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The opacity of the impact investment decision-making process is one of the main constraints hampering further growth in the impact investing ecosystem. This paper takes a differentiated view on why (investment motivation) and how (investment decision criteria) the major private impact investor types allocate funding to investees. We incorporate insights from 34 interviews with the five major impact investor types: social business angels, foundations, social banks, impact investment funds, and crowdvesting platforms. We find that motivation and decision-making significantly differ between the impact investor types, especially concerning strict vs. ambiguous impact definitions, active vs. passive investment approaches, and return requirements reaching from capital preservation to market-driven returns. By providing a differentiated overview of the investor type-specific motivations and most important investment criteria, our study offers social entrepreneurs a roadmap to identify the most appropriate impact investors for their business model.
This study investigates how sharing ventures address the paradox of doing good versus doing harm in their strategic decision-making. The doing good versus doing harm paradox refers to the difficulty of sharing ventures to balance the aim to benefit society and the environment while minimizing potential adverse effects. Understanding and addressing this paradox is crucial for promoting sustainable and responsible decision-making. Our thematic content analysis of 38 in-depth interviews with founders and senior managers of sharing ventures in four European countries finds that these ventures align along three distinct value focus types in their decisionmaking and use five mechanisms to conceal paradoxes related to balancing social/environmental and economic contradictions. By surfacing the importance of sharing ventures' value focus and resultant mechanisms to deparadoxify, our findings provide insights into organisational paradox and the sharing economy, specifically the purposeful concealment of paradox as a counterintuitive choice for remaining actionable in decision contexts.
The cognitive perspective in entrepreneurship research has predominantly evolved around the static conceptions of cognition at the level of individual reasoning. Recently, the emerging stream of situated entrepreneurial cognition asserts that the eironment substantially influences the inherent knowledge structures of entrepreneurial reasoning. It claims that the context indoctrinates the perceptions and beliefs underlying decision making, thus authoring entrepreneurial cognition to derive from the recursive interaction between the mind and the respective eironment. Drawing on this perspective, this article follows a narrative approach iestigating the unfolding dynamics between the entrepreneurial cognition and contextual factors in a business model design. Using textual accounts from 34 episodic interviews with entrepreneurs from corporate entrepreneurship initiatives, we applied a constant comparative method identifying main themes in the data. Our findings show that entrepreneurial cognition is embedded, grounded, and distributed. We provide evidence that the situated entrepreneurial cognition results from the recursive interplay of material objects, bodily interactions, and agents spanning a social system. Our findings suggest that the unilateral consideration of authored cognitive systems falls short in capturing the holistic nature of entrepreneurial cognition. Thus, our findings further empirically ground situated entrepreneurial cognition by placing the entrepreneur at the nexus of individual and context. Finally, this article reveals the business model as a central boundary object connecting and focalizing a variety of influences on the situated entrepreneurial cognition in its social context.
The sharing economy is attracting increasing research attention. However, scholarly knowledge lacks understanding about the individuals who are the key players in this emerging phenomenon. This study uses an explorative approach to investigate the individual-level characteristics of sharing economy users and providers. We analyze a sample of 1170 respondents and reveal that socio-demographics (gender, age, and education), personality traits (Extraversion, Neuroticism, and Conscientiousness), and attitudes (interdependent self, materialism, sharing economy support, and perceived public value contributions) are significantly associated with people's activities in the sharing economy. Our results shed new lights into the academic debate about individual drivers of the sharing economy.
This paper seeks to expand our understanding of sustainable entrepreneurial ecosystems by investigating the interrelation between contextual factors and sustainable entrepreneurial activities of sharing ventures. While the sharing economy is considered as a potential pathway to a more sustainable society,; ambiguous activities of some sharing ventures call the credibility of sharing as a sustainable concept into question. In order to shed light on the underlying cause of the ambiguity, we conducted 37 in-depth interviews with founders and senior managers of sharing ventures. Our comparative analysis identifies two distinct sets of contextual factors, which influence their sustainable activities. The first set of contextual factors enhances sustainable activities by enforcing the adaptation of behavioral rules and by enabling the development of organizational capabilities. The second set of contextual factors restricts sustainable activities by impeding market penetration and by suppressing growth. We contribute to theorizing about sustainable entrepreneurial ecosystems by delineating the conjoint effect of contextual factors on sustainable activities. Furthermore, our results add insights into the controversial academic debate about the sustainability dimension in the sharing economy.
Value creation and appropriation of software vendors: A digital innovation model for cloud computing
(2021)
Do software vendors propose, create, and capture value in the era of digital transformation? Drawn on the literature of business models, digital innovation, and firms' capabilities, we examine this cutting-edge research question. We conducted a multiple case research of 10 software vendors operating in Germany and Austria. The thematic analysis yields a conceptual model that explains whether and how software vendors leverage cloud computing-enabled innovation for the digital boost, which is this study's primary contribution to information systems research. Software vendors use a complementary portfolio of information technology and organizational capabilities to innovate in their value proposition, creation, and capture.
Advocating sustainability in entrepreneurial ecosystems: Micro-level practices of sharing ventures
(2021)
While extant research on entrepreneurial ecosystems has focused on macro-level factors influencing the ecosystem's development, the role and impact of entrepreneurial practices have been neglected. The objective of this study is to address this research gap and to shed light on the micro-level practices of entrepreneurs who support sustainability transitions in entrepreneurial ecosystems. Our inductive study looks at these micro-level practices from the perspective of sustainable ventures situated in the sharing economy. We conducted 31 in-depth interviews with the founders and senior managers of sustainable ventures to investigate how they advocate the sustainability cause in their ecosystem. Our findings show that sustainable entrepreneurs rely on three distinct sets of micro-level practices: building a supportive environment, disrupting normative standards, and reframing the sustainability paradigm. Also, sustainable entrepreneurs engage in political work to strengthen their position and credibility in the sharing economy, which is being increasingly dominated by profit-oriented players and business practices. By substantiating the central role and micro-level practices that sustainable entrepreneurs enact to advocate sustainability, our study contributes to theorizing the sharing economy. Furthermore, our resultant framework provides a detailed overview of the distinct micro-level practices that help ventures to support the sustainability transition in entrepreneurial ecosystems.
Labels as moral markers
(2020)
How to build a coherent narrative of organizational identity in a socially contested field? Through an inductive study of the sharing economy, we analyzed how managers deal with conflicting collective identities and develop coherent organizational identity narratives through label work. Our findings reveal that managers responded to the social contestation of the field by using the label as a malleable moral marker. The process of embracing, fixing, un-fixing, and re-fixing the label´s principles helped managers to, on the one hand, provide coherence to their identity narrative while, on the other hand, working on the consolidation of their preferred principles of the field label. By exploring the identity formation through label work in socially contested fields, we offer a new perspective on the importance of label work for identity formation and its malleability potential.
This study explores the role and facilitating actions of top managers in response to the digital transformation. Building on 27 in-depth interviews with top managers and close associates from large German firms, we find that top managers respond to the digital transformation by engaging in three key actions: understanding digitalization, setting the formal context for digitalization, and leading change. Moreover, findings emphasize that top management team support is essential in firms' digital transformation. Overall, this study contributes novel insights about the consequences of top managers for firms and establishes an initial foundation for investigating top managers in the digital age.