Business Commons^™

The Role Of Disruptive Innovation, Personality Characteristics, And Business Models On Entrepreneurial Success, Will Shannon

CMC Senior Theses

Disruptive Innovation, according to the term’s founder Clayton Christensen, is defined as a specific type of innovation that is able to capture the lower-end of the market through quality, feature, or cost differences and leverage this position to achieve higher market share. Entrepreneurs who utilize disruptive innovation strategies have been historically able to create products and services that achieve massive financial and cultural success. Theories of personality characteristics have been previously applied to entrepreneurial activities, but not used to bridge the gap between developmental experiences and market success. Cross-industry analysis of ten top entrepreneurial business leaders from retail, food services, …

Strategies For Growing And Sustaining Successful Small Businesses, Patrick Modilim Modilim

Walden Dissertations and Doctoral Studies

Small business manufacturing enterprises represent viable means of creating employment, stimulating economic growth, and accelerating development. Many newly formed small business enterprises do not continue beyond 5 years after formation. The purpose of this multiple case study was to explore the strategies used by small business manufacturing leaders in Lagos, Nigeria to sustain their businesses, using general systems theory as the conceptual framework. The sample comprised 3 small business leaders who have sustained their business enterprises beyond 5 years after formation in Lagos, Nigeria. The data collections were through semistructured, in-person interviews and the review of business feasibility and planning …

Preparing Employees For Entrepreneurship In Retirement: A Case Study, Samuel Omonowa Aikhuomogbe

Walden Dissertations and Doctoral Studies

In Nigeria, 92% of retirees live in poverty because of insufficient preparation for entrepreneurship that could serve as an alternative income in retirement. Guided by the human capital theory, the purpose of this case study was to explore how 15 civil service employees in Grade Levels 15-17 at the public service attained small scale business information before retirement. All employees had knowledge, training, and experience in small-scale business operation. Fifteen employees participated in individual interviews and 5 participated in a focus group; data were also gathered from, employee training records, organizational policy documents on training, and public service documents regarding …

Success Strategies Saudi Entrepreneurs Used To Navigate Through Regulations In Jeddah, Farah Mehar Spencer

Walden Dissertations and Doctoral Studies

Saudi Arabian entrepreneurs face major difficulties with the country's complex regulatory system. Based on Schumpeter's theory of entrepreneurship, the purpose of this phenomenological study was to reveal the lived experiences of Saudi entrepreneurs in navigating regulatory procedures in Jeddah. Data were collected through prolonged, face-to-face phenomenological interviews with 22 Saudi businesspeople who started successful businesses. The van Kaam method and member checking helped validate the transcribed data, which were subsequently coded into 4 themes. Four themes emerged from the data analysis: (a) obstacles in regulatory processes, (b) lack of information, (c) cumbersome procedures and need for alternatives to stringent protocols, …

The First 4 Years: A Small Business Sustainability Study, Iris Ann Cooper

Walden Dissertations and Doctoral Studies

Small businesses create most of the new jobs in the world, yet more than half fail before the 5th year. Small businesses contribute to the economy by originating new products and services, yet they often lack the strategies to overcome the challenges of the beginning years. When businesses fail, the community wanes from unemployment, poverty, crime, and other social dilemmas. The purpose of this single case study was to explore small business strategies for sustainability beyond Year 4, specifically in a single independent operating Ohio restaurant owner with less than 500 employees. The conceptual framework was Schumpeter's theory of the …

Human Capital Development Strategies For The Tourism, Hospitality, And Leisure Industry, Abimbola Peter Alamu

Walden Dissertations and Doctoral Studies

A shortage of skilled labor could cost the tourism, hospitality, and leisure industry (THL) a loss of $610 billion and 14 million jobs by 2024. The literature contains the contributions of specialist THL institutions but not that of the industry leaders to ameliorating this human capital (HC) challenge. The purpose of this multicase study was to explore the HC productivity strategies used by THL business leaders in Nigeria that improved employee productivity despite the lack of specialist THL institutions. The human capital theory (HCT) was the conceptual framework of the study. Coding of data derived from semistructured interviews with 3 …

Strategies For Small And Medium-Sized Enterprises To Engage Third-Party Logistics Providers, Masoud Malakoti-Negad

Walden Dissertations and Doctoral Studies

Small and medium-sized enterprise (SME) managers struggle to stay competitive. The purpose of this multiple case study was to explore the strategies SME managers located in Canada use to engage third-party logistics (3PL) providers to improve their supply chains. Porter's value chain theory formed the conceptual framework for this study. Data collection included semistructured interviews with 3 managers from 3 different SMEs in the province of Ontario and a review of the documents related to the use of 3PL providers. Member checking was conducted to enhance credibility of interpretation of the data collected. Data analysis was used to identify key …

Service-Disabled Veteran Small Business Owners' Success Strategies, Calvin Lewis Russell

Walden Dissertations and Doctoral Studies

The federal government has been inconsistent in meeting the mandated contracting set-aside goals of 3% to aid service-disabled veteran small business owners. Guided by the general systems theory, the purpose of this qualitative exploratory case study was to explore what strategies an owner and 2 senior managers of a small service-disabled veteran-owned business in the Washington, DC metropolitan used to obtain federal contracts. The owner and senior members represented those responsible for strategic vision, development of business opportunities, and the company acquisition process. Data were collected from semistructured face-to-face interviews and corporate documents. Member checking and transcript review were completed …

Sustainability Of Small Businesses In Zimbabwe During The First 5 Years, Barbra Sibanda

Walden Dissertations and Doctoral Studies

Small businesses in Zimbabwe make up 94% of the country's business population but only contribute 15% to the country's economy due to a high failure rate during the first 5 years. The purpose of this descriptive multiple case study was to explore strategies and skills that may contribute to the sustainability of small businesses during the first 5 years. The study population consisted of 5 small business owners in Ntepe village in Zimbabwe who had sustained their businesses for the first 5 years of operations. The conceptual framework that grounded this study was management theory. The data collection process involved …

Ballymaloe Cookery School: A Study Of The Business And Its Local Impact, Keelin Tobin

Theses

The focus of this research is Ballymaloe Cookery School situated in East Cork, Ireland. This study seeks to understand the emergence of the cookery school, how this business has evolved over time and to investigate the impact it has had on the local area. Ballymaloe Cookery School was officially founded by brother and sister, Darina Allen (nee O’Connell) and Rory O’Connell in Shanagarry, Co. Cork in 1983. The findings examine the establishment of the cookery school as a family business and its attributes. Set amongst a rural landscape, close to the sea and surrounded by agricultural land, the school is …

A Techno-Economical Appraisal Of A Pv Domestic Plant On A Irish Dwelling, Roberto Sandano

Articles

A comprehensive study of a domestic PV installation is addressed in this paper. A series of economic results are presented for a domestic installation in Ireland.

Communicating Entrepreneurial Passion: Personal Passion Vs. Perceived Passion In Venture Pitches, Kristen Lucas, Sharon Kerrick, Jenna Haugen, Cole J. Crider

Faculty and Staff Scholarship

Research problem: Entrepreneurial passion has been shown to play an important role in venture success and therefore in investors’ funding decisions. However, it is unknown whether the passion entrepreneurs personally feel or experience can be accurately assessed by investors during a venture pitch. Research questions: (1) To what extent does entrepreneurs’ personal passion align with investors’ perceived passion? (2) To what cues do investors attend when assessing entrepreneurs’ passion? Literature review: Integrating theory and research in entrepreneurship communication and entrepreneurial passion within the context of venture pitching, we explain that during venture pitches, investors make judgments about entrepreneurs’ passion that …

2016 Ivmf Annual Report, Institute For Veterans And Military Families At Syracuse University

Institute for Veterans and Military Families

This report overviews the accomplishments of the IVMF during 2015-2016.

Startups And Unmet Legal Needs, Alice Armitage, Evan Frondorf, Christopher Williams, Robin Feldman

Utah Law Review

Our survey results demonstrate that startup companies are exposed to a wide variety of legal needs from an early stage: when attorneys associated with the Startup Legal Garage were asked to handle a company’s most pressing legal needs, the average startup received assistance with over three distinct legal matters over the course of a thirteen-week academic semester. These issues often spanned multiple categories. Although matters frequently touched on a variety of topics within companies, strong similarities emerged in the types of issues faced by all startups in our sample. Almost 90% of the legal matters addressed by Startup Legal Garage …

The Entrepreneurial Commons: Reframing The Relationship Between Intellectual Property And Entrepreneurship, Michael J. Burstein

Utah Law Review

Reconceptualizing entrepreneurial activity as a knowledge commons leads us to ask a different set of questions than previous studies have, and to utilize a different set of methodological tools. As Part II described, existing approaches to understanding the relationship between IP and entrepreneurship focus on the firm and its reactions to various IP laws. By contrast, to the extent that the exemplar entrepreneurial activities described in Part III can be described as instances of commons governance, the analysis must necessarily be broader. The knowledge commons framework forces us to acknowledge that much of information production and dissemination depends on relationships …

Women Business Owners’ Start-Up Motivations And Network Content, Jalleh Sharafizad, Alan Coetzer

Research outputs 2014 to 2021

Purpose

The purpose of this paper is to examine how women small business owners’ (SBOs) business start-up motivations influence their network content.

Design/methodology/approach

Semi-structured interviews were conducted with 28 women SBOs who were recruited through purposeful sampling methods. Interview data on their start-up motivations were used to categorise them into three types: classic, forced and work-family. The interviews explored the network contents of the three categories of participants.

Findings

There were many similarities between network contents of classic and forced SBOs, as both groups had started their business for financial reasons rather than family reasons. All the participants’ networks contained …

Strategy/Enterprise Discourse Bounds In Business Talk., Brendan O'Rourke

Articles

Corporate strategy emerged as large non-owner managed firms became economically important (Knights and Morgan, 1991). Strategy became the substitute for the earlier enterprise discourse, which depended on the dominance, in entrepreneurial capitalism, of owner-managed firms. The discourses of strategy and enterprise developed as separate academic areas and as logics of two very different economic domains. From the late 1970s however, large organizations (Kanter, 1983:27) and governments have been urged to be more entrepreneurial (Klein et al., 2010; Osborne and Gaebler, 1993). Meanwhile, small firms were encouraged to be more strategic (Carr, 2000). This article looks at evidence from small …

The Implications Of The Trans-Pacific Partnership For Smes: Opportunities And Challenges, Heng Wang

Research Collection Yong Pung How School Of Law

The Trans-Pacific Partnership (TPP) will have profound implications for small and medium-sized enterprises (SMEs) within and beyond the free trade area. SME issues get more attention in the TPP than previous FTAs. Since there is limited research on the impact of the FTAs on SMEs, it is of great significance to probe into the practical implications of the TPP for SMEs. The key question will be analyzed: what are the challenges and opportunities that the TPP hold for SMEs? It is argued that, first, the support to SMEs, tariff elimination or reduction, and the reduction of non-tariff barriers are major …

Spinning Straw Into Gold: A Study Of Resource Creation, Flow, And Conversion In A Nonprofit Collaboration, Elizabeth A. Castillo

Dissertations

Throughout history people have joined together to improve their individual lives. In the modern era, organizations often work cooperatively to enhance their efficiency and effectiveness. Collaborating organizations in the nonprofit sector are increasingly expected to produce system-level change as well. This collective impact approach is under-theorized and therefore not consistently actionable. A central puzzle is how formal nonprofit collaborations acquire resource inputs and transform them into outputs, outcomes, and impact while producing financial returns to sustain the backbone organization. Resource dependence theory is sometimes proposed as an explanatory framework, yet it does not explain the generation of a double bottom …

Creativity, Design And Management In Australian Fashion Enterprises, Bruno Santarelli

Theses: Doctorates and Masters

In this study a number of Australian fashion enterprises are investigated in an effort to understand how product development is managed and creativity facilitated. Of particular interest was the interaction between the various actors in the creative process and the manner in which they influenced creative output. The study was underpinned by a wideranging review of the literature that reflects the multidisciplinary nature of creativity and innovation in business.

The study is timely because Australian fashion enterprises are operating in an increasingly challenging market with a perfect storm of competitive drivers at play. Technology enables instant dissemination of fashion trends …

2015 Q4 Market Pulse Report, Craig R. Everett

Pepperdine Market Pulse Report

The quarterly IBBA and M&A Source Market Pulse Survey was created to gain an accurate understanding of the market conditions for businesses being sold in Main Street (values $0-$2MM) and the lower middle market (values $2MM -$50MM). The national survey was conducted with the intent of providing a valuable resource to business owners and their advisors. The IBBA and M&A Source present the Market Pulse Survey with the support of the Pepperdine Private Capital Markets Project and the Graziado School of Business and Management at Pepperdine University.

Startup Elsewhere, Michaela Ross

Capstones

Immigrants have made outsized contributions to American innovation and entrepreneurship, but the headwinds they face in the U.S. are now driving them to return to their native countries to startup their tech companies.

U.S. immigrants make up only 13% of the country’s overall population, but they have filed over a quarter of the country’s global patent applications, won a third of America’s Nobel prizes in the sciences in the last hundred years and make up over half of all computer science Ph.D. students in U.S. universities. Immigrants also build businesses at twice the rate of native-born Americans, and over the …

Pricing Disintermediation: Crowdfunding And Online Auction Ipos, A. Christine Hurt

Faculty Scholarship

No abstract provided.

Education And Entrepreneurship In Amman, Jordan, Nicole Bills

Senior Theses

My thesis examines the potential economic impact of entrepreneurial education in Amman, Jordan. In order to investigate this topic, I also considered the economic impacts of increased entrepreneurism and access to education more broadly. I found that entrepreneurial education is just a small piece of a much larger ecosystem needed to support economic development. In fact, encouraging the creation of nascent firms is a somewhat dubious aim given the lack of scholarship assessing whether there is a shortage of entrepreneurial activity in the Jordanian economy. Institutional factors are a vastly more important component of efforts to spur growth.

Towards Entrepreneurial Learning Outcomes In Business Education And Beyond – Next Practice? Design & Guidance, Anthony Paul Buckley

Other

High growth economies can be differentiated from low growth economies by their high investment in knowledge, low knowledge filter and high levels of entrepreneurial capital. These states help create entrepreneurial capital by providing their citizens with opportunities to learn to be more enterprising in their pursuit of value creation and capture. What should be taught, how and what are the appropriate learning outcomes of entrepreneurship education and training (EET) then become the relevant questions. This paper reviews the relevant EET literature, assesses current thinking and practice and concludes, in the absence of empirical evidence in favour of a particular pedagogical …

Pubhub: A Mobile Application Business Plan, Zachary T. Washam

Finance Undergraduate Honors Theses

PubHub is a mobile application designed to address point-of-sale inefficiencies at bars. This business plan details our strategy for product design, marketing, financing, and eventual acquisition. We address key legal and competitive risks and project five years of pro-forma financial statements based on comparable firms.

The Time Frames Of New Venture Teams., Jason D’Mello

Electronic Theses and Dissertations

The central research question in this dissertation is: how do an individual’s perceptions of time impact a new venture team? Specifically, the study examined whether or not temporal depth relates to how reactive entrepreneurs may be to the environmental changes and threats that they face in their new venture team. I interviewed two cofounders from 40 new venture teams. The results suggest that cofounders in the same new venture team have very different perceptions of time. Their agreement, or congruence of temporal depth (future, past, and total) impacts their new venture team’s perception regarding environmental hostility. This relationship is negatively …

An Entrepreneurial Context For The Theory Of The Firm: Exploring Assumptions And Consequences, Arturo E. Osorio, Paul Donnelly, Banu Ozkazanc-Pan

Articles

While entrepreneurship may be driven by personal interests and lifestyle choices, entrepreneurial actions are not only economically driven opportunity-searching processes but also enactments of social transformation that may or may not lead to socioeconomic benefits. We advance that exploring these entrepreneurial processes can inform a theory of the firm that may explain how socioeconomic processes shape the socioeconomic environment of communities while serving individuals. This article discusses several understandings of the firm, as theorized in extant literature. Guided by these different conceptualizations, we present a case study of an artist and artisan cluster in Western Massachusetts to demonstrate various understandings …

The Process And Problems Of Business Start-Ups, Natasha Evers

The ITB Journal

“… there is little known about the initial phases of the process (of entrepreneurship). The conception, birth and early development of new ventures are very much an uncharted territory”. (Reynolds and White, 1997:1). This paper sets out to examine the process and problems encountered by new business start-ups. A didactic overview, based on past and current literature in the field, identifies the most common theoretical frameworks frequenting the academic literature and assesses their contribution to explaining and understanding the Process and Problems of New Venture Creation. The founding of a new organisation is not instantaneous and the process is a …

Who Wants To Be An Entrepreneur?, Maura O Connell

The ITB Journal

So you want to be an Entrepreneur? What does it take? Are you suited to entrepreneurial life? Have you got the required personality characteristics and what social factors influence whether or not you become an entrepreneur? While many studies have tried to answer these questions the results are somewhat mixed.