Some curricular elements are threshold concepts that involve "troublesome knowledge," not because they are difficult for students to comprehend per se, but because they are challenging for students to fully appreciate. In this article, we suggest that entrepreneurial failure is a threshold concept in entrepreneurship courses because students may get so fixated on failure's economic costs that they neither fully appreciate the social and emotional costs nor recognize the potential benefits of failure to entrepreneurs. In a multiphase empirical study, we explore the effects of entrepreneurial experiences on how students categorize and conceptualize entrepreneurial failure. We find that students with entrepreneurial experiences provide more complex, multicategorical descriptions of failure and are more likely to represent the useful aspects of failure in their descriptions. Our findings highlight the role of experiences in facilitating students' understanding of the threshold concept of entrepreneurial failure and suggest that entrepreneurship educators can leverage student experiences to promote more complex representations that account for both the costs and benefits of failure.
In this paper, we introduce the concept of the ''glue role'' in groups engaged in creative tasks. An individual crafts a glue role by seeking out and taking on otherwise neglected tasks that have the potential to facilitate a creative group's performance. We adopt a negotiated order perspective on roles in groups to examine how a group's emerging social structure provides opportunities for crafting the glue role. We then suggest two mechanisms through which the glue role can facilitate performance in creative groups: the coordination of group members' contributions and the management of group conflict. In a pharmaceutical research and development group, a technical analyst offers to help with an obscure statistical methodology that facilitates a breakthrough drug production process. This individual works vigorously with the scientists to interpret and write up the results, but is only mentioned in a small footnote when the group's lead scientists pitch the innovation to the company's top management. An academic committee has a member who customarily takes assiduous notes at each meeting. At first, the other members of the committee think that this person is a little obsessive. However, as the time comes for the committee to begin to put together its final
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