Entrepreneurs pursuing environmental projects face a paradox: they are most needed in weak institutional contexts, but in these contexts, they are also most under-resourced. We investigate whether global rewards-based crowdfunding platforms can mitigate this paradox by channeling cross-border (financial) resources to environmental projects, especially in weak institutional contexts. Drawing on institutional theory, we conceptualize such platforms as cross-border institutional carriers that transmit backer support across borders guided by pro-environmental community logics. Using Kickstarter data spanning campaigns in 153 countries and backers from 226 countries and territories, we find a positive relationship between projects' environmental orientation and their likelihood of attracting cross-border funding. Moreover, this cross-border support originates from countries with stronger environmental institutions and is especially directed toward projects in weaker institutional contexts. Our findings differ from prevailing expectations from international entrepreneurial finance research focused on venture capitalists and angels, which emphasize cross-border disadvantages for risky, environmental projects in weak-institutional contexts, while we report cross-border fundraising advantages for these projects. Our study contributes to research on the nexus of institutional theory, international entrepreneurship, and crowdfunding research by showing how international crowdfunding platforms can enable the bottom-up diffusion of pro-environmental values and resources across country borders.

Research Summary Academic spin-off (ASO) performance has been studied in relation to either specific university-level or regional-level characteristics. However, ASOs originate from universities, which are embedded in regional ecosystems. This nested structure can create an attribution problem when either level is studied in isolation. Consequently, the relative importance of these two different levels for ASO performance has remained ambiguous. To address this ambiguity, we rely on multi-level modeling and use a novel, hand-collected dataset of 3164 ASOs founded between 2010 and 2019 from 212 universities nested within 99 European regions. We find that the region effect matters for about 27% for Return on Assets and 16% for Sales, whereas the university effect is negligible. Our study contributes to research at the nexus of academic entrepreneurship and variance decomposition in strategy.Managerial Summary Academic spin-offs (ASOs) bring innovations from the university to the market, thereby potentially generating new sales, employment, and value. However, once formed, their performance prospects vary significantly, and understanding this variance is important for entrepreneurs and policymakers alike. Our findings from a new European dataset reveal that the region effect matters for ASO performance, but the university effect is negligible. This evidence does not imply that universities lack importance; rather, it suggests that universities in a region may have a collective impact that diffuses into regional resources and networks. Our evidence highlights the importance of fostering a supportive regional ecosystem.

We investigate how crowds evaluate pitches by entrepreneurs with versus without physical disabilities. Leveraging stereotype subtyping, we argue that entrepreneurs with physical disabilities are evaluated as a distinct subtype, rather than as people with disabilities or as conventional entrepreneurs. We hypothesize that benevolent ableism shapes how this subtype is evaluated, inflating both warmth and competence perceptions. Three experiments support our hypotheses, and key informant conversations with professional investors and entrepreneurs with disabilities corroborate the proposed mechanisms. Our findings contribute to unconventional entrepreneurship research by examining how bias can manifest as patronizing positivity rather than overt negative discrimination.

Academic spin-offs (ASOs) are key vehicles for commercializing university research, yet theoretical and empirical insights on their performance relative to new technology-based firms (NTBFs) remain inconclusive. Drawing on a novel, hand-collected dataset of ASOs and independent NTBFs across 99 regions in ten European countries, we examine differences in their growth outcomes and the moderating role of regional human capital. Using entropy balancing to facilitate causal inference, we find that ASOs outperform comparable NTBFs in both employment and sales growth. The employment growth “premium” for ASOs is especially pronounced in regions with higher shares of business graduates, but not with STEM graduates. Our findings provide evidence that ASOs outperform similar NTBFs, which is important given the social costs of academics leaving universities, and highlight the importance of regional labor markets in shaping these outcomes. The results have important implications for policy-makers, universities, and academic entrepreneurs.

Regulatory institutions are double-edged swords: stricter regulations can improve entrepreneurs' access to key resources but also constrain their discretion. Past research has focused on the individual and/or independent influence of regulatory institutions, calling for stricter regulation or deregulation. However, institutional theory suggests that the full configuration of regulatory institutions, including their possibly complex interactions, drives the trade-off between resource access and the constraints imposed by resource providers. Using an inductive approach and fsQCA analysis, we aim to better understand how configurations of regulatory institutions and contextual conditions influence high-growth entrepreneurship (HGE) rates across European countries. We find that three distinct configurations explain high country-level HGE rates, which include different regulatory institutions that sometimes work in opposing ways and do not necessarily work universally across contexts. Overall, this study deepens research at the nexus of institutional theory and high-growth entrepreneurship.

Past research shows that firms with constrained access to debt are more likely to withdraw from exporting. We argue that firms’ debt maturity structure – that is their use of short‐term versus long‐term debt – also matters, because different debt maturities entail different risks (i.e. liquidity risk versus underinvestment risk). Using data from Belgian international new ventures (INVs), and controlling for self‐selection into exporting, we find that INVs relying primarily on either short‐term debt or long‐term debt are more likely to subsequently withdraw from exporting than INVs with a balanced debt maturity structure (i.e. comprising an optimal mixture of short‐ and long‐term debts). This U‐shaped relationship is weaker for INVs with more financial slack and stronger for those with higher growth opportunities. Overall, while past research emphasizes the impact of financial resource levels on export withdrawal, our study underscores the role of the structure of these resources. Our study contributes to the international entrepreneurship literature and resource mobilization literature in management.

In equity crowdfunding (ECF), early investments serve as signals of venture potential to prospective investors, making them more likely to join an offering. We argue that ECF platform team members can exploit this mechanism and convey false signals to unsophisticated investors. Data from a prominent ECF platform indicate that platform team members "invest" in ventures that exhibit weaker post-campaign outcomes. However, in ventures that successfully fundraise, platform team members typically withdraw their investment (after it incentivized others to join), and these ventures show even weaker post-campaign outcomes. Finally, ventures' post-campaign outcomes are particularly weak when this "invest-and-withdraw" tactic is executed by the platform's upper echelons, whose investments can further be perceived as endorsement signals by the crowd, despite significant goal incongruence between the upper echelons and the crowd. Our study presents novel theoretical and empirical insights into the signaling, financial misconduct, and ECF literature, and holds important policy implications. Executive summary: Past research has shown that equity crowdfunding (ECF) platforms can reduce agency problems between entrepreneurs and ECF investors, such as adverse selection problems, by providing selection and due diligence activities. In other words, past research has focused on the bright side of ECF platforms. However, this study focuses on a possible dark side of ECF platforms. The paper investigates the practice of ECF platform team members fabricating support (i.e., using an invest-and-withdraw tactic) towards firms with weaker prospects listed on their own platform. ECF platform team members can use an invest-and-withdraw tactic in firms with weaker prospects. Indeed, through their investments, ECF platform team members influence early investments, which are often used by prospective ECF investors as a quality signal to influence their own investment decisions. However, platform team members then withdraw their investments (after their investment lured follow-on investors to the offering). As such, platform team members

This study investigates the role of venture capitalists (VCs) and business angels (BAs) in the post-campaign performance of equity crowdfunded (ECF) firms. Analyzing 1373 UK ECF firms, we examine post-campaign outcomes, including firm size, financial performance, innovation, and future entrepreneurial finance events (i.e., follow-on funding, M As, or IPOs). We find that both VC- and BA-backed ECF firms exhibit lower innovation than matched ECF firms without such investors. There are limited other differences with non-backed ECF firms, except that BA-backed-only ECF firms are larger post-campaign. ECF firms with multiple investors of the same type are larger post-campaign, but they have fewer granted patents, while ECF firms backed by distinct investor types have fewer employees and fewer patents. However, ECF firms with VCs and/or BAs, except for BA-backed-only ECF firms, all outperform ECF firms without such investors in future entrepreneurial finance events. Our findings offer new evidence on the heterogeneous effects of VCs and BAs, addressing calls to desegment the entrepreneurial finance literature and explore investor co-participation. We study what happens to firms after they raise equity crowdfunding, especially when VCs and/or BAs are involved. We find that while having BA(s) and multiple VCs can help ECF firms grow bigger, they do not exhibit greater profitability and exhibit lower innovation than ECF firms without such investors. When both types of investors back the same firm, firms exhibit lower employment post-campaign and have fewer patents. Overall, the study indicates that just having VC or BA investors does not guarantee better results for ECF firms in the post-campaign period. While VCs and BAs (but not BAs alone) can help open doors to future financing, their value beyond money may be limited, and entrepreneurs and retail ECF investors should not assume their presence automatically means ECF firms will exhibit better performance post-campaign.

Research Summary: Private equity (PE) investors invest in a portfolio of firms, setting new, ambitious performance aspirations and providing monitoring and value-adding services to help management attain these aspirations. Integrating a behavioral theory of the firm and corporate governance perspective, this study investigates how portfolio firms respond to performance feedback, considering heterogeneity in PE investors' incentives and influence toward a given portfolio firm's strategic actions. Using unique data from a PE investor including direct aspirations measures, we find that (1) portfolio firms' performance relative to aspirations, and (2) the PE investor's relative investment amounts and experience of PE-appointed board members, interact to affect the distinct growth strategies (i.e., internal capital investments or external acquisitions) its portfolio firms pursue.Managerial Summary: A PE investor may guide its portfolio firms differently. Incentives to intervene should be larger in case of larger investments, and influence should be more extensive in case of more senior PE board representatives. In this study, we examine how a PE investor's varying incentives and influence affect how PE-backed firms strategically react to underperformance and overperformance. We find that a PE investor pushes for capital investments but deters acquisitions as performance shortfalls increase in a portfolio firm, when they have made larger investments and appointed more senior board members. In case of overperformance, a PE investor pushes toward acquisitions (and against capital investments) when they have invested more. Surprisingly, the opposite holds in case of more senior board members.

Drawing on institutional and demand-side perspectives, we investigate performance implications of (de)centralized governance modes in platform-based new ventures, and the conditions under which (de)centralization generates more value. Using a sample of 1,431 Initial Coin Offerings (ICOs), a new source of entrepreneurial finance, we find that centralization of decision-making is positively associated with platforms’ market value. Further, we consider how platform characteristics affect this relationship, finding that both the presence of an experienced Chief Technology Officer (CTO) and project transparency negatively moderate the positive relationship between centralization and market value. Thus, decentralized platforms need leaders with technical experience and project transparency to generate more value. Overall, this study provides a better understanding of the boundary conditions that increase the value of (de)centralized governance. This study investigates how different governance structures impact the market value of new blockchain-based ventures that conduct Initial Coin Offerings (ICOs). We explore the roles of centralized and decentralized decision-making and how these structures affect platform performance. Our findings show that centralized governance, where decision-making is concentrated, tends to increase a platform’s market value. However, having an experienced Chief Technology Officer (CTO) and clear project transparency can reduce the reliance on centralization. This implies that decentralized platforms can also achieve high market value if they have transparent processes and skilled leaders who can manage the technical aspects. The primary implication for practice is that new blockchain platforms should focus on hiring experienced technical leaders and ensuring transparency in their projects to attract investors and customers.

How does entrepreneurial team size affect fundraising success? Theory and prior evidence are contradictory or inconclusive at least. Indeed, a resource dependency theory perspective suggests that larger teams have access to more resources, which should positively affect fundraising success. In contrast, a team effectiveness perspective suggests that larger teams incur higher coordination costs, which should negatively affect fundraising success. In this article, we address this theoretical paradox by arguing for a curvilinear effect between team size and fundraising success. By drawing on the liabilities of newness and smallness perspectives, we further argue that firm age and size will serve as important moderators. For this study, we exploit data from equity crowdfunding (ECF) markets. In Study 1, we examine the population of 2942 initial ECF offerings from three ECF platforms in the U.K. We provide first-time evidence of the inverted U-shaped relationship between entrepreneurial team size and the fundraising success of the ECF offering. Specifically, an entrepreneurial team of four members exhibits the highest probability in terms of ECF offering success. Moreover, we show that the inverted U-shape is stronger for younger and smaller firms relative to older and larger firms, respectively. In Study 2, we examine 256 initial ECF offerings from an Italian ECF platform and find broadly consistent results on the inverted U-shaped relationship between entrepreneurial team size and fundraising success.

Digitalization can profoundly change resource mobilization, including the search, access and governance of resources. In this introductory paper to the Special Issue on Digitalization and Resource Mobilization, we review existing research to identify different approaches towards digitalization, different conceptualizations of what resources are in this context and different aspects of resource mobilization across studies and theories. Drawing on these insights, we illustrate contemporary research examples and outline the way forward for two research streams focusing on resource mobilization in a digital context – specifically, the crowdfunding and human resources literature. We conclude by proposing four new areas to further advance the field.

Past research shows that during a crisis, managers of publicly-held firms often adopt a 'conservative' approach focused on protecting the existing core of their firms by decreasing investments and hoarding precautionary cash. By doing so, managers decrease firms' short-term failure rates. However, the literature says little about how managers of private, Small and Medium-sized Enterprises (SMEs) (should) act during a crisis. To address this question, we draw on the Conservation of Resources (COR) theory. Empirically, we use longitudinal data from 38,885 Belgian SMEs' responses to the 2008-09 financial crisis. Consistent with our expectations, we find that an 'aggressive' approach focused on resource investment during the crisis decreases SMEs' failure rates for up to a decade after the crisis. Further, younger SMEs, and especially those in industries with more growth opportunities, adopt aggressive approaches. Overall, the results show that SMEs need to be aggressive during the crisis to ensure their long-term survival. Moreover, contrary to current depictions of younger SMEs as being vulnerable, and especially so in crises, our evidence highlights that they are surprisingly aggressive when being confronted with a crisis, relative to their older peers.

Although there are opposing theoretical arguments on the relationship between the strength of a country's employment protection laws (EPLs) and innovation, empirical evidence tilts towards a positive relationship. However, research has mainly focused on the early stages of the innovation process, such as R&D and patenting. This study examines the role of EPLs in the later stages of the innovation process: the commercialization of new products. In particular, we focus on EPLs' relationship with two different new product commercialization outcomes: the launch and subsequent sales of new products. Using data on small European firms, we find that, controlling for invention, stricter EPLs are negatively associated with firms' likelihood of launching new products, but positively associated with the sales from new products. We discuss the implications of our results for theory and practice.