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The present chapter aims to provide a holistic perspective by investigating how passion types can have a role on entrepreneurs’ target of passion with the integration of Hofstede’s cultural dimensions. A conceptual framework was administered in order to build the association between passion types and targets of passion in the light of the literature by which harmonious and obsessive passions are proposed to be the determinants of different targets of entrepreneurs’ passion. Additionally, based on the extant literature, the role of culture in shaping the entrepreneurs’ target of passion is addressed by utilizing Hofstede’s cultural approach. Seven major propositions were discussed to provide a comprehensive understanding of entrepreneurial passion and targets of passion.

This research aimed to determine the mediating effect of entrepreneurial self-efficacy on the relationship between entrepreneurial passion and leadership styles. Two hundred hardware and footwear entrepreneurs from the Las Malvinas Commercial Emporium, Lima, Peru were surveyed. The partial least squares structural equation modelling (PLS-SEM) multivariate statistical technique was applied for data analysis. It was found that there is a complementary mediating effect of entrepreneurial self-efficacy in the relationship between entrepreneurial passion and leadership styles. On the other hand, it was concluded that entrepreneurial passion has a positive influence on entrepreneurial self-efficacy. Likewise, there is a positive influence of entrepreneurial self-efficacy on leadership styles, and there is a positive influence of entrepreneurial passion for leadership styles. This research contributed theoretically to the academic literature and provided empirical evidence of the relationship of the proposed variables; it proved a new predictive and explanatory structural model that can now be used in future research worldwide and generated a model of the studied variables that are useful for both academia and the business world.

We argue that voice – the sound that people produce when they speak – is an important resource for entrepreneurs, especially when they are pitching to potential investors. We integrate evidence from entrepreneurship, social psychology and linguistics to show that the voice can be regarded both as a tool for entrepreneurs to utilize and as a vital source of information allowing listeners to make judgements about the speaker and their message. To better understand how the voice may be used and interpreted in investment pitches, we develop a model of the relationship between the entrepreneurial voice and investor judgments. Voice depends on entrepreneurs’ characteristics including gender and communication goals but can be utilized to express emotions (purposefully or not) and signal qualities such as competence and trustworthiness. How potential investors interpret these displays depends on cultural expectations and stereotypes. Our review illustrates that female entrepreneurs may find it more difficult to persuade investors due to their naturally higher voice pitch and bias against speech patterns prevalent among young women. We highlight directions for future research exploring the voice as a unique cultural resource for entrepreneurs.

Extant literature on entrepreneurial cognition declares that entrepreneurs who are confident in their ability to design a new business perform better than entrepreneurs who lack such a self-perception of efficacy. This is swagger. A different set of literature, including Discovery-Driven Planning, Design Thinking, and Lean Startup Method, recommends that entrepreneurs create, confirm, or reject hypotheses to design and refine the specific elements of their business model. This is the scientific method.

This article used survey data from 353 participants in an international business pitch competition to connect these two literatures. We found that the number of hypotheses that the entrepreneur elucidated and confirmed were linked to business model performance. Counter-intuitively, the number of hypotheses rejected by the entrepreneur showed the strongest relationship to success. We found no significant relationship between the number of interviews that an entrepreneur conducted and the business model’s performance: more effort was not always helpful.

Although we found no direct connection between an entrepreneur’s self-efficacy in searching for a new idea and the business model’s eventual success, entrepreneurs with high levels of this narrow form of self-­confidence were more likely to perform the constructive actions of elucidating, confirming, and rejecting hypotheses. In summary, swagger leads to science, and science leads to success.

Situated within a context where high-skilled migration is increasingly being featured in policy debates around the world as part of strategies to foster innovation, this chapter examines the ways highly skilled entrepreneurs in tech traverse their entrepreneurship and their subsequent migration via business accelerators. Business accelerators, which are not just promoted as pre-seed funds in financial circles, but also by migration policy as sponsors of migrant innovation, play an important role in the lives of young migrant ventures. However, based on interviews with entrepreneurs that used policy-endorsed accelerators in the United Kingdom, this chapter emphasises that both finance and migration policy considerations are just tiny specks in a larger picture. This chapter shows the boundary-fluid lives entrepreneurs in tech lead, and puts forth that it is the symbolic capital that they amass through their active use of accelerators, that they then convert to economic value. Consequently, it is argued that discussions around social integration of migrants into ‘mainstream’ society need to be viewed with a new lens, as the symbolic capital thus accrued, is at a truly transnational level.

The purpose of this chapter is to explore whether and how angel investors’ emotions unfold in the investment opportunity evaluation process as they interact with the social environment. Complementing recent research that has emphasized the financial calculations, we add angel investors’ own emotional arousal to the list of tools that may help them to rate investment opportunities.

Drawing on semi-structured qualitative interviews, we develop a phenomenological analysis of the investment opportunity evaluation process at the level of angel investors’ lived experience.

Our findings indicate that when angel investors use their emotional arousal in evaluating investment criteria, they engage in a developmental process characterized by three elements: subjective validation, social validation, and investment decision.

We illuminate how discrete emotions can complement rational considerations in the opportunity evaluation journey. Capturing the nature of emotion as action oriented, embodied, socially situated, and distributed, we embrace its adaptive socially situated dynamics.

Taking a step toward better understanding of the soft aspects in the relationship development that leads to investments, we hope this study will help not only those entrepreneurs who need funding but also those policymakers who design new incentives that improve the flow of investment into promising new ventures.

We demonstrate how angel investors’ emotions can complement their rational considerations in the investment opportunity evaluation process as they interact with the social environment. Identifying boundary values for the conditions that are necessary and sufficient to advance in the process, we have demonstrated how emotion can serve as a driving or restraining force not only during subjective validation but also during social validation.

Improving a startup’s ability to obtain funding is critical to the survival of the organization. Although existing studies have observed various biases in investment decisions, few have studied the neural mechanisms behind such behavioral observations. We propose to apply cutting-edge neuroscientific techniques to uncover the neural processes engaged during pitches by entrepreneurs to investors and to use this new knowledge to identify strategy artifacts promoting pitch success. We hypothesize that pitches are dynamically shaped by covert cognitive, emotional, and social processes, which are in turn influenced by tactical approach (story-telling vs dry facts), physical context (online vs in-person), and demographics (gender, ethnicity). The role of inter-brain synchrony (i.e., correlation of cortical activity between brains) – within the startup team or between the entrepreneurs and investors – in pitch outcomes remains unknown. By uncovering the covert processes that mediate pitch outcomes, we provide an evidence-based, scientific approach to improving pitch success.

This study examines how narratives and legitimacy formation affect crowdfunding capital assembly from distributed, heterogeneous investors.

The study explores a dataset of 80,181 projects from Kickstarter, a rewards-based crowdfunding platform, between 2009 and 2013. We explore the link between project-related variables, legitimacy formation and outcomes.

Entrepreneurs design narratives and create project legitimacy by exploiting crowdfunding platform-specific features. First, lower funding targets and shorter campaign durations confer positive project legitimacy. Second, entrepreneurs exploit reward-levels as narrative tools that encourage funders to engage with the project. Third, visual pitches transmit a broader sociocultural narrative, leveraging emotional rather than financial reasoning. We also note certain gender effects.

Crowdfunding platforms allow entrepreneurs to pitch business ideas to a broad online audience. We show that project legitimacy, including both structural and narrative elements, is linked to crowdfunding outcomes. In particular, legitimacy is co-created through the generation of a persuasive narrative linking the entrepreneur and investor cohort.

Entrepreneurs use crowdfunding platforms to generate a coherent narrative around unfamiliar business models. Generic platform tools may be set and manipulated in online crowdfunding pitches to support project legitimacy. Ultimately, these are less important than establishing an affinity-based narrative that engages and exploits investor participation. Successful crowdfunding pitches co-author the project story with investors.

Crowdfunding has been traditionally understood as simply an online-mediated venture resource assembly tool. A narrative framework highlights the critical role of legitimacy formation in a disintermediated investment system.

This study investigates the impact of socioemotional wealth (SEW) on family firm entrepreneurial orientation (EO) in Saudi Arabia, and the moderating effect of generational involvement on this relationship. Our data set comprises 241 privately, wholly owned family firms. We examine EO as a strategic orientation expressed in terms of both firm behavior and how managers approach risk-taking attitudinally. Our study finds that SEW is positively related to firms’ entrepreneurial behavior, but not managerial attitudes toward risk-taking. However, the positive effects of SEW on firms’ entrepreneurial behavior diminish as the number of generations involved in the family business increases. The broader implications for enabling entrepreneurship within Arab transforming economies adhering to strong cultural tribalistic norms are discussed.

This paper reflects on the evolution of implicit and explicit behavioral ideas in the field of strategic management using Herbert Simon’s scholarship as a starting point, that is, his emphasis on empirically driven; interdisciplinary theorizing allowing and enabling two-way street learning. We argue that historically, there were plenty of behavioral ideas embedded in the field and, together with the recent movement towards explicit “behavioral strategy,” these provide several possible paths for future developments in strategic management research. In the spirit of broadening the tent for behavioral strategy in the future (Hambrick & Crossland, 2018), we suggest some topics and approaches for behavioral strategy in empirically driven, interdisciplinary directions which allows also for two-way street learning between concepts and real-world strategic phenomena.