Chair of Entrepreneurship and Technology Transfer
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The integration of legitimacy in entrepreneurial ecosystem theory is under-researched, resulting in scholarly vagueness about how entrepreneurs acquire resources. Our qualitative study with 31 (co-)founders of startups following the triple bottom line investigates entrepreneurs' daily practices for building legitimacy in entrepreneurial ecosystems. We identify that entrepreneurs follow a sequential process to build legitimacy: 1) engaging and assimilating with culture, 2) establishing and utilizing networks, 3) enhancing visibility, and 4) leveraging the sustainable mission. Following this sequential process builds different levels of legitimacy. Each level grants access to resources from the entrepreneurial ecosystem. We contribute to the scholarly conversation on legitimacy in entrepreneurial ecosystems and provide practical implications for entrepreneurs.
Digitalization has been heavily transforming Real Estate (RE) around the world in the last decade. Many old processes and practices are the center of aim for change, innovation, new way of operation, more efficient use of resources and alternative ways of solving the same and also new problems. RE has just started to interact and cooperate with startups for these purposes. The startups offering technology-based products and services specialized in Real Estate are called PropTech. This category as an ecosystem is new and in consolidation, which means that the stakeholders are still developing their business models, value propositions and they are struggling in their maturity process. To identify the barriers faced by Real Estate, we interviewed 15 companies (asset owners, asset managers, service providers, etc.) about the challenges and experiences in working with Proptech startups. We identified three aggregate dimensions: barriers at provider’s side, internal organizational barriers and external ecosystem barriers. With these findings, we add a contribution to technology adoption and innovation diffusion in the new ecosystem of PropTech. This paper completes at identifying further research areas.
This cumulative dissertation focuses on PropTech (Property Technology – technological ventures targeting Real Estate) and the dynamics in the Real Estate industry as a result of the continuous founding of PropTech Startups, which responds to the need for digitalization of processes in Real Estate. We first conducted a study to shed light on the challenges and barriers that PropTech startups face when trying to find their product-market fit in the industry. We then designed and conducted a study to identify the barriers and obstacles that incumbents in Real Estate would encounter when working, cooperating, and interacting with PropTech startups. Finally, we completed our research with a third study to understand the impact of dedicated institutional investors on the success of PropTech startups. Overall, this dissertation contributes to the literature on Diffusion of Innovation, Technology Acceptance, and strategy uniqueness of dedicated institutional investors. Moreover, the dissertation provides perspectives and tools to reflect and assess the essence of the strategy of PropTech startups, investors, and incumbents.
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.
The growing importance of sustainability in organizational success, particularly in the pharmaceutical industry, underscores the need for leveraging technologies such as blockchain methods to enhance sustainability indicators across environmental, social, and economic pillars. This study aims to identify and understand the challenges hindering the adoption of blockchain technology in the pharmaceutical sector for improving sustainability performance, addressing two research topics: the specific challenges faced by blockchain adoption in this context and the interdependencies among these challenges. Employing a two-step approach, the study compiles challenges through a literature review, refines them via expert opinions, and establishes their interrelationships using methodologies like fuzzy interpretive structural modeling (FISM) and cross-impact matrix multiplication applied to classification (MICMAC). The research contributes to unraveling the complex relationships and dependencies within the system, providing a structured framework for improved decision making and strategic planning. It fills a literature gap as the first attempt to outline driving and dependent factors related to the challenges of adopting blockchain technology for sustainability enhancement in the pharmaceutical sector, offering insights that can significantly impact brand image, company perception, and consumer value.
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.
Heuristics are mental shortcuts applied, consciously, subconsciously or both, to save time and efforts at the expense of risking the accuracy of the outcome. Therefore, one might argue that it is just an accuracy-effort trade-off. Nonetheless, we ought to recognize the distinction between the circumstances of risk, where all choices, outcomes, and probabilities might be generally known, and the circumstances of uncertainty, where, at least some, are not. Traditional models like the Subjective Expected Utility (SEU) work best for decisions under risk but not under uncertainty, which portrays most situations people need to tackle. Uncertainty requires simple heuristics that are sufficient instead of perfect. In this dissertation, the notion of heuristics was researched through a comprehensive historical review that unfolded the heuristics-linked ideas of significant scholars. An explicit distinction between the deliberate and the automatic heuristics was stated with chronological categories of pre and post-introduction of the SEU theory; providing a new perspective and opening a discussion for future research to consider. Additionally, qualitative and quantitative studies were applied that produced an unsophisticated heuristic set that was used by entrepreneurs in the Middle East and Germany. Perhaps entrepreneurs, and people in general, do not always know or acknowledge their use of heuristics. But still, they use it extensively and may exchange heuristics among others. That may lead us to think that in a world where uncertainty prevails, the Homo heuristicus might become a real threat to the Homo economicus.
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.