entrepreneurship Archives

Differentiation in Microenterprise: A Field Experiment in Zimbabwe

In explaining variation in productivity in microenterprise, research has focused primarily on the adoption of effective business practices and access to capital, with little focus on strategic positioning. In archival evidence, we find that offering a differentiated product or service is strongly correlated with firm performance. Using a combined sample of nearly 10,000 microenterprises across eight developing countries, we estimated that a standard deviation increase in differentiation is associated with approximately an 11 percent increase in revenues and an eight percent increase in profit…Read More

Pivoting and Experimentation in Lean Startups

While recent scholarly and practitioner research has stressed the importance of learning in entrepreneurial settings, little scholarly work has formally examined the mechanisms through which learning drives behavior in those settings. Specifically, we investigate how an active learning process based on evaluating performance relative to an aspiration drives the pivoting and experimentation behavior of startups in environments with high degrees of uncertainty and potentially intense selection pressures.…Read More

Information Ambiguity in Entrepreneurial Experimentation

Pursuing entrepreneurial opportunities is characterized by high uncertainty because entrepreneurs look to find unsatisfied demand with their new products or services. In an attempt to reduce uncertainty, entrepreneurs experiment with potential customers, seeking feedback through interviews or prototypes. It allows the entrepreneurs to learn about the targeted market and whether their idea can satisfy that demand.…Read More

Credit Supply & Entrepreneurship in Low-Income Regions

We show that bank credit affects entrepreneurship, but only in low-income regions. We use a novel methodology to identify credit supply shock from regional demand shock using comprehensive data on small business loans between pairs of banks and counties in the US.…Read More

Human Capital and Startup Financing

We establish the relevance of human capital to startup financing. Using administrative databases from the Central Bank of Brazil, we obtain information on private firms, their founders and their access to bank credit.…Read More

A Theory of Experimentation in New Ventures

Experimentation has been the center of a fascinating debate among entrepreneurship practitioners throughout the past decade. While intellectually stimulating and practically relevant, this discussion has received little attention from management research, and therefore has no scientific support. …Read More

Experimentation and Appropriability in Early-Stage Ventures: Evidence from the U.S. Software Industry

This study examines the tension between learning and appropriability in the experimentation process of early-stage ventures. I build a stylized model to argue that, when formal intellectual property is weak, the learning benefit of experimentation may be offset by its imitation risk. …Read More

Solution for Removing Alcohol From Beer While Preserving Flavor Wins 2021 Y-Prize

LiberTech proposes that brewers use a Penn technology to cost-effectively filter out ethanol and still preserve quality and taste.…Read More

Who Benefits from Having a Partner? Intrinsic Motivation, Partnership Decisions, and the Chance of Becoming a Profitable Firm

Entrepreneurs and entrepreneurial firms are often the drivers of innovation, and success for entrepreneurial firms often means development and introduction of innovative products and services. This project examines the role that having a partner plays in early-stage entrepreneurial firm performance.…Read More

Employee Entrepreneurship and the Fall of Incumbents

In this project, I investigate employee entrepreneurship as a key source of the incumbent disadvantage. …Read More

Entrepreneurship Amid Stigma

This project will examine the response by entrepreneurs to sociopolitical forces such as nationalism and populism.…Read More

The Role of Organizational Sponsorship in Pioneering New Technology

Organizational sponsors foster young entrepreneurial firms by providing resources to increase survival rates. Sponsorship can be financial, as with tax incentive structures, public and private grant programs, or early stage private investment. …Read More

Does Crowdfunding Benefit Entrepreneurs and Venture Capital Investors?

We study how a new development in entrepreneurship—crowdfunding—interacts with more traditional financing sources, such as venture capital (VC) and bank financing. …Read More

Does Private Equity Ownership Make Firms Cleaner? The Role Of Environmental Liability Risks

As VC firms have an acute interest in high-tech companies, they potentially bear substantial risk of patent litigation. In this project, we aim at looking into the following questions: how do ex-ante and ex-post patent litigation risks affect VC firms’ investment strategies and how those risks is propagated among all portfolio companies they have invested?…Read More

Personal Wealth and Self-Employment

We examine how wealth windfalls affect self-employment decisions using data on cash payments from claims on Texas shale drilling to people throughout the United States. Individuals who receive large wealth shocks (greater than $50,000) have 51% higher self-employment rates.…Read More

‘Creating the Organizational Structures that Liberate People to Innovate’

Kaihan Krippendorff (W’94, EAS’94) discusses the value of innovating from within and describes the traits that characterize internal innovators compared to entrepreneurs.…Read More

‘Removing the Element of Luck’ for Young Entrepreneurs

Seth Berger ( W’89, WG’93), Managing Director of Sixers Innovation Lab, discusses how the accelerator supports Philadelphia entrepreneurs by providing office space, health care, food, and even housing.…Read More

For Startups, Adaptability and Mentor Network Diversity can be Pivotal: Evidence from a Randomized Experiment on a MOOC Platform

Entrepreneurs leading digital ventures are often advised to be adaptable. However, research on how to pursue adaptable strategies and whether such strategies improve short- or long-term digital venture outcomes is sparse.…Read More

Situating the Construct of Lean Start-Up: Adjacent Conversations and Possible Future Directions

The lean start-up approach has garnered tremendous amount of interest in recent years and has become mainstream among entrepreneurs. However, this practitioners’ conversation has been largely decoupled from the broader academic literature in management and technology strategy. …Read More