The Babson College Entrepreneurship Research Conference (BCERC), with generous support from The Kauffman Foundation & SAMS, is tapping leading-edge research conducted by an elite group of doctoral students from top universities around the world. These 25 students have participated in the 2023 BCERC Doctoral Consortium.
We have published their practitioner translations that highlight important implications for entrepreneurs and others involved in the entrepreneurial ecosystem. These translations succinctly highlight key research findings and interpret what these findings mean for an entrepreneur starting or building their business. The Kauffman Foundation also sponsored two awards for Best Research Translation (winner: Alana Pierce) and Best Poster Presentation (winner: Wanyu (Emilie) Xu). Please enjoy their short 2-4 page articles with direct practitioner implications in the areas of the Entrepreneur, External Environment, Growing Your Venture, Managing Your Team, Social Entrepreneurship, and Venture Financing.
Summary: Entrepreneurs receive a lot of advice but its not always relevant and entrepreneurs do not always take it in. Instead of thinking of advice as something to take or leave, making advice, or co-producing advice through specific interactional moves can make advice more relevant and impactful.
Summary: Polymathic orientation empowers entrepreneurs to create unique, high-value ideas and challenge conventional wisdom by drawing on knowledge that diverges from others in the domain.
Summary: Entrepreneurship does not always do good. And, the good and bad of entrepreneurial behaviour may not be best seen as a two-sided coin, given that each form of behaviour may a 'life' of its own.
Summary: Impulsive or perfectionistic? While these business practices can help business venture survival early on, they can become barriers to selling your business if left unchecked.
Summary: Understanding the implications of gender and adapting online posting wisely can help women eco-entrepreneurs navigate gender norms and stereotypes. They can create a positive impact in their venture while challenging gender norms in entrepreneurship.
Summary: Entrepreneurship is often understood to be synonymous to creativity and innovation. This semantic interpretation or rather misinterpretation can lead new entrepreneurs into the trap of trying to come up with “one hell of a business idea” that makes them live happily ever after. This fondness with their idea might be a fast track to a destined failure though.
Summary: While development research and practitioners have focused on factors that limit the capabilities of potential entrepreneurs, they have too often neglected the factors that make entrepreneurship undesirable even when feasible. The result is that those most capable and well-resourced in sub-Saharan Africa (the educated middle and upper class), are less likely to start a business as it is seen as an undesirable choice.
Summary: Organizations unknowingly lose employees by silent quitting and exodus into entrepreneurship - A guide for organizations to retain high-potential employees.
Summary: Academic spin-offs are relevant to transform technologies from the university into commercialized products. However, academic entrepreneurs often do not possess the managerial know-how and thus need to seek support from their environment to improve their performance.
Summary: Entrepreneurs aim to change the world and make life better, yet they often face a dilemma between their ambition and family life. This study is to show that family life is not conflicted with entrepreneurs’ ambition but instead is a pathway to entrepreneurs’ self-realization.
Summary: Recognizing the power of diversity within entrepreneurial ecosystems is key to unlocking their full potential. By embracing the symbiotic relationship between a variety of inward- and outward-looking entrepreneurs, policymakers can use their budget effectively and keep the economy moving.
Summary: How can we combat global warming when people are reluctant to abandon well-established practices in favor of sustainable ones? There is a lesson to learn from the case of plant-based meat: win people over by using a displacement strategy.
Summary: Entrepreneurship is often glorified as a journey of individual bravery and seizing opportunities. But what about the role of external changes influencing a venture’s creation?
Summary: Only some senior managers know how to set the tracks of culture and fuel the engine with practices that carry a venture to their destination on time. Those that do take advantage of some signs they encounter on the way there are set to encounter maybe more than just one destination.
Summary: The growth of entrepreneurship can be accelerated by attracting favorable attention from investors and potential customers. This attention can create intangible assets that transform unknown individuals into public figures and can lead to opportunities for platform businesses, crowd-funding, and positive impression management for the founders. This article explores how novice entrepreneurs employ behavioral strategies to generate positive attention from their audiences.
Summary: Firms need to balance the trade-off between transparency and secrecy to serve multiple strategic purposes. When facing a regulatory shock that requires firms to disclose innovation information, how do they camouflage to strike a balance between complying with mandatory disclosure requirements and protecting intellectual property from detection?
Summary: Discover how homegrown ventures such as Gojek and Grab outcompeted global giants like Uber by building a scaling business model that adapts to the local challenges in emerging and developing markets.
Summary: Employee resource groups (ERGs) have demonstrated benefits for HR and diversity departments. But do they help the company’s bottom line, and how?
Summary: Demographic diversity of the top management team influences the risk of firm failure. However, not all types of diversity have a similar effect as gender and age diversity appears to decrease the risk, whereas nationality diversity increase the risk.
Summary: The high-tech sector, despite its reputation for innovation, struggles with a lack of diversity, particularly in terms of gender and ethnicity. Our study shows that diverse founding teams have a positive impact on promoting inclusivity in high-tech firms, as they are more likely to contact and receive responses from female and underrepresented minority job candidates, highlighting the need for policies that empower diverse entrepreneurship from the outset to foster sustained diversity in the sector.
Summary: This article brings attention to the Lean Startup methodology and provides insights on how the methodology can be approached in order to be successfully implemented at the bottom of the pyramid, in impoverished non-western developing economies, a setting characterized by severe resource constraints. Virtually none of the world’s entrepreneurs at the bottom of the pyramid lives in western developed economies the context from which Lean Startup emerged.
Summary: One out of five students are triggered to address ESG issues one to five years earlier - training problem sensitivity is key to moving ideas out of the classroom.
Summary: Entrepreneurs face various challenges when they offer new products and services. Their efforts to overcome their newness obstacles and to mobilize resources, through rhetoric and communication, however, can lead to hype which can adversely impact their new ventures depending on the involvement of other factors.
Summary: Uncover the secret weapon of small firms in the booming U.S. equity crowdfunding market: incorporating in Delaware. Explore how this strategic move offers unique benefits, such as streamlined exits, robust governance, expert legal support, and a competitive edge, propelling firms to succeed in crowdfunding.
Summary: In the face of foreign-advantaged firms, entrepreneurs could rely more on external partnerships for complementary resource acquisition to enhance their competitive advantages. However, entrepreneurs must be more vigilant to take action to prevent misappropriation from their partners.