Papers by Jeffery S McMullen
Journal of Business Venturing, 2023
This editorial highlights the importance of a robust reviewer pool to the development of the fiel... more 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.
Academy of Management Insights, 2023
Facing starvation alone after being marooned on Mars, Matt Damon's character in the 2015 movie, T... more Facing starvation alone after being marooned on Mars, Matt Damon's character in the 2015 movie, The Martian, offers food for thought for entrepreneurs seeking sustainable practices, according to an Academy of Management Review article. "Resources aren't nearly as substitutable as our theories like to assume, especially in the short term. One can substitute duct tape for a lot of things, but not for food," said Indiana University's Jeffery S. McMullen, who wrote "Real Growth Through Entrepreneurial Resourcefulness: Insights on the Entropy Problem from Andy Weir's The Martian." The movie takes place in 2035, with NASA astronaut Mark Watney, played by Damon, awakening to find himself left for dead on Mars with no way to communicate with Earth, a futuristic take on Robinson Crusoe. "What ensues, however, is more than a gripping tale of survival in space. The Martian unintentionally offers a rigorous look at an isolated firm that must grow to survive and whose entrepreneur must rely on resourcefulness to make this growth possible. How will Weir's protagonist succeed and what might we learn from his exploits?" McMullen wrote. "How do we know that an entrepreneur is realizing profit that did not come at someone else's expense? We can have mutually beneficial exchanges, but that still doesn't guarantee that those resources will be there for generations to come," he said. "I ran across The Martian and I thought, that's exactly what happens. This is somebody who is isolated, he cannot profit through an exchange with other people. If he doesn't figure out a way to use resources better, he's going to die. But, even as Mark Watney improves his prospects of survival through economic growth, he still never comes close to achieving sustainable development." "We live on a closed system on Earth. We don't see ourselves that way. But it becomes easier to realize this when you watch Mark Watney on Mars. That's why I thought it was just such a great illustration of what happens when we don't have enough resources. You can't survive through rationing. You can't survive through an efficient economy," he explained. "I propose a model of real growth through entrepreneurial resourcefulness to determine whether an isolated firm can grow if it can capture only the value it creates," he wrote. His model likens entrepreneurs to "chefs using new production recipes to maximize the ingredients available. Such experimentation emphasizes that entrepreneurship is a process of resource transformation, not just customer discovery." "By making do with resources perceived by others to have little-to-no value, entrepreneurs may be able to get more from less," he wrote. "Society may even consider some of these resources worthless, 1 Copyright of the Academy of Management, all rights reserved. Contents may not be copied, emailed, posted to a listserv, or otherwise transmitted without the copyright holder's express written permission. Users may print, download, or email articles for individual use only.
Entrepreneur & Innovation Exchange, 2023
A Perennial Battle Battles between visionary entrepreneurs and their investors are common and can... more A Perennial Battle Battles between visionary entrepreneurs and their investors are common and can be epic, as the stories of Steve Jobs (Apple), Travis Kalanick (Uber), and Adam Neumann (WeWork) show. To scale their ventures, founders give up decisionmaking control to access investor cash, advice, connections, and other resources. Indeed, investors receive dominant equity interests, board chairs, board membership majorities, and decision-making authority. Research tells us that, despite collaborative and constructive starts to these relationships, conflicts arise from arguments over goals, responsibilities, and performance issues, culminating in investor calls for founders to step down from leadership roles and even to leave their organizations.
Entrepreneurship has the potential to be an inclusive space comprising many types of conventional... more Entrepreneurship has the potential to be an inclusive space comprising many types of conventional as well as unconventional entrepreneurs. In this essay we will argue that when it comes to unconventional entrepreneurs-ranging from refugee entrepreneurs and entrepreneurs with a physical or cognitive disability, to elder entrepreneurs, former convict entrepreneurs, and many others-there are important questions we are not asking because we tend to look at each subgroup in isolation. Our central message is that looking for shared wisdom across various groups of unconventional entrepreneurs may facilitate a shared theoretical conversation that aids the transfer of knowledge, prevents silos and the unnecessary reinventing of the wheel, boosts the field's appeal and critical mass, and facilitates a broader exchange of ideas. To facilitate that conversation, we identify who unconventional entrepreneurs are; identify obstacles to a common theoretical conversation and how these obstacles could be overcome; outline a set of common theoretical themes that apply across various groups of unconventional entrepreneurs; and show how further theorizing unconventional entrepreneurs could challenge the community to reach beyond our existing knowledge horizons to develop pioneering entrepreneurship research.
Persisting with a losing project (i.e., a new product development project facing superior competi... more Persisting with a losing project (i.e., a new product development project facing superior competition) is a social endeavor that can increase the costs of failure to the entrepreneur and other stakeholders. Yet, it tends to be explained almost exclusively in terms of intrapersonal predictors, such as the sunk cost fallacy. This paper examines whether, how, and under which conditions interpersonal influence, such as the intensity of a team’s recommendation to persist with a losing project, encourages entrepreneurs to persist. Drawing from the psychologies of escalation and self-regulation, we build a model of entrepreneurs’ undue persistence that we test through experimental design and conjoint analysis. We find that an entrepreneur’s decision to persist with a losing project is determined partly by the team’s recommendation to persist and that the strength of this effect varies across entrepreneurs based on their self-regulation and experience.
Entrepreneurs and investors sometimes battle for control of new ventures when their relation- shi... more Entrepreneurs and investors sometimes battle for control of new ventures when their relation- ships deteriorate, a phenomenon that we describe as entrepreneur-investor rivalry. Theoretical accounts of entrepreneurs' and investors relationships preclude the potential for true rivalry, battles where either side can emerge with venture control, yet such rivalry can and does happen. To address the disconnect between theory and practice, we develop an initial theory of entrepreneur-investor rivalry from the in-depth, qualitative analysis of a battle to control a renowned craft distillery. Our theory elaborates why entrepreneur-investor rivalry can occur, how it can unfold, and how it can conclude, attending to contextual factors and interaction dy- namics that shape the outcomes of three sequential stages and the overall rivalry process. In conceptualizing the features of entrepreneur-investor rivalry, we improve extant theory's capacity to explain such rivalry, provide practical prescriptions to mitigate or avoid it, and till fertile ground on which to invigorate its study. Most importantly, we provide a theoretical foundation to invigorate research on entrepreneur-investor rivalry and other relational dynamics of importance to venture resource mobilization, moving beyond assumptions that we “know all there is to know” about these relationships.
Entrepreneurial support organizations (ESOs), such as incubators and accelerators, are now ubiqui... more Entrepreneurial support organizations (ESOs), such as incubators and accelerators, are now ubiquitous. Despite this proliferation, their impact on entrepreneurs, ventures, and communities remains unclear, while academic research remains disjointed and largely descriptive, limiting understanding of the entrepreneurial support process and the influence of ESOs on it. Conducting a systematic review of 337 peer-reviewed articles involving five ESO forms-incubators, science parks, accelerators, maker spaces, and co-working spaces-we find that the literature's conception of support is under-socialized such that there is a need for longitudinal, processual, and experimental examination of changes in the rich relationships between entrepreneurs and their ventures, entrepreneurs and other entrepreneurs, entrepreneurs and ESOs, and ESOs and external stakeholders. Conceiving of support as help to become self-sufficient, we offer an alternative, relational approach to research on entrepreneurial support and those organizations seeking to provide it.
Digitization has provided entrepreneurs direct access to consumers in cultural industries while o... more Digitization has provided entrepreneurs direct access to consumers in cultural industries while offering intermediaries an alternative to critics' reviews when deciding whether to invest in creative products. Using data from the Chinese online self-publishing industry, we examine whether and how intermediaries use popular acclaim when deciding to invest in self-published books. We then flip the script and examine whether cultural entrepreneurs generate intermediary investment through popular acclaim and to what extent they do so through a digital serialization strategy. We find that, by encouraging both popular acclaim and intermediary investment, digital serialization emancipates cultural entrepreneurs from the indirect and uncertain reciprocity historically described by cultural entrepreneurship theory. Instead, digital serialization allows cultural entrepreneurs to generate consumer attention directly through economic entrepreneurship and to alter the power and roles of intermediaries and entrepreneurs in the cultural production process.
Despite its overwhelming importance to millions of people across the planet both currently and th... more Despite its overwhelming importance to millions of people across the planet both currently and throughout history, religion has been largely neglected by entrepreneurship research. Yet, because of its prevalence, centrality, established base of scientific inquiry, and ability to offer novel insight into emerging phenomena, religion offers numerous opportunities for transformative research. In this editorial, we offer a glimpse of what a "theological turn" in entrepreneurship research might look like: first, by identifying obstacles to religion's inclusion and how these barriers may be overcome; second, by explaining how the theological turn enables alternative explanations of important phenomena and stimulates research questions that build on the growing integration of religion and entrepreneurship in practice; and finally, by showing how a theological turn could challenge researchers to reach beyond our existing knowledge horizons to develop a future of impactful, relevant, and pioneering scholarship in the field of entrepreneurship.
What will entrepreneurship look like in 2030? We conducted a Delphi panel study asking this quest... more What will entrepreneurship look like in 2030? We conducted a Delphi panel study asking this question of editors and Editorial Review Board members of the two leading entrepreneurship journals, Journal of Business Venturing and Entrepreneurship Theory and Practice in an attempt to lift the eyes of the field to the horizon, outside academe, if only briefly. Using thematic coding analysis, we identified close to 1000 first-order codes from the 175 scholars surveyed, which we categorized into 24 distinct themes. From this input in the first round, we generated 93 predictions, which were assessed by the panel in terms of likelihood in a second round. It is our hope that these themes and predictions might serve to inspire our present research, teaching, and entrepreneurial endeavors, and spur debate and discussions among (future) entrepreneurship scholars of future-relevant phenomena that can potentially be studied under the rubric of entrepreneurship.
Calls for greater contextualization have been powerful in motivating research and knowledge creat... more Calls for greater contextualization have been powerful in motivating research and knowledge creation about entrepreneurship. However, unless counterbalanced with attempts to identify the field's conceptual core, these efforts have the potential to devolve into hypercontextualization, exposing the field to fragmentation, loss of consensus, and possible disintegration. We identify five elements of entrepreneurial agency common across eight subcommunities of entrepreneurship but emphasized differently in each. By conceiving of entrepreneurship as structural transformation, we explain why some agents succeed at transforming social structures via entrepreneurial action. We conclude with some first steps toward the development of a unified theory of entrepreneurial agency.
Innovative entrepreneurship, defined as the creation of new products, services, production method... more Innovative entrepreneurship, defined as the creation of new products, services, production methods, or business models, is critical for firm, industry, and economic growth and a key determinant of societal well-being. This special issue explores the roles of institutions and government policies in promoting or impeding innovative entrepreneurship. In this introductory editorial, we review theory and evidence on entrepreneurship at the macro-institutional and micro-policy levels, highlighting costs and benefits of alternative institutional environments and targeted policy interventions, as well as interactions within and across levels. We summarize the six papers in the special issue, discuss their contributions to the literature, and suggest how future work can build upon these and other papers to advance our understanding of the conditions and mechanisms underlying successful entrepreneurial innovation.
Using meta-analytic techniques, relations among the Dark Triad personality traits-Machiavellianis... more Using meta-analytic techniques, relations among the Dark Triad personality traits-Machiavellianism, narcissism, and psychopathywere examined in relation to outcomes associated with two different stages of the entrepreneurial process: entrepreneurial intention and entrepreneurial performance. From 39 independent samples (N = 11,819), we found that Machiavellianism positively relates to entrepreneurial intention (r c = 0.16) and negatively relates to entrepreneurial performance (r c = − 0.22), narcissism positively relates to entrepreneurial intention (r c = 0.24) and entrepreneurial performance (r c = 0.09), and psychopathy positively relates to entrepreneurial intention (r c = 0.17) and negatively relates to entrepreneurial performance (r c = − 0.10). Amid conflicting empirical results and theoretical viewpoints, we leverage our findings to present an exploration into how and why the Dark Triad personality traits relate to the initiation and performance of entrepreneurship. We interpret the existing literature through the lens of Nietzsche's will to power and propose that power acquired over others (domination) is likely to be as viable a predictor of entrepreneurial agency as power removed from others (emancipation). Limitations to the primary studies included in our review are thoroughly examined, and we offer direction for future research.
We highlight the important role that time plays in conceptualizations of opportunity in entrepren... more We highlight the important role that time plays in conceptualizations of opportunity in entrepreneurship research. Through two longitudinal case studies, we introduce a more dynamic understanding of opportunities than portrayed by current theorizing, which tends to emphasize "opportunity discovery." By adopting
Entrepreneurial imaginativeness is important for new venture ideation (the generation, evaluation... more Entrepreneurial imaginativeness is important for new venture ideation (the generation, evaluation, and development of ideas for new ventures), but its effects have only been examined at the individual level. Research suggests that new venture creation, including ideation, tends to involve multiple individuals, who are in the process of becoming a team for the first time. Given myriad possible combinations of individual imaginativeness in newly forming teams, we ask whether team configurations might vary in composition and performance when seeking to generate and develop new venture ideas. To answer this question, we conduct a field survey of 51 new venture teams in six different startup competitions. We find that various configurations among newly forming teams yield different new venture ideation performance outcomes and conclude by unpacking the theoretical and practical implications of our findings for new venture ideation, entrepreneurship, and team composition.
Maker spaces - shared production facilities offering access to basic and advanced manufacturing t... more Maker spaces - shared production facilities offering access to basic and advanced manufacturing technologies - have quickly become the latest must-have for universities, large corporations, and communities looking to foster entrepreneurship and innovation. While the entrepreneurial and educational prospects of maker spaces are certainly intriguing, questions remain concerning their design and effectiveness. Drawing primarily on case evidence and conversations with five maker spaces located across the U.S., we identify and present six key decisions for maker space leaders looking to foster entrepreneurship in their organizations. We conclude with a decision framework for maker space leaders and a series of questions for entrepreneurs as both groups work to pursue entrepreneurship through and in maker spaces.
Academy of Management Annals, 2020
The entrepreneurship setting—an extreme organizational context—provides fertile ground for organi... more The entrepreneurship setting—an extreme organizational context—provides fertile ground for organizationally relevant theory testing and development. In this paper, we propose that randomized experiments in the context of entrepreneurship have considerable potential to advance theory in entrepreneurship, as well as other areas of organization science including organizational behavior and strategic management. We ground this proposition in a multipronged review of randomized experiments in entrepreneurship (REE). Based on this review of prior work and emerging trends, we provide illustrative examples of innovative theory-driven experiments and motivate future research to consider randomized experiments in the entrepreneurial context both for testing boundary conditions and enhancing organizational theorizing broadly.
The purpose of this editorial is to discuss methodological advancements to enhance quantitative t... more The purpose of this editorial is to discuss methodological advancements to enhance quantitative theory-testing entrepreneurship research. As the impact of entrepreneurship scholarship accelerates and deepens, our methods must keep pace to continue shaping theory, policy, and practice. Like our sister fields in business, entrepreneurship is coming to terms with the replication and credibility crisis in the social sciences, forcing the field to revisit commonly-held assumptions that limit the promise and prospect of our scholarship. Thus, we provide suggestions for reviewers and editors to identify concerns in empirical work, and to guide authors in improving their analyses and research designs. We hope that our editorial provides useful and actionable guidance for entrepreneurship researchers submitting theory-testing papers to Journal of Business Venturing.
Researchers are confronted with uncertain expectations and demands regarding their potential reli... more Researchers are confronted with uncertain expectations and demands regarding their potential reliance on rich, multifaceted datasets. In particular, generating multiple papers from such datasets requires careful navigation of the publication process, as this practice is concurrently incentivized and fraught with potentially unanticipated risks. The current essay outlines several issues facing researchers seeking to generate multiple publications from common datasets, with emphasis on identifying the challenges associated with and the concurrent need for relying on such datasets when conducting programmatic research. Expectations and guidelines for editors, reviewers, and authors are offered.
Entrepreneurial identities and emotions can have profound effects on entrepreneurs. We examine ho... more Entrepreneurial identities and emotions can have profound effects on entrepreneurs. We examine how positive emotion (PE) among entrepreneurs may be influenced by the congruence they experience between their self-concept and the entrepreneur social identity. Given that uncertainty in the business environment can exert powerful effects throughout the entrepreneurial process, we further test the moderating impact of environmental dynamism on the relationship between identity congruence and PE. Results from a study of 175 entrepreneurs indicate that entrepreneurs experiencing greater congruence have higher levels of PE, and that this relationship is stronger in more dynamic environments.
Uploads
Papers by Jeffery S McMullen