Entrepreneurship theories acknowledge that competitive conditions matter for opportunity beliefs, yet how entrepreneurs identify competitors and how this identification shapes venture concept development have received little theoretical or empirical attention. We develop a process account of how entrepreneurs identify competitors and revise opportunity beliefs and venture concepts in response. Unlike market demand or technological feasibility, competitors are strategic agents who can adapt in response to entry, and as the venture concept evolves, so does the set of competitors it faces. We theorize an adaptive cycle in which encountering a competitor prompts threat assessment, which raises perceived competitive pressure and lowers confidence in venture success while motivating venture concept adaptation that can partly restore perceived viability. A controlled experiment isolates the cycle's components and shows that identical competitive information produces widely divergent threat assessments. A behavioral simulation in which participants develop their own ventures and search for competitors shows that entrepreneurs starting from similar concepts identify largely non-overlapping competitor sets. Some reposition their ventures spontaneously in response to what they find, and adaptation attenuates the link between threat and perceived competitive pressure.
The judgment-based approach (JBA) has emerged as an important contemporary perspective in management and entrepreneurship research. The JBA offers a distinctive theoretical account of entrepreneurship, centered on the formation and implementation of subjective theories of value creation under conditions of Knightian uncertainty, which highlights resource ownership, heterogeneous capital structure, organization and the firm, institutions, uncertainty, and the overarching need to appraise and coordinate all these factors using judgment. We present and develop the JBA by articulating the uncertainty–heterogeneity nexus, in which the joint presence of fundamental uncertainty and heterogeneous resources gives rise to the need for entrepreneurial judgment and makes its exercise economically consequential. Because judgment is subjective, tacit, and difficult to communicate or contract upon, entrepreneurs must rely on ownership and residual control rights to create value, linking judgment to the combination and deployment of resources, profit and loss, and organizational structure. The purpose of this article is threefold. First, we provide a systematic statement of the JBA as a theoretical framework, clarifying its core constructs, causal mechanisms, and domain of application. Second, we engage with key critiques and distinguish the JBA from related approaches, including opportunity-based, effectuation, and bricolage perspectives. Third, we outline directions for future research that build on the JBA's emphasis on judgment, ownership, and the organization and deployment of heterogeneous resources under uncertainty. By integrating these elements, we position the JBA as a coherent and distinctive theory of entrepreneurship with broad implications for research in management, organization, and strategy.
Entrepreneurial narratives are widely understood as strategic tools for building legitimacy and mobilizing resources. Yet we observed that some entrepreneurs openly share stories of fear, doubt, and struggle on social media - foregrounding emotional exposure rather than demonstrating strategic purpose. We conceptualize these as entrepreneurial vulnerability narratives: a distinct narrative form through which the lived consequences of entrepreneurial uncertainty are publicly shared and opened to social negotiation. These disclosures expose entrepreneurs to interpersonal risks, heightened for women entrepreneurs who contend with gendered biases and less supportive social contexts. To examine this phenomenon, we conducted interviews with 33 women entrepreneurs and a 21-month observation of their Instagram activity. Our analysis reveals that women entrepreneurs hold multiple and coexisting motivations for disclosure - self-oriented, relational, and normative - oscillating between them as needed, while developing narrative-crafting tactics that sustain the benefits of sharing while managing interpersonal risks. Our study contributes by theorizing entrepreneurial vulnerability narratives as a distinct narrative form; by challenging the view that entrepreneurial narratives serve primarily persuasive functions; and by showing how entrepreneurs actively construct precarious holding environments in fragmented digital contexts.
We conducted a 27-month field study of 23 North Korean Defector (NKD) founders. Founders responded in three different ways to the disparaging default social identities they encountered by self-categorizing into three “avowed” social identities, which served as aspirations for how they would build their ventures. Founders generated sensemaking narratives that explained their behavior – to themselves and to others – by anchoring on the past, present, or future circumstances and claiming individual capabilities to build their ventures. The resulting ventures were characterized by distinctive missions, branding, and hiring preferences and therefore by patterned differences in the roles founders played. We contribute to scholarly understanding of refugee entrepreneurship by showing that the ways in which refugee founders respond to being in a new country and constructing new identities is more varied – because it is embedded in their responses to local social evaluations – than prior research has portrayed. We contribute to the development of founder identity theory (FIDT) by expanding prior understanding of how social identities drive founder role creation. Overall, we show the extension of refugee founder agency as they move from self-categorizing into avowed social identities to embedding themselves in the concrete social relations required to perform a role.
Based on 41 interviews across three UK-based commons enterprises, this study addresses one of the most pressing challenges of our time: encouraging local actors to contribute to the sustainable governance of supra-local common-pool resources (CPRs)—shared resources whose use and impacts extend beyond community boundaries. While existing research has focused on locally bound natural CPRs, we lack understanding of how entrepreneurial ventures can mobilize the members of local communities to govern resources that span multiple jurisdictions. Our findings reveal a two-step process through which entrepreneurs first embed their commons enterprises in the local community, using asset locks and diversified engagement strategies to involve citizens, local businesses, and public authorities. Building on this embedding, three commoning practices emerge: collective learning about the CPR, collective action and capacity building for CPR stewardship, and collective institutionalization of CPR governance. Around these practices, a community of commoners emerges that is nested within the local community and increasingly sustains collective action independently of the entrepreneur. These practices anchor the supra-local CPR within the local community through three mechanisms: resource proximization, local conditionality, and bonding as a selective incentive, thereby overcoming the collective action barriers arising from lacking resource proximity and perceived responsibility. Our study contributes to research at the intersection of entrepreneurship and the commons by demonstrating the strategic role of common property regimes, shifting attention from the resource to the commoning practices and communities that form around it, and specifying the mechanisms that enable local collective action for supra-local CPR governance.
