Entrepreneurship →
- 21 Jun 2017
- Book
Meet the Oddball Entrepreneurs Who Invented Green Businesses
Historians have hardly noticed the fringe-of-society entrepreneurs who gave birth to the green business movement starting in the 19th century. In a new book, Profits and Sustainability: A History of Green Entrepreneurship, Geoffrey Jones chronicles the pioneers of healthy food, alternative energy, and alternative living. Open for comment; 0 Comments.
- 20 Jun 2017
- Working Paper Summaries
Conversational Peers and Idea Generation: Evidence from a Field Experiment
To develop a theory of innovator capability, this study extends existing research linking personality and creativity to take into account the social nature of idea generation. Using data from an experiment embedded in a bootcamp for aspiring entrepreneurs, results show that better ideas are generated by “open” innovators exposed to extroverted peers. Extroverts provide more raw information that innovators high in openness are best able to recombine into novel ideas.
- 19 Jun 2017
- Working Paper Summaries
Learning to Manage: A Field Experiment in the Indian Startup Ecosystem
This study of 100 high-growth startups in India finds that founder-executives can learn how to improve their management style from their peers at other firms. These interfirm network connections between founders may help explain why some companies are well managed and others less so. Despite the apparent value of this peer learning, founders don’t appear to naturally connect with peers who could help them improve their management style.
- 11 May 2017
- Working Paper Summaries
Coordination Frictions in Venture Capital Syndicates
A startup typically has more than one investor, each with different incentives. Drawing on the authors’ experience, this paper documents frictions occurring when VCs with differing objectives work together in syndicates. Entrepreneurs must be careful about selecting and building the syndicate of VCs who back their firm.
- 16 Feb 2017
- Cold Call Podcast
Black Business Leaders Series: A Remarkable Legacy of Firsts, Maggie Lena Walker
Maggie Lena Walker used her leadership of the Independent Order of St. Luke to form a bank, newspaper, and department store—all in the stronghold of the Confederacy. Tony Mayo discusses his case study about this pioneering African American woman. Open for comment; 0 Comments.
- 13 Feb 2017
- Working Paper Summaries
Diversity in Innovation
This study discusses a systematic and persistent lack of female, Hispanic, and African American labor market participation in the innovation sector, through both entrepreneurs and the venture capitalists that fund them.
- 30 Jan 2017
- Working Paper Summaries
The Environmental Legacies of The North Face's Doug Tompkins and Patagonia's Yvon Chouinard
The contrasting strategies taken by founders of Patagonia and The North Face provide a new lens on current debates about the ability of business to contribute to environmentalism. This paper suggests that the strategies of both founders bring positive environmental benefits but with trade-offs and limitations. Open for comment; 0 Comments.
- 30 Nov 2016
- Op-Ed
Where Could More Regulation Help Small Businesses? Online Lending.
The regulatory system overseeing the financial technology industry is a tangle of multiple agencies and inconsistent rules. Karen Mills and Brayden McCarthy propose a six-point plan to regulate online lending. Open for comment; 0 Comments.
- 16 Nov 2016
- Research & Ideas
Turning One Thousand Customers into One Million
In the second part of a series on growing startups, Thales S. Teixeira explains how Uber, Etsy, and Airbnb climbed from one thousand customers to one million. Open for comment; 0 Comments.
- 17 Oct 2016
- Working Paper Summaries
Self-Employment Dynamics and the Returns to Entrepreneurship
Why do workers turn to entrepreneurship when many entrepreneurs appear to earn less than what they could earn in paid employment? This is the first paper to characterize how the value of resolving uncertainty about entrepreneurial earnings varies over the lifecycle after adjusting for tax differences between entrepreneurs and paid workers. Findings suggest that helping people learn about their potential earnings in entrepreneurship, either by learning from other's experiences in self-employment or by experimenting themselves, can improve the efficiency of sorting workers across sectors.
- 17 Oct 2016
- HBS Case
Business Solutions That Help Cut Food Waste
Up to 40 percent of food grown in the United States for human consumption is wasted. But solutions are starting to come together from retailers, farmers, academics, policy makers, and social service organizations, according to José Alvarez. Open for comment; 0 Comments.
- 12 Oct 2016
- Research & Ideas
Break the Rules of How Business is Done
Making just small changes to how you do business inside and outside the company can help you attract bright employees and increase innovation, argues Julia B. Austin. Open for comment; 0 Comments.
- 31 Aug 2016
- Research & Ideas
One Quarter of Entrepreneurs in the United States Are Immigrants
Immigrants are 15 percent of the overall United States population, but they become entrepreneurs at a much higher rate, according to new research by William Kerr and Sari Pekkala Kerr. Open for comment; 0 Comments.
- 18 Aug 2016
- Working Paper Summaries
Immigrant Entrepreneurship
Immigrant entrepreneurship is a topic of key policy interest but one with few facts. The authors construct a data platform using US Census Bureau administrative data to provide new statistics on the patterns of business formation by immigrant entrepreneurs and on the medium-term success of those businesses. Immigrants account for around a quarter of US entrepreneurs, and this share has been increasing since 1995. Immigrant entrepreneurs display a stronger up-or-out dynamic that is typical of young firm growth than natives—they fail more frequently, but immigrant-founded firms that persist experience greater employment growth compared to their native counterparts.
- 13 Jul 2016
- HBS Case
How Uber, Airbnb, and Etsy Attracted Their First 1,000 Customers
Thales Teixeira studies three of the most successful “platform” startups to understand the chicken-and-egg challenge of how companies can attract their first customers. Open for comment; 0 Comments.
- 15 Jun 2016
- Working Paper Summaries
Slack Time and Innovation
This study combines data about projects posted on Kickstarter with the timing of school breaks of top US colleges to find that slack time can lead to an increase in creative projects, particularly those that are relatively complex and high quality. Managers in corporations that emphasize innovation should consider providing their employees with coordinated slack time particularly to advance development of novel ideas.
- 15 Jun 2016
- Research & Ideas
These VC Partners May Make Your Firm Less Innovative
Startups that do business with VCs that also fund competitors may find they get the short end of the attention stick and produce fewer new products, concludes research by Rory McDonald and colleagues. Open for comment; 0 Comments.
- 06 Jun 2016
- Research & Ideas
Skills and Behaviors that Make Entrepreneurs Successful
Research at Harvard Business School by Lynda Applegate, Janet Kraus, and Timothy Butler takes a unique approach to understanding behaviors and skills associated with successful entrepreneurs. Open for comment; 0 Comments.
- 11 May 2016
- Cold Call Podcast
Who Owns Space?
Entrepreneurs like Elon Musk and Jeff Bezos are tapping into their vast personal wealth to make commercial space travel a reality. In the process, they're revitalizing a listless national space program. Professor Matthew Weinzierl discusses his new case on New Space, and how public-private partnerships are becoming the building blocks for the hottest new startup sector. Open for comment; 0 Comments.
It’s Hard to Fix the Family Business Without Offending the Family
Navigating complex relationships and understanding unwritten processes are among the many challenges of transitioning a family-owned business to the next generation. Len Schlesinger, Michael Raiche, and Roger Zhu discuss the dilemmas of a small Vietnamese restaurant in the case study “Pho Hoa Dorchester.” Open for comment; 0 Comments.