Management Entrepreneurship & Technology

In building a new venture management team, do entrepreneurs seek team members to fill specific roles on the team needed to exploit an opportunity? Or do they consider what opportunities they can create, given their current team? Research on new business creation has traditionally favored a “planning” approach in which entrepreneurs recognize business opportunities, identify their goals (possible effects), and then choose the most effective means to achieve their goals by acquiring resources and creating an organization (e.g. Bhave, 1994). But others (e.g. Sarasvathy, 2001) have indicated that some entrepreneurs “effectuate”: that is, they focus primarily on the resources (means) under their control, and then go through a process of finding goals that can be accomplished with those resources. However, relatively little empirical research has addressed the conditions under which an entrepreneur will use planning and/or effectuation processes in the formation of his/her entrepreneurial...

Given that gaining access to external resources is a critical component of entrepreneurial activity, a great deal of research has been done in an attempt to predict and explain this phenomenon. Unfortunately, this literature is largely scattered across a wide variety of somewhat disconnected research streams, which makes interpreting the insights that have been hitherto gained challenging. In response, we identify a sample of 76 relevant articles from the leading management and entrepreneurship journals that examine entrepreneurial access to resources. Using a narrative synthesis approach, we then organize these articles based on the strategies (projective and/or interpersonal) and tools (communications, actions, associations, and/or intangibles) by which entrepreneurs gain access to resources. Based on our categorization, we discuss the major themes in the extant literature and offer suggestions for how to move research on entrepreneurial access forward in the future.

Despite the importance of social impact to social entrepreneurship research, standards for measuring an organization’s social impact are underdeveloped on both theoretical and empirical grounds. We identify a sample of 71 relevant papers from leading (FT50) business journals that examine, conceptually or empirically, the measurement of social impact. We first describe the breadth of definitions, data sources, and operationalizations of social impact. Based on this analysis, we generate a typology of four approaches to conceptualizing social impact, which we use to organize insights and recommendations regarding improved measurement of the social impact of entrepreneurial ventures.

As online transactions continue to increase and become a significant part of the global economy, the ability to accept payments online becomes more important for businesses. This paper evaluates the literature and provides current information for IS researchers and instructors focusing on electronic commerce. In this paper, we explore the components of e-credit providers (conventional, person-to-person, and third-party) and explain how each system processes a single transaction. We then analyze several market leaders in each segment and summarize the strengths and weaknesses of each company. We provide guidelines for selecting an e-credit provider and highlight the options that apply best to online businesses. Finally, we outline potential areas of future research and provide a simple tutorial on creating a business account with PayPal website Payments Standard as an example of an online payment provider.

Because violations of information security (ISec) and privacy have become ubiquitous in both personal and work environments, academic attention to ISec and privacy has taken on paramount importance. Consequently, a key focus of ISec research has been discovering ways to motivate individuals to engage in more secure behaviors. Over time, the protection motivation theory (PMT) has become a leading theoretical foundation used in ISec research to help motivate individuals to change their security-related behaviors to protect themselves and their organizations. Our careful review of the foundation for PMT identified three opportunities for improving ISec PMT research. First, extant ISec studies do not use the full nomology of PMT constructs. Second, only one study uses fear-appeal manipulations, even though these are a core element of PMT, and virtually no ISec study models or measures fear. Third, whereas these studies have made excellent progress in predicting security intentions, none of them have addressed actual security behaviors.
This article describes the theoretical foundation of these three opportunities for improvement. We tested the nomology of PMT, including manipulated fear appeals, in two different ISec contexts that model PMT’s modern theoretical treatment more closely than do extant ISec studies. The first data collection was a longitudinal study in the context of data backups. The second study was a short-term cross-sectional study in the context of anti-malware software. Our new model demonstrated better results and stronger fit than the existing models and confirmed the efficacy of the three potential improvements we identified.

Whistle-blowing has long been an important organizational phenomenon that improves organizations in the long-run. Online whistle-blowing systems are becoming increasingly prevalent channels for reporting organizational abuses. Given that the Sarbanes-Oxley Act and similar financial laws throughout the world require multi-national firms to establish whistle-blowing procedures and systems, whistle-blowing research is even more important (Ernst & Young 2009). Existing whistle-blowing theory does not explicitly ...