FREE ACCESS: Paper on Accelerators

Happy to share that my recently published Technovation article “Scale quickly or fail fast: An inductive study of acceleration” (with Tommy Clausen) will be available FREE with FULL ACCESS for a limited period. Courtesy: Elsevier, ScienceDirect.

CLICK HERE TO READ FOR FREE (available until 31-October-2020): https://authors.elsevier.com/a/1bjribssdh0wq

Scholars and practitioners may find these highlights useful to trigger interest in reading the full article:

• Accelerator is a nascent yet fast growing global phenomenon; its role within the entrepreneurship ecosystem remains debated.

• Our grounded inductive study uses data from accelerator executives (supply) & accelerated ventures (demand).

• Our study calls for a shift in analysis from form (accelerator) to mechanism (acceleration).

• Acceleration focuses on: product-market fit ventures; time compressed scaling; aggressive scalability testing.

• Accelerators focus on scaling of new ventures vis-à-vis birthing and hence complement other support forms

If you are an incubator manager, an accelerator executive, entrepreneurship policymaker, entrepreneurial ecosystem participant, or anyone interested in entrepreneurship support forms and mechanisms, you will find the article of interest.

Happy Reading!

Why more entrepreneurship education is not necessarily better?

A couple of months back I had the pleasure of attending a provocative seminar by Prof Ulla Hytti from Turku School of Economics. She is also a visiting professor at the Division of Innovation and Entrepreneurship, Nord University Business School.

The topic of her talk is the title of this blog post! Isn’t that provocative enough?

Entrepreneurship is now being taught in more Universities, colleges and schools than ever before. Entrepreneurship education has clearly transcended the boundaries of the business school. Some universities have now labelled themselves as ‘entrepreneurial universities’. Entrepreneurship and entrepreneurship education are truly becoming ubiquitous. This is both encouraging and worrying!

Prof Hytti cautioned us that it was probably the right time to pause and reflect – on the  question – ‘Why more entrepreneurship education is not necessarily better?’. Having been an entrepreneurship educator for over a decade, I could not agree more to her reasons for why we should pause and reflect:

• entrepreneurship is positioned as a panacea to all social and economic challenges
• every course wants to be ‘entrepreneurial’ in some way
• most entrepreneurship courses look similar (content and pedagogy)
• everyone wants to be ‘entrepreneurial’ (from Universities to corporations)
• everyone wants to be an entrepreneurship educator

Without complaining, Prof Hytti gave us enough reasons as to why it was good to reflect when things are apparently good for the field. She also highlighted the benefits of such critical reflections. The discussions post her presentation went on for a long time and ranged from issues of how much contextualization is right for entrepreneurship courses, how to balance reflection and action in entrepreneurship education and approaches required for bringing reflection in entrepreneurship education, especially after action-oriented modules.

I have often heard people say, there is little to research in entrepreneurship education. I used to doubt it, but after yesterday’s reflection, I completely disagree. There are a number of things about entrepreneurship education that we don’t understand well enough. Following an ‘ideal’ curriculum and an ‘ideal’ pedagogy is only aggravating the challenges looming under the surface of entrepreneurship education.

I left the seminar wondering if it was time to start some new research projects on entrepreneurship education. Do you have questions on entrepreneurship education that have perplexed you?  Here is my first one: How can we teach entrepreneurial failure? How can we enable students experience and learn from failure?

Do share your top questions in the comments section below. We can probably create a list of unanswered research questions in entrepreneurship education.

FREE ACCESS: Paper on Corporate Accelerators

Happy to share that until October 10, 2019 my article published in the Journal of Business Venturing will be available FREE TO READ without any registration, fees or sign up requirements.

 

 

Click Link to access the article free: https://authors.elsevier.com/a/1ZbaS38~UTXKpO

If you are researcher on the growing phenomenon of corporate accelerators, the future research section has numerous “potential research questions”

If you are a corporate executive involved with your organization’s corporate entrepreneurship efforts (including accelerator programs), this paper will provide you a number of insights to design and run the program more effectively

So, go ahead, click on the link above and learn more about Corporate Accelerators:

Highlights of the article

• Corporate Accelerator (CA) is a fast growing global phenomenon & confusing CA with corporate venturing limits understanding
• Our grounded inductive study found at least two ways to design & run CAs (accelerating strategic fit or venture emergence)
• Corporation’s Strategic Posture & Investment Time Horizon influence CA pathway (strategic-fit CAs & venture-emergence-CAs)
• Strategic-Fit CAs nurture innovations and Venture-Emergence CAs nurture ecosystems with differing and distinct outcomes
• We posit that corporate nurturing ventures via CAs is a third form of corporate entrepreneurship (venturing and renewal)

 

Accelerator Papers in AOM 2018

When I started my research in 2015 on accelerators, there were very few scholars working on it and hardly a handful of papers published on the phenomenon. In the Babson College Entrepreneurship Research Conference (BCERC) 2017 there were probably three papers on the topic. My BCERC 2017 presentation was received well and provided good feedback. My conference paper was developed and eventually published  in the Journal of Business Venturing — you can read it here: Accelerating strategic fit or venture emergence: Different paths adopted by corporate accelerators

Hence I was quite excited when I saw a tweet from Susan Cohen (an early scholar on the topic) that there were 10 papers in this year’s Annual Meeting of the Academy of Management (AOM). Quite an increase in a short span of two years! In fact I was happy to see that there were 9 papers and one symposium too. The symposium will have 5 additional papers — thereby taking the total count of presentations on accelerators to 14. Here is the list of papers with links to them.

Link to Papers (nine in all)

1. Variance Decomposing of Accelerator and Cohort Effects Among London Startups — https://journals.aom.org/doi/10.5465/AMBPP.2018.80

2. Pace Yourself?: A Model of Varied Entrainment Responses in a Seed Accelerator — https://journals.aom.org/doi/abs/10.5465/AMBPP.2018.11158abstract

3. How inter-organizational relationships shape innovation in business accelerators — https://journals.aom.org/doi/abs/10.5465/AMBPP.2018.11488abstract

4. Entrepreneurial Acceleration: Exploring Accelerator Programs — https://journals.aom.org/doi/abs/10.5465/AMBPP.2018.12509abstract

5. Enhancing Human Capital with Social Capital via Entrepreneurial Learning in a Start-up Accelerator — https://journals.aom.org/doi/abs/10.5465/AMBPP.2018.12722abstract

6. High Growth, Innovation, and Business Accelerators:Differences Between Women- and Men-led Ventures — https://journals.aom.org/doi/abs/10.5465/AMBPP.2018.13720abstract

7. A Conceptual Examination Of Corporate Accelerators Versus Traditional Corporate Venturing Programs — https://journals.aom.org/doi/abs/10.5465/AMBPP.2018.14591abstract

8. The ‘Give and take’ of Mentorship Processes within Accelerators — https://journals.aom.org/doi/abs/10.5465/AMBPP.2018.15669abstract

9. Social Ventures, Impact Accelerators And Endorsement Signals: The Moderating Effect of Gender — https://journals.aom.org/doi/abs/10.5465/AMBPP.2018.16786abstract

Link to Symposium (with five presentations)

1. Business Accelerators and the Development of Early-Stage Ventures — https://journals.aom.org/doi/abs/10.5465/AMBPP.2018.17606symposium

I am not attending the AOM 2018. But I hope to hear and learn from friends who attend the AOM. Exciting times for people researching entrepreneurship support and entrepreneurial ecosystems.

My First FT50 Publication

I am happy to share that my first FT50 journal publication just got online: https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0883902617308376

My paper (co-authored with Dean A Shepherd) is published in The Journal of Business Venturing (popularly called JBV). JBV is widely accepted as the top entrepreneurship journal in the world. It is one of the top 50 journals in management too (an FT50 journal).

 

What is a FT50 journal? The Financial Times (FT) List of 50 Journals, popularly called “FT50” is considered the top journals in business and management. Publishing in them is considered prestigious. They are used to evaluate the research contributions while arriving at the top business school ranking. It is therefore not surprising that getting published in them is highly competitive and extremely rigorous.

Here is a present list of the top 50 journals (FT50) – https://www.ft.com/content/3405a512-5cbb-11e1-8f1f-00144feabdc0 

Hope to write more FT50s 🙂

Free Book on Entrepreneurial Cognition

Happy to share a 2018 book on entrepreneurial cognition! I have met both the authors of this volume (Professors Dean Shepherd and Holger Patzelt). They are inspiring academics! Both are well known scholars in the field of entrepreneurship. When they put together a book, it should be compulsory reading. For those interested in the psychology of entrepreneurs – this is a must have book.

The book (in my opinion) is aimed at researchers, doctoral students and educators in entrepreneurship. It provides a good source of available knowledge and numerous future research areas.

This open access book is available for free download at the link below:

Link: https://link.springer.com/book/10.1007/978-3-319-71782-1

A new journal for entrepreneurship education research

Last year I visited Peru, South America and helped start the ‘Diploma in Innovation and Entrepreneurship” run jointly by CIDE-PUCP and Future Startup Heroes. I spent almost three weeks in Peru visiting number of cities helping promote the culture of entrepreneurship. Here are some photographs capturing my Peruvian memories.

Before leaving Peru I promised the participants of the first batch of the diploma program that I would send them every month, two “readings” on entrepreneurship education. I kept my promise and this month I am sending them the fifth and last installment. As I was putting together the readings I realised that I had an opportunity to not make it the last mail from me (entrepreneurial educator?).

Last week, the United States Association for Small Business and Entrepreneurship (USASBE) launched a new journal with a focus on entrepreneurship education. It is called “Entrepreneurship Education & Pedagogy” (EE&P). Its name and form confirm its sibling status to “Entrepreneurship Theory & Practice” (ET&P) – a premier journal for entrepreneurship research. While I was enjoying the articles from the very first issue of this new journal, it occurred to me that I should share this with my friends who will be soon completing their diploma and becoming entrepreneurship educators.

Would they not benefit from having access to a spring, instead of a glass?

Therefore instead of sending two articles as I have done in the past four months, I decided to turn this into a blog post and send it to them. I hope they read all the articles in the first issue of EE&P (for this month) and continue to look up this journal from time to time. The journal has research articles, cases, instructor resources, and games. This will help them as they embark on their journey to being world class entrepreneurship educators!

Peru is an entrepreneurial country and with a host of entrepreneurial educators the nation can catalyse its entrepreneurial journey.

Good Luck to every one of them.

Top Entrepreneurship Researchers & Institutions

Entrepreneurship is a young academic field. It is always difficult to find out who is really contributing to its development. Many times rankings are filled with biases and opinions. But when a peer-reviewed journal article suggests a list, it might actually be worth looking at it.

I am presently at the Nord University Business School, Bodo, Norway for a research stay. The school has many well published Professors (Einar Rasmussen, Gry Agnete Alsos, Tommy Clausen, Lars Kolveried, amongst others). I hope to learn from them during this stay. But what I did not know was that they were one among the top 100 institutions contributing to entrepreneurship research and that two of the school’s adjunct professors (Johan Wiklund and Andrew Corbett) also feature in the top 25 contributing authors in entrepreneurship research. While I was excited to be here anyways, knowing this makes it all the more special. Hope to collaborate and learn from the wonderful scholars here.

Link to the paper: http://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1111/jsbm.12367/full

Prof Andrew Corbett was here the whole of last week. All of us received feedback on our paper ideas and working papers. There were discussions around collaborations and building on each others work. This is a very progressive culture for research. A lot of tips from senior scholars about “getting published” was helpful, especially for us (junior folks).

Congratulations to the whole team at Nord University Business School for being one of the top 100 contributing forces to entrepreneurship research and wishes for greater glory.

I am really glad to be here in this lovely and vibrant environment for entrepreneurship research and look forward to an entrepreneurial experience.

Trailblazing in Entrepreneurship

Title: Trailblazing in Entrepreneurship – Creating new paths for understanding the field

Authors: Dean A Shepherd and Holger Patzelt

This is not a review of the book. I am sharing this book for a number of reasons:

• I got it from one of the co-authors (Prof. Dean Shepherd) who and whose work I admire a lot
• It is a great resource on where entrepreneurship scholars can look at for the future of entrepreneurship research
• It is a great resource on literature in entrepreneurship research from two highly respected scholars
• The authors have been generous to make it freely available so that a lot many scholars who cannot access expensive resources can gain access to good material
• It is an ‘open access’ book and freely available. Link: https://drive.google.com/open?id=0B8gg18ojh-w_SzZWcHc2Y0JZQWM
• More than everything else I feel it is only fair that young scholars must read the right literature in entrepreneurship and identify promising areas of research for themselves

I have already started reading it and I have shared it with a few colleagues who have good words for the book. Hence I am sharing it with the blog’s readers so that all of you will have the opportunity to trailblaze through the wilds of entrepreneurship research.

Good Luck and Happy Reading!

Moving beyond the Razor-Blade Business Model

Almost every Business Model Class speaks about Gillette’s excellent idea of what is now popularly known as the ‘Razor Blade Business Model’. So many companies have milked this model. Examples include: Camera Films, Mobiles, Games, etc

There are even examples of the ‘Reverse Razor Blade Business Models’. Example: Apple.

Here is a study from a professor (http://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0007681316000124) that questions if this model has lived its life and is facing its end-of-life. The study shows how the time has come for organisations to look at better pricing models. The environment in which we live today provides a lot more transparency and access. There are also institutional voids in emerging economies and Intellectual Property is not respected the same way as in the West. With so many new and changed forces, it is time for organisations to innovate with their business models and more importantly their revenue models.

Happy Reading and Happy Thinking!