No abstract

While entrepreneurship researchers agree that institutions 'matter' for entrepreneurship, they also have a rather encompassing understanding of institutions as almost any external factor that influences entrepreneurship. Ultimately, this literature thus comes up with a long list of institutional factors that may explain entrepreneurial differences between countries. But which institutions are most influential? How do these institutions relate to different types of entrepreneurship? And to what extent are institutions complementary to each other in the way they sustain different entrepreneurship types? The literature on 'Varieties-of-Capitalism' (VoC) offers a parsimonious theoretical framework to address these questions. Based on the VoC literature, we theoretically derive a consistent set of institutional indicators that can explain differences in entrepreneurship types between countries. Based on principal component and cluster analyses, we illustrate how 21 Western developed economies cluster around four distinct institutional settings. Furthermore, we use simple OLS regressions to show how these institutional constellations are related to different types of entrepreneurship. We conclude that four different 'Varieties of Entrepreneurship' can be identified across the Western world. The main implication of our findings is that a 'perfect' institutional constellation, equally facilitating different types of entrepreneurship, does not exist. Policy-makers seeking to stimulate entrepreneurship are thus faced with the trade-off of targeting policy reforms to that entrepreneurship type they intend to promote-at the expense of other types of entrepreneurship and the broader societal consequences such reforms will have.

Sustainable entrepreneurship often requires a purposeful change to the existing business environment, market regulations, and societal norms and values (institutions) to ensure sustainable products and services become legitimate and competitive. Yet, how sustainable entrepreneurs alter or create institutions remains unclear. We employ a two-year comparative case study with four entrepreneurs commercializing torrefied biomass in the Netherlands. Consistent with insights from institutional entrepreneurship research, findings show that sustainable entrepreneurs create new symbols, theorize, construct new measures, build consensus, and forge new relations to alter or create new institutions. Moreover, we find that entrepreneurial collaboration, in the form of a trade association, has three feedback effects: it creates accessible modes; diversity of scope; and an increased scale of institutional change strategies. We conclude that future studies should further connect sustainable and institutional entrepreneurship research, and take group and individual factors into account when explaining how sustainable entrepreneurs engage in institutional change.

In early phases of the software cycle, requirements prioritization necessarily relies on the specified requirements and on predictions of benefit and cost of individual requirements. This paper presents results of a systematic review of literature, which investigates how existing methods approach the problem of requirements prioritization based on benefit and cost. From this review, it derives a set of under-researched issues which warrant future efforts and sketches an agenda for future research in this area.