147 UK single owner-managed (OM) corporate start-ups. Relative to comparable US survey evidence, UK OM corporate start-ups rely very heavily on debt financing from inception, with minimal equity being injected by owners and with retained earnings making only a modest contribution to initial financing. Financial gearing is found to be an important determinant of failure after controlling for company-specific and owner characteristics. Interestingly, the results indicate that foreign-owned company start-ups are less failure prone. Based on the empirical findings of the study and that of extant research, a number of suggested avenues for future research are discussed.

Social enterprises are the products of the social, cultural, commercial, and political expectations of the innovation’s range of stakeholders, not solely the vision of the social entrepreneur(s). The power of stakeholders to influence the development of an innovation is drawn from their salience and the resources, access, and/or legitimacy that their support would provide. In this way, the actions of social entrepreneurs represent the interests of communities and it is through processes of resistance, negotiation, and collaboration that the actions of social enterprises become the manifestations of collective social processes. This paper draws on the development of a nascent social enterprise in New Zealand to demonstrate how the effects of its context ultimately shaped its innovative business model. Using an ethnographic methodology, the development of the business model and the partnership through which it formed was examined by the author as a central actor as it unfolded. The case study serves as an illustrative example of the ways in which differing expectations, beliefs, and logics of stakeholders induces particular decisions to be made about the design, resourcing, and strategy of the venture.

This paper explores the concept of the living-dead trap (LDT), a pervasive state of entrepreneurship resulting from the decision to persevere in the operation of a venture in the face of sustained financial underperformance and personal psychological disutility. Financially underperforming firms can survive for long periods, usually with injections of sweat equity and debt, often decimating in the process the capital of their founders and investors as well as the obligations incurred to employees and other creditors. More specifically, this paper suggests a personal composite of specific cognitive and affective processes that leads entrepreneurs to commit to “failing but not failed” projects. That is, to fall into a trap known as the living-dead trap. We posit the living-dead phenomenon as a most pervasive state in firm founding drawing on cognitive and affective perspectives to model the attendant decision-making processes.