Volume 7, Issue 1 -

Businesses compete in markets with significant uncertainty and choose disparate competitive strategies. Some attack while others appear to wait. While real options logic has been used to explain market entry and exit decisions under uncertainty, few have tied this logic to the characteristics of ventures’ competitive moves. This paper discusses how ventures launch competitive moves, particularly the speed and intensity of action, under contrasting conditions of exogenous uncertainty and first-mover advantage. We argue that the speed and intensity with which entrepreneurs conduct competitive activities are contingent on both their perceptions of the environment and their level of certain cognitive biases. We conducted a two-by-two within-subjects design experiment to test our hypotheses with a sample consisting of service industry professionals.

We critically examine how an entrepreneurial ecosystem is structured using an exploratory and bottom-up approach. Past studies in this area have discussed the presence of elements in the system or captured the ecosystem as holistically as possible by extending to social, cultural, and institutional dimension. However, we find that such aggregated conceptualizations gave limited understanding to how different elements are connected and constitute the system. Here, we apply a social network approach by analyzing the connections of the ecosystem at multiple layers: (1) among entrepreneurs, (2) among support organizations, and (3) between and among entrepreneurs and key support organizations. Through a series of interviews with entrepreneurs and support organizations in St. Louis, we find that the ways in which support organizations in this region interacted with each other and with entrepreneurs, including explicit cross-organizational collaboration and strategic structuring of resources, significantly impacted the way that entrepreneurs interacted with one another and with organizations, thus deepening our understanding of these connections and identifying intervening points within the ecosystem.

This article shows how a research journal can be used as a tool to reflect on issues arising during the phase of data collection. Especially in cross-cultural comparative research, unexpected cultural issues are likely to arise. The most critical is the phase of data collection, where decisions have to be made quickly. This article demonstrates how to establish and maintain a research journal during cross-cultural face-to-face interviewing with entrepreneurs. It provides ten suggestions for “what” and “why” to take notes on during five phases of data collection. Furthermore, the article elaborates on how a research journal could be used to deal with emotions as well as methodological and ethical issues that may arise.