No abstract

New venture success often depends on how the founding team collectively understands its world, estimates effects of possible actions, makes decisions, and allocates appropriate resources. Drawing on recent work in managerial cognition and entrepreneurship, this article argues for the importance of examining cognition at the team level. New venture strategy is used as a springboard to discuss collective cognition, although other important critical decision domains in new ventures may also be used to illustrate the arguments. In this and other such decision domains, collective cognition mediates between individual cognitions and firm actions and performance. A method for assessing entrepreneurial top management team cognition is developed and then tested in an exploratory study of technology-based new ventures. Two structural characteristics of collective cognition (differentiation and integration) are strongly related to firm performance, suggesting interesting opportunities for future entrepreneurship research in cognition.

A new venture's strategy-and thus its performance-is based upon the knowledge the firm has about its market, its opportunity in that market, and its appropriate conduct to take advantage of that opportunity. Resource-based theory underscores knowledge as a type of resource that confers competitive advantage and the potential for sustainability, two factors that are critical for start-ups. Three types of procedural knowledge are considered to be important at start-up: (1) about the industry in which the venture competes; (2) about the type of business approach the venture is pursuing; and (3) about creating, building, and harvesting new ventures. Knowledge useful to the new venture is developed either through relevant personal experiences or by accessing relevant knowledge possessed by others. Hypotheses are developed regarding the impact on the performance of new ventures as a result of these sources of knowledge, and these relationships are explored in a study of new technology-based firms.

This article evaluates the emergent academic field of entrepreneurship to better understand its progress and potential. We apply boundary and exchange concepts to examine 97 entrepreneurship articles published in leading management journals from 1985 to 1999. Some evidence was found of an upward trend in the number of published entrepreneurship articles, although the percentage of entrepreneurship articles remains low. The highly permeable boundaries of entrepreneurship facilitate intellectual exchange with other management areas but sometimes discourage the development of entrepreneurship theory and hinder legitimacy. We argue that focusing entrepreneurship research at the intersection of the constructs of individuals, opportunities, modes of organizing, and the environment will define the field and enhance legitimacy. Decision theory, start-up factors of production, information processing and network theory, and temporal dynamics are put forward for entrepreneurship scholars to explore important research questions in these intersections.

Emerging economies face daunting economic development challenges. Economists and management consultants have generally suggested global solutions that typically focus solely on foreign direct investment. Yet a resource-based theory approach offers an alternative view of economic development in which a foundation of resources within a region gestates entrepreneurial activity. While theoretically appealing, it is unclear in application how such resources can be developed or which types of resources are most important to develop. This paper extends the application of resource-based theory to entrepreneurial economic development in subsistence economies. A qualitative study of contrasting entrepreneurial activity in Chiapas (Mexico) and Atenas (Costa Rica) highlights the primacy of intangible resources-and especially entrepreneurial orientation resources-in the gestation of entrepreneurial activity.