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 2024 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 to David Wunder and the Best Poster Presentation to Ann Sophie Sabbatucci. Please enjoy their short 2-4 page articles with direct practitioner implications in the areas of: Crowdfunding, Disruption, Entrepreneurial Ecosystem, Managing Growth, Relationships with Key Stakeholders, Social Entrepreneurship, and The Entrerpeneur.
Summary: Corporations are increasingly investing in startups that develop green technologies. For these green startups combating climate change, it raises questions about whether and how corporate venture capital investments can truly support and align with their environmental missions.
Summary: Although the general interest in organizational scaling is growing, the primary focus is on the antecedents and processes, neglecting how employees experience scaling.
Summary: Our understanding of the phenomenon of entrepreneurship has evolved and deepened over the past fifty years, but our stereotypical idea of what a “good” entrepreneur is has not changed much. In research and in popular media, we tend to describe entrepreneurs in specific ways: ways that may overtly or implicitly exclude certain sections of society, including those that make up half of the human population – women.
Summary: Most startups are founded and led by teams instead of individual entrepreneurs. Yet, forming a startup team is a challenging task, which may be particularly difficult for rookie entrepreneurs.
Summary: Entrepreneurs experience intense time pressures daily due to high uncertainty, resource crunches, and strong psychological attachment to their ventures. While entrepreneurs with a willpower growth mindset (the belief that willpower is an unlimited entity) experience lower emotional demands due to the daily time pressure, such entrepreneurs also experience higher fatigue at the end of the day because this mindset ignores the signals of mental strains and exhaustion.
Summary: We know that external feedback is a powerful tool to challenge our actions and decisions. This also holds true for entrepreneurs and can redefine a startup’s guiding principles. Discover how different sources of feedback can strategically influence your startup’s purpose.
Summary: Entrepreneurs often face failure and how they learn from it can affect their future success, but failure is an emotional experience, and many not always be motivated or able to improve future performance. An entrepreneur’s response to a failure and resulting performance can be dependent on the size of the failure as well as the prior experience and employment that they use to inform their decision making.
Summary: Entrepreneurs are resilient by nature. Extreme adversity helps us understand how entrepreneurs become resilient and utilize their resources to bounce back and successfully adapt to new environments
Summary: Crowdfunding is a setting that vastly differs from traditional fundraising. Entrepreneurs must thus master the art of crafting appealing campaigns that standout in the marketplace while effectively communicating their projects’ qualities to potential investors/backers.
Summary: Most crowdfunding attempts fail, precluding ventures’ resource provision prospects. Our research unpacks the three key strategies of how ventures persist and “bounce back” on their crowdfunding journey.
Summary: Entrepreneurs receive a lot of information on sustainability. While information is important to make decisions, being flooded with information leads to overwhelm and ultimately results in bad sustainable decisions or making no decision at all.
Summary: Constellations of start-ups linked to space technologies have increased almost fivefold over a 10-year period. This acceleration of the commercialization of space activities, called “New Space”, is driven by socio-technological transformations facilitating access to outer space for entrepreneurs. This calls for appropriate entrepreneurial support, for which start-ups are not always well prepared.
Summary: AI is changing micro-lending towards small businesses but at what cost? Balancing technology’s potential to expand financial inclusion with the critical need to maintain authentic connections with marginalized entrepreneurs demands a nuanced approach.
Summary: Cryptocurrencies have faced ongoing scrutiny from regulators since their introduction. What lessons can entrepreneurs in emerging fields learn from the cryptocurrency industry about managing their relationship with regulators?
Summary: The creation of new categories disrupts markets but generates wealth. When this creation occurs in the underground, it requires the collective participation of underground and mainstream entrepreneurs to succeed.
Summary: In a world facing global health challenges, how do we meet the demands of a growing and aging population? By developing new MedTech hotspots, using the best hotspots in the world as a template.
Summary: Many biotech startups fail because of insufficient capital. Here is what a biotech entrepreneur needs to know before reaching out to potential investors.
Summary: It often takes money to make money and especially early growth is typically very costly for startups. Research on investor pitches now reveals that the very words used to present a startup as a growth opportunity are critical to gain investor support.
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Summary: Internal corporate ventures and their parent firms are intentionally designed to be different, often leading to a culture clash. However, collaboration is crucial. This article shows how to promote a smooth collaboration despite the culture clash.
Summary: Entrepreneurship has unexpected, sometimes, momentous repercussions for society, technology, and the economy. Startups can withstand crises when entrepreneurs tackle ethical dilemmas heads-on, deliberately shifting between perspectives before taking action.
Summary: Philanthropic support is crucial for nascent ventures with a mission for the public good. The strategic choice of broad versus narrowly defined scope of mission affects the chance of securing philanthropic support, as effective use of philanthropic resources for optimizing added value for the public good is an important criterion.
Summary: We've witnessed the environmental toll of the fashion industry, but there's hope on the horizon. Discover how fashion B Corps are driving positive change through social entrepreneurship, offering sustainable solutions that benefit both people and the planet.
Summary: Ants have much to teach us in tackling complex challenges through collective action. Resembling the organizational principles of ant communities, community enterprises can effectively address local manifestations of larger societal problems and create civic wealth.
Summary: For the majority of people living in slums, informal entrepreneurial undertakings are the only viable source of income. Initiatives aimed at improving the livelihoods of slum inhabitants should therefore carefully consider their impact on such informal ventures and how to best support them.