- 2015-03-09 (x)
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- Entrepreneurship (x)
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Show moreThe importance of entrepreneurship to economic development is widely debated and acknowledged. With rising unemployment and growing disenchantment with corporate employment, more policy makers and scholars are turning to entrepreneurship and self employment as a solution to youth unemployment. College experiences and learning have the potential to change attitudes, beliefs and focus not only in a student’s general life outcomes but also in career orientation. Colleges therefore provide a window of opportunity for creating positive attitudes towards entrepreneurship and influencing students’ entrepreneurial self efficacy making careers in entrepreneurship more feasible and desirable. The manner in which these factors inter-relate is the essence of social cognitive career theory which postulates that environmental variables can moderate, mediate or directly affect the relationship between interest and career intentions or goals as well as the relationship between intentions and action. Research in higher education has shown student engagement to be one of the processes through which college impacts on student outcomes. The extent of this involvement is in turn influenced by college characteristics. This study explores the impact of college entrepreneurial orientation on students’ entrepreneurial self efficacy and attitudes towards entrepreneurship on the one hand and their entrepreneurial intentions on the other as mediated by students’ involvement in college activities in and out of class. Student involvement or engagement is hypothesized to impact on entrepreneurial intentions through increased exposure to vicarious experience, expanded information and supportive networks. Engagement is also hypothesized to mediate the influence of prior exposure to entrepreneurship, gender and perceptions of formal learning on self efficacy and attitudes towards entrepreneurship. Keywords: College environments, engagement, self efficay, attitudes, intentions
Doctorate of Management Programs
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Show moreWe surveyed 172 technology entrepreneurs to explore links between learning style and learning flexibility and decision making behaviors hypothesized to produce entrepreneurial innovation and success. Our findings reveal a system of entrepreneurial learning and innovation with subtle and surprising interactions between learning processes and behavioral mediators.
Doctorate of Management Programs
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Show moreWith the current competitive challenges facing for-profit and nonprofits organizations, observers have advocated the implementation of internal entrepreneurial actions as a response. Internal entrepreneurship – defined as risk taking, innovativeness, and proactiveness actions – are examined to determine what mechanisms are at work in promoting these actions among both managers and employees in organizations. Four organizations – two from each sector – were studied using a grounded theory approach, with semi-structured qualitative interviews performed with 15 managers and employees. Data analysis and coding resulted in a conceptual model that provides a parsimonious explanation of the mechanisms that promote entrepreneurial actions in organizations. Three key mechanisms that stem from individual, managerial, organizational, and situational characteristics – trust, motivation, and an enabling mechanism – were identified as key mediating variables and represent constructs that have not been previously studied in the context of internal entrepreneurship. Given the small sample of the study, future large scale hypothesis testing research is called for.
Doctorate of Management Programs
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Show moreThis study was conceived after the realization that there was inadequate literature linking intention to venture creation and psychosocial factors in Kenya. The critical question of the study was; how do psychosocial factors impact on an individual’s intention to venture creation? The data was sourced from college students and nascent entrepreneurs in Nairobi. This paper explores the relationship between perceived desirability and feasibility, and intention to venture creation. Further, the paper seeks to establish the relationship between perceived social norms, social support network and entrepreneurial experience on perceived feasibility and desirability. It also seeks to establish the relationship between these antecedents and intention to venture creation. Exploratory factor analysis was done to test both discriminant and convergent validity of measurement items. Structural equation modeling was used to examine and confirm the structural relationship in the network. Perceived desirability and feasibility were found to have a significant effect on intention to venture creation. Entrepreneurial experience, perceived support networks and social norms had no direct significant effects on intention to venture creation. The three had positive effect on perceived desirability and feasibility. This study provides ground breaking scholarly work in this field of entrepreneurship that will hopefully provoke Kenyan entrepreneurship scholars to conduct more research on this fallow ground. Key words: Intention to venture creation, Perceived desirability, Perceived feasibility, Perceived social norms, Perceived social networks, Entrepreneurial experience.
Doctorate of Management Programs
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Show moreMulti-source data from 18 organizations was utilized to examine intrapreneurship in the nonprofit sector. Specifically, individual level and firm level variables were introduced concurrently to explore competing and complementary mechanisms in an effort to provide a better understanding of intrapreneurial orientations and behaviors. Employing structural equation modeling on the multi-source cross sectional survey data, results suggest that employee entrepreneurial orientation is greater when (a) high managerial trust is perceived by an employee, and (b) and the employee feels a strong fit between his/her own personal values and those held by the organization. In turn, this individual entrepreneurial orientation has significant positive effects on the entrepreneurial orientation of projects and activities undertaken by employees, which appear to result in positive overall outcomes for the organization and its clients/community. In addition, results reveal that formal organization controls, often thought to have both positive and negative impacts on intrapreneurship, appear to play a limited role on intrapreneurial intentions and behavior. Taken together, these findings indicate that both individual and interpersonal factors are at work in the facilitation of entrepreneurial orientation within nonprofit organizations, providing new insight into the intrapreneurial process.
Doctorate of Management Programs
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Show moreKenya has a population of approximately 34 million with those aged 35 years and below making up over 75% of the population. In 2003 and 2005, when the national unemployment stood at 40%, the youth accounted for about 78% and 67% of the national unemployment in the two years respectively. This encompasses all youth including recent college and university graduates. Taking into account that these numbers include recent university and college graduates, the resulting waste of resources is enormous. It therefore makes economic sense to have more youth engage in entrepreneurship to combat unemployment and stem the resource waste. For a country that has traditionally raised college graduates to expect wage employment, this requires a concerted effort cutting across all facets of the society. The current study focuses on the role that colleges can play in enhancing entrepreneurial intentions among the youth.
Doctorate of Management Programs
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Show moreThis paper presents findings from an investigation of pattern-changing social entrepreneurs. We examined the efforts of fifteen entrepreneurs and sought to understand the factors that enable successful ones to scale their social impact. All the entrepreneurs were operating in capital constrained environments and scaling required overcoming funding constraints. The findings indicate that pattern-changing social entrepreneurs are more concerned with scaling their impact than with growing their enterprises. Hence, many were pursuing both direct scaling where they grew their own enterprises and indirect scaling where they pursued impact through influencing other organizations. Social entrepreneurship is not a linear process; rather it is one of discovery, evolution, growth, learning and reinforcement. Most of the entrepreneurs began with a unique and innovative idea and then “discovered” through trial and error how to build a successful enterprise. The findings indicate many similarities between social entrepreneurship and profit seeking entrepreneurship as characterized in the empirical literature. Key differences include implications of the social mission and resource acquisition for non-profit entrepreneurs. Successful entrepreneurs were able to build and access social and business networks in order to garner financial, human, and other resources. They then developed viable self-reinforcing resourcing and capability building approaches built on principles of value exchange with partners, funders, and customers. They delivered exceptional value to partners and key stakeholders providing satisfaction and building credibility and strong reputations. The most successful social entrepreneurs discovered innovative ways to improve the profitability and mission-focus of key activities and once they had refined their model, they focused their energies to exploit the opportunity and scale their impact. A critical success factor for scale was moving from individual-level skills to the building of core organizational-level competencies.
Doctorate of Management Programs
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Show moreEntrepreneurs need creative ideas to develop innovative new products. We interviewed 32 technology entrepreneurs to generate a grounded theory about how technology entrepreneurs use social behaviors, techniques and cognitive processes to attain, develop, refine, validate and filter (for usefulness) creative ideas for successful new products, processes or services. The results reveal a complex, cyclical and recursive multi-level social process with emphasis on active and social experimentation. Greatest ideational productivity occurs when strong social ties interactively solve problems in an environment of trust -- in particular, when 'Trusted Partners' exchange and refine ideas through a form of shared cognition. Findings will be of great interest to researchers interested in entrepreneurship, social creativity and management team dynamics. Practitioners will benefit from this new insight into the methodologies and practices of successful entrepreneurs.
Doctorate of Management Programs
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Show moreThis study aims to address the unexplained stagnant entrepreneurial environment in Puerto Rico despite average or above average entrepreneurial potential, capabilities, and intentions compared to other high-income countries. Analysis of interviews with public, private and civic sector leaders and both successful and less successful entrepreneurs suggest a pervasive lack of support for entrepreneurs from formal organizations charged with entrepreneurship development and a failure of entrepreneurs themselves to develop networks to support venture startup and sustainment.
Doctorate of Management Programs
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