A majority of entrepreneurial teams contain family relations but little is known about the implications of such family relationships in the formative stages of new venture creation. We examine two distinct types of family relationships in these teams; romantic couples and biologically linked teams and how such relationships influence the probability of ever achieving first sales. Relying on social identity theory, and a longitudinal sample of 295 nascent teams, we find that these relationships matter in important ways. Our conceptualizations and results have implications for the entrepreneurial teams and family business literatures.

An experiential perspective for examining family business creation is introduced. As a "lived experience," the family firm generates a cumulative series of interdependent events that takes on properties rooted in affect. The family business is a context that enables unscripted temporal performances by founders. Characteristics of the venture creation experience are examined, and underlying dimensions are proposed and empirically investigated. Building on social capital theory, differences in experiences between founders of family businesses, nonfamily managers, and founders of nonfamily ventures are explored. These differences are argued to have important implications for decision making and ongoing dynamics within the family firm.

When facilitating large-scale instructional change, leaders face stakeholder tensions that arise from different institutional pressures. Over the past 4 years, we have created an innovative live case competition in a strategic management course as our college’s signature undergraduate experiential learning opportunity. This case has integrated the Association to Advance Collegiate Schools of Business’ (AACSB) business knowledge and skill areas with grounded learning elements and course learning objectives. Each semester, over 350 students apply strategy concepts to analyze challenges provided by a local company. Course section winners present to executive judges in the final competition. We contribute to the literature by describing the live case competition created from a six-step collaborative process that managed stakeholder tensions as institutional pressures changed. Using distributed leadership and information-sharing approaches, our collaboration model helped us address different needs, share resources, adapt to institutional pressures and create sustainable experiential learning opportunities. With shared decision making and constructive dialogue, we developed high-quality student learning experiences that respected faculty autonomy, addressed resource limitations, and institutionalized business partnerships. We describe our motivation, context, and key stakeholders’ (faculty, students, executives, and administrators) challenges and solutions. We hope our collaborative model helps others successfully implement large-scale instructional change.

This research explores the mechanisms that connect entrepreneurial passion (EP) to entrepreneurial behavior. We investigate the mediating impact of growth-oriented intentions on the relationship between EP and behavior. We conducted a two-wave longitudinal survey study and recruited a sample of 235 undergraduate students from a business school in the Mid-Atlantic region of the United States. Our findings indicate EPs for inventing and for founding are significantly related to entrepreneurial behavior and that growth-oriented intentions partially mediate the relationships between passions for founding and for inventing with behavior. We discuss implications of our findings.

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