Research area: Start-up creation and success

Necessity entrepreneurship and industry choice in new firm creation

Research area: Start-up creation and success

Hybrid nascent entrepreneurship

With the rise of the gig-economy and side-hustles, hybrid entrepreneurship – concurrently running a business while employed – is becoming increasingly common. While prior studies suggest hybrid entrepreneurship might be beneficial by providing job security during transition to full-time entrepreneurship, we caution that hybrid entrepreneurship can represent a dual sword for potential entrepreneurs. Our findings suggest that entrepreneurs should avoid simultaneously look for a job new job while attempting to start a business, as it is strongly detrimental to start-up chances. This is especially true for individuals who are part-time employed, unemployed and/or those with strong managerial experience – whom have a stronger tendency to do so.

What can the body tell you about affect in team conflict? Using biometric data to study conflict

We introduce a new way of understanding the emotions in organizational conflict, showing that all types of conflict elicit much more emotion than previously thought. Building upon knowledge from psychology research—specifically, relationship psychology—we theorize all conflict as affective, dynamic and constantly changing. We suggest a framework for examining dynamic changes in affect during conflict. We empirically test this framework by capturing fluctuation of affective states through the measurement of facial expressions, biometric responses and self-reported affect during the entire conflict situation from 18 teams including all team members.

Our findings reveal that regardless of the type of conflict, i.e. relationship or task, all conflict elicited negative affect disproportionate to the level of conflict reported. More strikingly, our results indicate a complete discrepancy between self-reported affect and physiological affect data. This highlights that future potential and importance of using biometric data when investigating affect. We advance conflict theory and affect theory by integrating knowledge from relationship psychology, which helps to see conflict and the potential impact on team performance in a novel way.

Business leaders are frequently inspired by anecdotal cases in the media about how role models of innovative firms have managed to grasp new market opportunities, combined with old or new technologies. Yet nowhere is there a comprehensive framework that can guide business leaders to navigate opportunities for innovation and entrepreneurship, develop relevant capabilities, and deploy tactics to take advantage of a situation like the COVID-19 pandemic. As a result, they often are driven only by short-sighted emerging opportunities.

This paper suggest a framework that includes four possible scenarios in which companies can explore opportunities for innovation and entrepreneurship. While examples are given for each scenario, a company can pursue multiple paths. We also make suggestions regarding the development of capabilities and tactics relevant to each scenario.

RESEARCH AREA: innovation and corporate entrepreneurship

Entrepreneurial orientation: The dimensions’ shared effects in explaining
firm performance

We shed new light on the structure of the relationship between entrepreneurial orientation (EO) and firm performance and how this relationship varies across contexts. Using commonality analysis, we decompose the variance in performance—in terms of the effects of innovativeness, proactiveness, and risk taking and consolidate existing conceptualizations of EO. We propose an extension of the extant theoretical views of the construct. Most notably, our research shows that firms should not blindly implement all of the dimensions of EO, or even individual dimensions based on the assumption that EO and all of its dimensions are universally beneficial. More specifically, our findings provide practitioners with a framework to help them calibrate the EO of their firm in a more fine-grained way to help them achieve superior performance. This will help firms carefully invest their limited resources and engage in activities that leverage EO in a manner that contributes to performance.

Licensing foreign technology and the moderating role of: Extending the relational view

The relational resource-based view posits that performance differences among firms can be explained not only by the possession of internal resources but also by maintaining and developing relationships with external partners. However, studies in the extant literature usually address the separated roles of various external relationships of focal firms, but the literature has not addressed how relationships with different sets of knowledge partners are related to each other and influence focal firms’ performance. Therefore, to fill this research gap, this study focuses on how technological resources acquired from one set of partners (licensing foreign technologies) may generate subsequent internal and relational rents in terms of technological innovation in the context of collaboration with an entirely different set of knowledge partners (local R&D partners). Specifically, we propose that local R&D collaborations need to be large in scale and broad in scope.

Dynamic business modeling for sustainability: Exploring a system dynamics perspective to develop sustainable business models

In the last decade, business models for sustainability have gained increasing attraction by corporate sustainability scholars and practitioners. This paper combines sustainable business modelling and system dynamics modeling, and it conceptualizes a dynamic business modeling for sustainability approach. The paper illustrates the key operating principles of the proposed approach through an exemplary application to Patagonia's business model. The study suggests that dynamic business modeling for sustainability may contribute to sustainable business model research and practice by introducing a systemic design tool, which frames environmental, social, and economic drivers of value generation into a dynamic business model causal feedback structure.

Exploring the factors associated with business contribution to the SDGs

Inspired by the outcome of two research studies at DTU Entrepreneurship, we are currently exploring whether organizational factors such as younger board of directors or higher share of female directors also influence entrepreneurship and innovation for the SDGs. We believe that in a rapidly changing world where sustainability issues are becoming more and more important, this knowledge can become a crucial asset for business, universities and policy makers.

Digital platform tactics: How to implement platform strategy over time

Platform-based business models are increasingly relevant. Scholars mainly focus on the strategic dimension, but what are the tactics to build and evolve digital platforms? This article proposes a novel framework, which assists in subdividing the scope of possible activities of digital platform sponsors in a temporal and contextual manner. The framework comprises four context dimensions (platform attributes, core product, governance, ecosystem) and four lifecycle phases (birth, expansion, leadership, renewal). In particular, three key insights emerge regarding the critical role of the leadership phase (in terms of institutional and regulatory influence and the need to build a defense) as well as a lack of studies in the renewal phase.

Dual boundary spanning—towards a typology of outside-in open innovation reflected by the Canadian context

The extant literature runs short in understanding openness of innovation regarding the different pathways along which internal and external knowledge resources can be combined. This study proposes a unique typology for outside-in innovations based on two distinct ways of boundary spanning: whether an innovation idea is created internally or externally and whether an innovation process relies on external knowledge resources. This yields four possible types of innovation, which represent the nuanced variation of outside-in innovations. Using historical data from Canada for 1945–1980, this study unveils different implications of these innovation types for different levels of innovation novelty.