Most empirical evidence focuses on commercial startups seeking financing from equity/debt investors to suggest that male-led startups raise more financing than female-led startups due to investor biases. We extend this inquiry to explore whether and how entrepreneur gender impacts access to financing from equity, debt and philanthropy investors in the context of social startups. Drawing on gender role congruity theory and signaling theory and testing our hypotheses on a sample of 9,420 social startups that applied to 393 social impact accelerators globally, we find that without an accelerator endorsement, female-led startups raise less equity and debt financing, but more philanthropy financing as compared to male-led startups. However, with an accelerator endorsement, the financing advantages female-led social startups have in philanthropy financing are eliminated and contrary to our hypotheses, their disadvantages in equity and debt financing are increased. Can completing a social impact accelerator program help women social entrepreneurs better compete with their male counterparts as they seek external financing for their startups? This is the question we sought to answer and to do so, we examined a global dataset of social startups that completed social impact accelerator programs and studied their financing outcomes within one year of program completion. We find that prior to applying to a social impact accelerator program, women entrepreneurs raise more philanthropy financing when compared to their male counterparts but are at a disadvantage when seeking equity and debt financing. However, upon completion of the accelerator program, women entrepreneurs lose their financing advantage in philanthropy financing and surprisingly, their disadvantage when seeking equity and debt financing increases even more when compared to their male counterparts. These findings have academic and practical implications especially in the context of startup financing.

Entrepreneurship research should strive for relevance—the potential to influence the thoughts, decisions, and actions of those who practice entrepreneurship. Despite the Journal of Business Venturing’s (JBV) efforts to foster relevance, submissions often fail to demonstrate their potential for practical usefulness. Addressing this problem involves making practical relevance a guiding principle of research design that complements traditional academic standards for publishing in JBV. It also involves forgoing attempts to make research directly usable by practitioners, who rarely read scholarly journals like JBV, in favor of enhancing its suitability for translation in outlets intended for those audiences. We introduce three design criteria—importance, insight, and impact—to guide the creation of translatable research that honors traditional academic standards. Our discussion touches on what the design criteria mean, how they make research translatable, how scholars can satisfy them, what they look like in exemplar JBV publications, and why they matter now. Indeed, designing research with practical importance, insight, and impact in mind may yield academic contributions more suitable for dissemination beyond academic circles, positioning entrepreneurship research to achieve practical relevance.

Entrepreneurs need to access knowledge to grow, but weak entrepreneurial ecosystems tend to lack the types of knowledge that foster venture growth. To explore how entrepreneurs can act resourcefully as they overcome local ecosystem deficiencies in efforts to grow, we conducted 78 interviews with growth-oriented entrepreneurs in Central America. These entrepreneurs, perceiving that their ecosystem was subordinate to stronger ecosystems, challenged local knowledge, prompting them to engage in knowledge-related resourcefulness, which involves reorienting network targets (resourceful cognition) and assembling network tie proxies (resourceful behavior), to leverage benefits from both local and distant entrepreneurial ecosystems in pursuit of steady organic growth.

Entrepreneurial affect has emerged as a burgeoning area of study, with a wealth of articles demonstrating that affect, broadly conceptualized, plays an important part in entrepreneurial life. While a few affective phenomena, such as passion and positive and negative affect, are primarily driving the affective revolution in entrepreneurship, a wide range of additional forms of affect, from momentary feelings to enduring affective dispositions, have been found to influence entrepreneurs’ judgments, decision-making, attitudes, and behaviors in distinct parts of the entrepreneurial process. Moreover, entrepreneurs’ affective experiences and displays of these experiences influence entrepreneurial behaviors and investors’ decision-making. Although this is an exciting time for work on entrepreneurial affect, several theoretical and empirical inconsistencies impede further knowledge accumulation. To assess how and why affect is critical to entrepreneurship, to clarify the theoretical inconsistencies, and to provide an integrative framework, we conduct a systematic review of 276 published empirical and conceptual articles on entrepreneurial affect. In doing so, we analyze how various affective phenomena (e.g., emotions, moods, sentiments), along with their discrete forms (e.g., anger, grief, happiness), influence and are influenced by specific stages of the entrepreneurial process. We conclude that while this body of research confirms that entrepreneurship is an emotional endeavor, the collective approach has thus far obscured a more detailed and useful understanding of affect in each stage of the entrepreneurial process. We examine the theoretical and empirical approaches taken to date and lay out an agenda for future scholars, thus bolstering the affective revolution in entrepreneurship.

Entrepreneurs need to access knowledge to grow, but weak entrepreneurial ecosystems tend to lack the types of knowledge that foster venture growth. To explore how entrepreneurs can act resourcefully as they overcome local ecosystem deficiencies in efforts to grow, we conducted 78 interviews with growth-oriented entrepreneurs in Central America. These entrepreneurs, perceiving that their ecosystem was subordinate to stronger ecosystems, challenged local knowledge, prompting them to engage in knowledge-related resourcefulness, which involves reorienting network targets (resourceful cognition) and assembling network tie proxies (resourceful behavior), to leverage benefits from both local and distant entrepreneurial ecosystems in pursuit of steady organic growth.

When various forms of crisis hit, they can stimulate changes in entrepreneurial agency - the capacity to act (or choose not to) - and the actions entrepreneurs take to mitigate the threats and pursue the new opportunities those crises create. While assessing articles for the Journal of Business Venturing's annual "Best Paper" award, we observed this to be a recurring theme across a significant number of the studies published in 2024. Inspired by this research, we summarize the 17 articles that explored this theme and develop a framework that highlights material, relational, and discursive concerns brought about by crises. In response entrepreneurs across individual or collective levels take action to preserve or cultivate distinct forms of entrepreneurial agency - adaptive, allied, and censored - and to resolve various paradoxes of entrepreneurial agency. We close with a brief discussion of the growing relevance of a social symbolic lens in reconciling how entrepreneurs construe and respond to crises and how the specific forms of agency and paradox identified could inform theory both within and beyond entrepreneurship. Executive summary: This article began as a search for the "Best Paper" published in Journal of Business Venturing (JBV) in 2024. The editor-in-chief selected a panel of editors who then reviewed each of the 49 articles published in volume 39, issues 1-6, to identify those that were bold, broad, and rigorous. We arrived at a shortlist of five articles that best exemplified these criteria, from which the entire JBV editorial team voted for the winner: "Sight unseen: The visibility paradox of entrepreneurship in an informal economy," by Robert Nason, Siddharth Vedula, Joel Bothello, Sophie Bacq, and Andrew Charman. In addition to enabling the selection of a best paper, this process revealed a common theme cutting across more than one-third of the articles published throughout the year; namely, "how entrepreneurs exercise agency in response to crises." Traditionally, crises have been defined as periods of turmoil that disrupt patterns of economic activities and represent acute potential threats to the livelihoods of those affected. Over the past decade, however, scholars (both within and outside the field of entrepreneurship) have gradually shifted attention from single, separate, and short-lasting episodes that momentarily disrupt entrepreneurial endeavors (Doern et al., 2016) to plural, entangled and long-lasting combinations, sometimes referred to as poly-crises (Klyver and McMullen, 2025). To consider both conceptualizations, we take a broader perspective of crisis, using the term holistically to include both acute and enduring widespread structural challenges. We reason that, by defying conformity and attempting actions that question a society's taken for granted assumptions about how the world works, entrepreneurs embody and enact a paradox of agency in which restrictions on their capacity to act - which dispirit, discourage, or even devastate most people - instead stimulate them to seek to preserve or cultivate their agency not only by mitigating the threats that crises can pose, but also by leveraging them as opportunities to improve their situation. We proceed as follows. After a brief introduction, we summarize how each individual article reflects and contributes unique insights to the overarching theme of exercising entrepreneurial agency in response to crises. Grouping the articles according to the type of crisis examined, we sensitize ourselves to the underlying mechanisms that entrepreneurs use in response by adopting a social symbolic lens (Lawrence and Phillips, 2019). Specifically, we hone our attention to the relative importance and interplay of material, relational, and discursive dimensions of social symbolic work as entrepreneurs construe and respond to different types of crises. We suggest that entrepreneurs encounter various limitations to and paradoxes of agency that they seek to resolve by adapting, allying, or censoring their capacity to act. Finally, we conclude by articulating potential avenues for scholars to elaborate on this tri-dimensional approach to entrepreneurial agency both within and beyond entrepreneurship theory and practice.

Research on entrepreneurial ecosystems (EEs) has tended to focus on the role that characteristics internal to the EE play in determining EE-level outcomes. Notwithstanding the insights that academics, policy makers, and entrepreneurs have gleaned from these studies, prior research has yet to explain whether, how, and why these outcomes might also be impacted by an EE's position within the larger network of EEs. Given broad acceptance for the important role that networks play in facilitating entrepreneurship at the firm-level, we contend that adopting a network-based view of EEs may also help predict and explain aggregate entrepreneurial outcomes at the EE-level. Specifically, we adopt a double embeddedness lens to examine the impact of both inter-EE (i.e., structural embeddedness) and intra-EE (i.e., cultural embeddedness) factors on EE-level new venture creation. Using a longitudinal sample of regional data in the United States from 1994 to 2016, we develop and test hypotheses where the relationship between structural embeddedness and new venture creation follows an inverted U shape that is itself moderated by cultural embeddedness. We conclude by discussing how these findings inform theory and practice in this area.

This editorial highlights the importance of a robust reviewer pool to the development of the field. We emphasize the role that authors play in ensuring the sustainability of that commons and consider both the field-level and individual-level consequences of failing to do so. In addition, we make a case for the long-term benefits of reviewing, while exploring strategic and tactical concerns such as where you should be reviewing, how much you should be reviewing, whether and when to review, who should review, and, finally, how to develop a reputation as a good reviewer.

Entrepreneurship is a function of risk and uncertainty and, thus, is shaped by the institutional environment in which it emerges. Institutions, or the codifiable and normative rules that underly transactions, mitigate risk by setting minimum standards of acceptable behavior with other entities, such as that which might be outlined in a contract. However, no institutional environment is perfect, and entrepreneurs must also be reliant on trust, or the willingness to be vulnerable to an entity even with no monitoring or control mechanism. Because entrepreneurship is a product of individual judgment, some entrepreneurs may not only be risk- and uncertainty-tolerant but also risk- and uncertainty-seeking, suggesting that depending on the kind of entrepreneurship, the individual is likelier to take on the risk of breaking from institutional rules and the uncertainty of trusting in unknown alternates of whom the individual has only incomplete information. Employing a multilevel model on World Values Survey data collected between 2010 and 2016, we analyze over 4,000 self-employed respondents across 60 countries. We find that, on average, entrepreneurs are more tolerant of breaking institutional rules and trusting in unknown alternates, but with important boundary conditions – namely, the wealth of the country, ethnolinguistic fractionalization, and control over corruption.

An entrepreneurial ecosystem (EE) is “a set of interdependent actors and factors coordinated in such a way that they enable productive entrepreneurship within a particular territory” (Stam, 2015: 5). By incorporating both “entrepreneurial” and “ecosystem” elements, EEs are argued to constitute “organized attempts to establish environments that are conducive to increasing the success for newly established ventures” (Audretsch, Belitski, & Desai, 2019: 313). Interest in EEs by scholars, policymakers, and practitioners has grown rapidly in recent years given the impact that their complex interdependencies between inter- and intra-EE factors have on the entry, growth, and exit of new ventures (Xu, Yang, Liu, Newbert, & Boal, Conditionally accepted), which, in turn, fuels regional economic development and growth. Such an progress contributes to the scholarly conversation regarding “EE heterogeneity” (Theodoraki, Dana, & Caputo, 2022), that is, why some EEs can foster entrepreneurial activity while others cannot. As Storper (2013: 7) observe, “regional business ecosystems or clusters generate or attract their own factor supplies, and create their institutional and interactive environments. These conditions can not be readily imitated, nor can their costs or prices be bid down through interregional competition and sorting of firms and people.” Along with scholars in related social science disciplines, such as economic geography (Storper, 2013), we seek to explore the drivers of change in EE development and their resultant social and political implications. In light of the challenges facing scholars interested in making a contribution to the EE literature, this symposium is intended to achieve two objectives by engaging a group of leading voices in the EE field. First, by highlighting interesting and important questions some of the leading scholars in the field are asking about EE heterogeneity, this symposium seeks to provide insight into the current conversations in the EE area and, in turn, help identify fruitful areas of inquiry going forward. Second, by soliciting expert feedback on these research projects by editors at top-tier journals in the field, it seeks to provide a viable roadmap toward publishing EE research in the very best management and entrepreneurship journals. Entrepreneurship Ecosystem and Natural Ecosystem Author: Yuxi Zhao; Concordia U. Greening Pastures, Entrepreneurial Ecosystems for Sustainable Entrepreneurship Author: Jip Leendertse; Utrecht U. Author: Frank Van Rijnsoever; Utrecht U. Innovation Radicalness of Entrepreneurial Ecosystems: An Analysis of Regional Knowledge Flows Author: Martina Buratti; Friedrich Schiller U. Jena Author: Matthias Menter; Friedrich Schiller U. Jena A Dynamic Configurational Analysis of Metropolitan Entrepreneurial Ecosystems Author: Daniel L. Bennett; U. of Louisville

While evidence that contradicts a discipline's hard core assumptions is essential to scientific progress, its accumulation is made difficult by the protective nature of the middle range theories that protect it. For this reason, progress tends to be most common in response to external shocks that expose the limitations of traditional ways of thinking. Given the impact COVID-19 has had on our collective understanding of business (family or otherwise), we propose that evidence against the hard core has reached the point where new thinking is necessary if we are to advance the field in productive ways. As the authors in this special issue demonstrate, such progress can be made by leveraging our intellectual roots in the social sciences. By looking to fields such as anthropology, sociology, jurisprudence, political science, and economics for inspiration, these authors use the current crisis as an opportunity to envision the future of family business scholarship.

Given the legitimacy challenges faced by entrepreneurs, gaining access to the resources necessary to create viable new ventures is often difficult. Accordingly, scholars advocate that entrepreneurs align with high-status partners to convey that they are an accepted part of the sociocultural and organizational landscape. Although startup accelerators have been argued to play this supportive role for high-tech, high-growth ventures, it remains unclear whether they are effective at serving the needs of ventures pursuing social missions alongside business structures, or for-profit social ventures (FPSVs). To explore this issue, we examine whether social impact accelerators (SIAs), accelerators specifically designed to support FPSVs, help such ventures make the transition from mere ideas to viable organizations, a process known as emergence. To determine a causal relationship, we employ a quasi-experimental design and adopt propensity score matching with the nearest neighbor matching algorithm to study 7185 startups that applied to 383 accelerators worldwide from 2013 to 2019. By matching accepted startups to a control group of rejected startups, we find that SIAs, on average, facilitate new venture emergence, with accelerated FPSVs raising more external financing, earning more revenues, and hiring more full-time employees than their unaccelerated counterparts. These results hold when controlling for selection bias, thereby providing robust evidence for a causal relationship between acceleration and startup emergence. However, a subsequent subgroup analysis reveals that this causal effect is contingent across a breadth of “who,” “when,” and “where” contexts, highlighting the idiosyncratic differences that different startups face in the acceleration process.

Amid the debate over whether scholars should conduct interesting or important research, we contend that entrepreneurship scholars can achieve both ends by acknowledging the foundational role context plays in our discipline and designing our empirical research in ways that enable us to explore and exploit the heterogeneity of our samples. In turn, we provide a non-exhaustive list of analytical approaches and empirical methods that can enable scholars to look past sample-wide averages and, instead, explore the nuances that exist beneath the surface of those findings. By contextualizing empirical research in these ways, scholars can move beyond these averages in order to better understand not only whether a given result is “true,” but more importantly where, when, and for whom it is or is not true, thereby increasing the inferential value of our findings.

While most empirical evidence suggests that male-led ventures raise more financing than female-led ventures due to investor biases, these studies primarily focus on commercially-oriented ventures seeking traditional forms of investment (debt/equity). In response, we draw on stereotype content theory and signaling theory to determine whether and how entrepreneur gender impacts nascent social ventures’ access to traditional and non-traditional (philanthropy) financing. Our results show that while female-led ventures do raise less traditional investment, they also raise more non-traditional investment than male-led ventures. However, a third-party endorsement signal increases female-led ventures’ disadvantage in traditional investment and eliminates their advantage in non-traditional investment

It is widely understood that business-owning families pursue socioemotional wealth (SEW) primarily to satisfy their desire for control over the firm. Unfortunately, due to the private nature of the gains SEW-based decisions are intended to generate, its pursuit is unlikely to serve the interests of those other stakeholders on which the business depends. In response, we draw upon Adam Smith's classic arguments from An inquiry into the nature and causes of the wealth of nations and The theory of the moral sentiments to develop a normative theory of decision-making in family business that balances the pursuit of self- and other-regarding interests. We propose that only those families that strive to generate socio-economic (rather than socioemotional) wealth are likely to survive in the long-run.

Entrepreneurs are frequently advised to “get out of the building” and consult with customers before any serious efforts to develop a new product or service are undertaken so they can understand what customers really want/need and test the assumptions underpinning their offering. Despite the popularity of this thesis, evidenced by the extraordinary success of the “business model canvas,” “customer discovery,” and “lean startup” movements, there is surprisingly little empirical evidence to support it. In response, we hypothesize that while involving customers during product/service development will help nascent entrepreneurs successfully exploit an opportunity, this benefit is offset by the additional time it takes to engage them. We further hypothesize that these benefits and costs are magnified when market uncertainty is high. Analyzing data from the PSED II, we find support for our hypotheses.

While startup accelerators are routinely touted in the popular press, research has yet to empirically establish their effect on emerging ventures. In order to confirm whether such a causal treatment effect exists, we adopt a quasi-experimental design to examine whether and how accelerators actually help new ventures emerge. Our sample consists of 4,294 startups that applied to 119 accelerators worldwide from 2013 to 2017. Using propensity score matching with the nearest neighbor matching algorithm, we find that accelerators do facilitate firm emergence. However, by stratifying our sample on the basis of the progress each startup had already made toward emergence prior to entering the accelerator, we also find that this acceleration effect is conditional on a startup’s stage of development. These results not only demonstrate the value accelerators can provide emerging ventures, but more importantly, how accounting for sample heterogeneity by reducing censoring bias can provide a clearer picture of the benefits of acceleration.

Nascent entrepreneurs are frequently advised to “get out of the building” and consult with customers before any serious efforts to develop new products or services are undertaken so they can understand what their potential customers really want/need. Despite the intuitive nature of this advice, it lacks theoretical and empirical bases. As such, the worldwide popularity of the movements this approach has spawned, such as Customer Development and Lean Startup, seems to rest on the unfounded assumption that the benefits of involving customers outweighs any costs. Thus, we theorize about the pros and cons of involving customers early on in the startup process and empirically test our model using data from the PSED II. Our findings suggest that while involving customers early will help entrepreneurs create offerings customers are willing to pay for, it also results in potentially costly delays in the launch of those offerings. We also find that these benefits and costs are magnified when innovativeness is high.