Zugl.: Lüneburg, Universiẗat, Diss., 2008.

Thesis (Ph. D.)--University of California, Berkeley, 2002. / Includes bibliographical references (leaves 423-466).

Thesis (Ph.D. (Entrepreneurship))-University of Pretoria, 2005. / Summaries in English and Afrikaans. Includes bibliographical references. Available on the Internet via the World Wide Web.

Globalization has affected nearly all aspects of life as people gain mobility to cross national borders and live in different countries. Along with the other developed countries, Sweden has become a popular destination for immigration contributing to the phenomenon of immigrant entrepreneurship. Naturally, these type of entrepreneurs are exceedingly susceptible to various factors that impact business development. This thesis will investigate the obstacles that immigrant entrepreneurs face in the pursuit to establish and operate a successful business. Additionally, an examination into the incentivising schemes that are available to benefit and encourage immigrants to implement entrepreneurial activity. Besides, the thesis aims to identify how the business supporting organizations may facilitate illumination of the most significant constraints for implementation of entrepreneurial activity among immigrants. The research is conducted by using qualitative method based on four cases and unstructured interviews of representatives of business organizations. The results were analysed by comparing the cases between each other and extrapolation with the theoretical framework. The outcome of this thesis suggest that the primary driving forces for immigrant entrepreneurship in Sweden referred to discovery and exploration of business opportunity as well as to the factors that necessitate the immigrants to establish a new business venture. However, it is suggested that the necessity alone cannot be the decisive factor if the prospective entrepreneur fails to explore business opportunity. The primary constraints for immigrant entrepreneurship involve the internal and external barriers that may refer to the social and human capital as well as the access to the resources necessary for the implementation of entrepreneurial activity. Finally, it has been found that the entrepreneur supporting organization can significantly facilitate the entrepreneurship among immigrants through granting an excess to unique information, advice and support of the foreign-born entrepreneurs that may partially illuminate the most crucial barriers.

Environmental entrepreneurs are considered to be important drivers for an environmentally sustainable development. As other entrepreneurs, they face survival challenges while operating their businesses. Due to the increased importance of environmental entrepreneurs in counteracting environmental issues we argue that it is necessary to gain an understanding of their specific challenges of survival. In this thesis, we build theory based on environmental venture cases located in Sweden. We provide an extensive overview of the current literature and contribute by identifying an institutional dimension being of high relevance in this field. Our findings are of particular interest for policy makers, public institutions, environmental entrepreneurs and their advisors. Additionally, we provide further necessary access to this relatively new research field and suggest future research directions.

abstract: The purpose of this study was to measure the effect of gendered communication on women's behavioral intentions regarding nonprofit and for-profit entrepreneurship. Women represent half of the U.S. workforce, but only about one third of all American entrepreneurs are women. Feminists have argued that because entrepreneurship is largely understood as a masculine activity, women — who are predominantly socialized to espouse a feminine gender role — are less likely to become entrepreneurs. Previous scholarship and the particular theoretical lens of social feminism suggest that communication about entrepreneurship that is congruent with a feminine gender role would lead to the recruitment of a greater number of women entrepreneurs. Findings of the current study, however, suggested the opposite, providing support for poststructuralist feminist theory. Women who viewed a feminine entrepreneurship recruiting brochure about entrepreneurship reported themselves to be more feminine and less likely to report intentions to become entrepreneurs than women who viewed a masculine entrepreneurship recruiting brochure. These findings suggested that feminine communication may prime women to think of themselves as feminine, which may then lead them to view themselves as not masculine enough to be entrepreneurs. The applications of these findings stretch beyond engaging more women in entrepreneurship and also extend to scholarship that investigates gender's effects on women's pursuit of other masculine careers, including those in science, technology, engineering, and mathematics. Until the larger discourse on entrepreneurship changes to be inclusive of femininity, it is unlikely that strategies that feminize entrepreneurial activity in controlled situations will have an effect on changing the patterns of women's entrepreneurial intentions. / Dissertation/Thesis / Ed.D. Educational Administration and Supervision 2014

Internationally mobile individuals such as migrants and expatriates exhibit a higher level of entrepreneurial activity than people without cross-cultural experience. Current research suggests that this pattern is rooted in specific resources and institutional arrangements that increase the attractiveness of exploiting entrepreneurial opportunities. In this study, we provide an additional explanation: We argue that cross-cultural experience increases the ability to recognize entrepreneurial opportunities. This argument is supported by two complementary studies - a longitudinal quasi-experiment and a priming experiment. We find convergent evidence that cross-cultural experience increases a person's capabilities to recognize particularly profitable types of opportunities by facilitating the application of cross-cultural knowledge for the discovery of arbitrage opportunities and creative recombination. (authors' abstract)

This dissertation highlights the infrequently discussed role of the entrepreneur as founder of disruptive brands creating new categories often in a stealth-like manner. A recent corporate entrepreneurial response being pursued by Fortune 100 corporations’ renown for their branding prowess is examined in the dissertation called strategic brand venturing. Strategic brand venturing (SBV) is a boundary-spanning activity whereby large firms access disruptive brands and entrepreneurial marketing know-how through equity investments in entrepreneurial brands. Using an abductive logic, eleven practitioner-based dimensions of SBV are iteratively refined through comparisons with intersection literature and venturing literature and theory, to arrive at a conceptual model. In the process, comparisons are also made between technology venturing and brand venturing. This model is empirically tested and refined within and across seven case studies from six subsidiaries of global consumer packaged goods corporations in the United States. The final model borrows from prior venture capital and corporate venture capital models but caters for the exigencies of brands and entrepreneurial founders. The model also acknowledges the role of antecedents and the role of influential exogenous communities such as consumers and retailers. Using a realism philosophical perspective, deeper structures and generative mechanisms are uncovered related to strategic and political context factors. The positive benefits through partnership with brand entrepreneurs, and the potential contribution to heightened corporate entrepreneurship in large firms is highlighted. The dissertation concludes with propositions and suggestions for future research as well as implementation implications for practitioners.

This research dissertation presents a study which increases the understanding of how corporate firms in Botswana can develop and enhance entrepreneurial innovations and encourage entrepreneurial activity within their organisational boundaries. By so doing such organisations create an entrepreneurial oriented firm where pursuit for innovating opportunities thrive, thereby increasing their competitiveness as well as performance. This study aims to determine how such organisations culture a dynamic link between the pursuit of innovation and the essence of Corporate Entrepreneurship (CE) Orientation as a conduit to building the entrepreneurial organisation. Existing studies carried out in the area of entrepreneurship in Botswana mirror on the areas of financing entrepreneurial firms and types of ownership. A search conducted on internet sources, University of Botswana data base as well as literature journals revealed no evidence of CE studies in Botswana. Therefore, there exists a literature gap in the area of CE studies on Botswana which this study seeks to bridge. Models established by studies in the area of CE elsewhere are used instrumentally in this study. The study addresses the research problem by examining how existing firms in Botswana represent the concept of an entrepreneurial organisation within the sphere of corporate entrepreneurship. The intention is to identify and seek the knowledge, attitude and belief of the individual’s potential as corporate entrepreneurs, their ability to be innovative and how such innovation is brought to fruition in such settings. The study adopted a cross sectional, formal study approach using primary data sources. It targeted a sample of 100 individuals operating within the sample frame of a corporate organisation in Botswana which employs over 100 employees. A research instrument in form of a questionnaire was used to obtain data. Simple random sampling was employed. The resulting data set was analysed and presented by means of descriptive and quantitative statistics using SAS package software of the University of Pretoria. The study proves the inextricable link between CE orientation and the pursuit of innovation as a conduit to enhancing entrepreneurial activities in companies in Botswana. The findings however show that the level of innovation is affected by the perception of the innovation process comprising opportunity identification, generation and exploitation. The findings of the study helps large corporate companies in Botswana to appreciate and develop entrepreneurial organisations. In such organisations, Corporate Entrepreneurial Orientations are an essential base which leads to the pursuit of innovation within corporate borders. In essence, the corporate entrepreneurial activity inherent within corporate borders raises immunity against complacency and bureaucracy. It affords the organisation the impetus for coping with a variety of simulated strategies and options in the competitive arena in which the organisation finds itself. Breeding entrepreneurial activity within corporate borders also leads the organisation to new and innovative ways of responding to the windows of opportunities that enhances potential for growth as well as contributing to the organisations performance through maximising utilisation of the inherent internal capacities and deriving a strategic fit therefrom. / Dissertation (MPhil)--University of Pretoria, 2009. / Business Management / unrestricted

Entrepreneurs require some elements of human capital investment (work experience, education, industry-specific and entrepreneurship-specific experience) and skills to perform entrepreneurial activities in different entrepreneurship phases. However, entrepreneurship literature is silent on which specific human capital investments and skills are needed in each of the entrepreneurship phases (nascent, new business and established phases). In addition, studies that applied human capital to understanding entrepreneurial behaviour focused on either opportunity recognition or exploitation without dealing with more than one phase of the entrepreneurship process. Accordingly, this study investigated the human capital investments and skills specific to the different entrepreneurship phases. This study employed a sequential mixed-method research design using interviews and surveys. The interviews were conducted to: identify the sources of entrepreneurship skills; discover skills relevant in each entrepreneurship phase; and use the results of the qualitative phase to develop a survey instrument for measuring applied skills in a larger population of entrepreneurs. The data was collected in face-to-face interviews with a purposive sample of 15 entrepreneurs (five per entrepreneurship phase) and six national experts in entrepreneurship. The quantitative study was aimed at confirming the skills sets derived from the qualitative phase, determining their significance across the different entrepreneurship phases, and testing the relationship between skills, sources of skills that are the human capital investments, and entrepreneurship phases. After validating the quantitative measuring instrument, a questionnaire survey covered 235 entrepreneurs who participated in the study. Through confirmatory factor analysis, the categories of skills developed were: start-up skills; core business skills (business management, financial management, human resource management and marketing skills); personal and leadership skills (social and interpersonal, leadership and personal skills); and technical skills. The hypotheses were tested using inferential statistics that included the Kruskal-Wallis test, Mann-Whitney U test, and hierarchical multiple regression. The results showed that applying start-up, social and interpersonal, technical, and human resource management skills across the entrepreneurship phases produces an inverted U-shaped curvilinear relationship, thus they increase from the nascent to new-business phase and decline in the established phase. Marketing, personal and leadership skills have a negative curvilinear relationship with the entrepreneurship phases as they are applied maximally in the nascent phase but decrease in the new-business and established phases. Financial management and business management skills have a positive curvilinear relationship with the entrepreneurship phases as they increase from the nascent phase, through new business to the established phase. Overall, the relationship between skills and entrepreneurship phases was found to be an inverted U-shaped curvilinear, thus the application of skills positively increases from the nascent to new-business phase but declines from the new-business to established phases. The study also revealed that, as entrepreneurs start businesses, in the nascent phase the use of human capital investments (especially formal education) as a source of skills declines, thus creating a need to acquire more entrepreneurship-specific investments. When the application of skills declines from the new-business to the established phase, entrepreneurs seek additional sources of skills to counter the depreciating skill sets. In addition to acquiring skills from human capital investments, entrepreneurs learn skills from actors in their social networks. So skills acquired from the human capital and social actors are applied unequally in the different entrepreneurship phases. Finally, the entrepreneurship phase and some identified contextual factors were found to have a moderating effect on the relationship between skills and human capital investments. The results of the study assisted in developing a skills framework that will give a deeper understanding of human capital investments and skills needed in the entrepreneurship phases. This study makes a contribution to policy-makers, scholars and training institutions to categorize and sample entrepreneurs according to their skills requirements and entrepreneurship phases. / Thesis (PhD)--University of Pretoria, 2016. / Gordon Institute of Business Science (GIBS) / PhD / Unrestricted