Entrepreneurial and Small Business Operations Commons^™

Entrepreneurs For A Low Carbon World: How Environmental Knowledge And Policy Shape The Creation And Financing Of Green Start-Ups, Theodor Florian Cojoianu, Gordon L. Clark, Andreas G. F. Hoepner, Paolo Veneri, Dariusz Wojcik

Research Collection College of Integrative Studies

We investigate how different types of environmental policies and new regional environmental knowledge affect new venture creation in and financing of green (low carbon), brown (fossil fuel) and gray (unrelated to natural resources) technologies across 24 OECD countries and 293 regions over the period 2001-13. We find that new regional environmental knowledge positively impacts new venture creation in green technologies, and moderately in gray industries. Gray industries also benefit from enhanced start-up financing in regions where new environmental knowledge is created, confirming that environmental knowledge creation yields positive externalities beyond the green sector. We also find that a more stringent …

Sasa In Singapore: What Went Wrong?, Singapore Management University

Perspectives@SMU

Twenty-two became a somewhat unlucky number for Hong Kong-based cosmetics retail chain, Sasa, for its Singapore operations in 2019. That was the year – 22 years after it entered the market – that it decided to close all of its 22 stores on the island.

Learn, Adapt, And Move On: An Interview With Rajesh Lingappa, Rajesh Lingappa, Singapore Management University

Asian Management Insights

Rajesh Lingappa, co-founder and former chief technology officer of RedMart, talks about his entrepreneurial journey in the world of technology.

Leveraging Digital Technology To Transform Accounting Function: Case Study Of A Sme, Gary Pan, Benjamin Lee

Research Collection School Of Accountancy

Digital transformation is taking hold of the processes and systems in accounting at a rapid pace and in a drastic way. With its emphasis on data and analysis, accounting entity is well suited to reap the benefits digital technologies have to offer. With the rapid infusion of digital technologies in accounting entity, the accounting literature has been calling for more empirical studies to examine the way accounting function leverages digital technology to enhance its analytical capabilities so as to obtain deeper business insights. This paper conducts an empirical study to examine the process of a SME's accounting function leveraging data …

Fin Vs. Tech: Are Trust And Knowledge Creation Key Ingredients In Fintech Start-Up Emergence And Financing?, Theodor Florian Cojoianu, Gordon L. Clark, Andreas G. F. Hoepner, Vladimir. Pažitka, Dariusz. Wójcik

Research Collection College of Integrative Studies

We investigate how the emergence of fintech start-ups and their financing is shaped by regional knowledge creation and lack of trust in financial services incumbents across 21 OECD countries, 226 regions and over the 2007–2014 period. We find that knowledge generated in the IT sector is much more salient for fostering new fintech start-ups than knowledge generated in the financial services sector. Additionally, the importance of new knowledge created in the financial services sector (IT sector) increases (decreases) as fintech start-ups grow and seek financing. When the level of trust in financial services incumbents falls within a region, this is …

Estimating The Benefits And Costs Of Forming Business Partnerships, Jungho Lee

Research Collection School Of Economics

I estimate a matching model of business‐partnership formation to quantify the relative importance of productivity gains, financing gains, and the coordination failure of effort provision (moral hazard) among partners. Productivity gains account for 61% of the gain from the observed partnerships. For partners in the first quartile of the wealth distribution, however, financing accounts for 93% of the gain. The cost of moral hazard corresponds to 42% of the entire gain from partnerships. A loan policy specifically targeting partnerships is less effective in improving welfare than a conventional loan policy that provides loans to individual entrepreneurs.

Developing Online Business Strategy With Millennials Through Partnership With University, Yuanto Kusnadi, Gary Pan

Research Collection School Of Accountancy

The COVID-19 pandemic has brought about a significant shift in shopping behaviour from offline to online among Singaporean consumers. According to data from data analytics firm Nielsen, 37 per cent of Singaporean consumers have increased online shopping activities since the COVID-19 outbreak. This shift towards online shopping, food delivery and e-groceries may persist beyond the COVID-19 period. While the increase in online shopping has benefited online stores, many businesses who do not yet have an online presence or have not been paying much attention to conducting sales online were caught off-guard during the circuit breaker period which has resulted in …

Digitalisation Of Smes In Singapore: An Institute Of Higher Learning-Enterprise Partnership Model, Benjamin Huan Zhou Lee, Gary Pan

Research Collection School Of Accountancy

An SME had commissioned a team of five accounting students to develop a forecasting model using analytics. The student team was from the Accounting Analytics Capstone (SMU-X) course offered by the School of Accountancy, Singapore Management University (SMU), in January 2018. For this project, the student-consultants applied their knowledge of accounting data and analytics, combining it with a multidisciplinary approach to solve real-world complex financial analytical problems that have real-time consequences.

A Dynamic Account Of Self-Efficacy In Entrepreneurship, Michael M. Gielnik, Ronald Bledow, Miriam S. Stark

Research Collection Lee Kong Chian School Of Business

We present a dynamic account of self-efficacy in entrepreneurship that integrates social–cognitive and control theory. According to our dynamic account, variability in self-efficacy energizes action because it involves self-motivation and discrepancy perception as competing motivational processes. We argue that variability and the average level in self-efficacy nascent entrepreneurs display over time support the enactment of entrepreneurial intentions and predict business ownership. The proposed positive effect of variability further implies an inverted u-shaped relationship between self-efficacy at a single point in time and business ownership. To test these hypotheses, we repeatedly assessed entrepreneurial self-efficacy of nascent African entrepreneurs during a 12-week …

Does Intergeneration Succession Influence Stock Prices Of Family Businesses?, Kunlun Zou, Rong Wu, Pu Chen

Research Collection Lee Kong Chian School Of Business

China’s A-shares family listed companies are facing a period of high intergenerational succession. This has attracted the attention and research of many scholars. The existing studies mainly focus on the motives, methods, and influencing factors of family business’ intergenerational succession, and there are few studies involving the reaction of the capital markets. This article takes 45 listed family businesses as samples and uses the synthetic control method to examine the impact and the degree of influence that intergenerational succession has on stock price movements. Thereafter, a difference-in-differences estimation is conducted to test for robustness. At the conclusion of our research, …

Changes In Decision-Making Authority When Chaebol Firms Grow: From The Perspective Of Non-Family Managers, Changhwan Kim

Dissertations and Theses Collection (Open Access)

What changes do non-family managers in large family firms such as chaebols (Korean conglomerates) observe in their decision-making authority when their organizations grow? The intuitive expectation is that non-family managers' decision-making authority will grow in conjunction with the successful expansion of the business and growth of the firm.

Based on 45 in-depth semistructured interviews with non-family managers from a wide range of chaebol firms, this study analyzes how non-family managers perceive the change in their decision-making authority and the cause of this change.

The findings indicate that respondents perceive that their decision-making authority does not increase with the growth of …

Bettr Barista For Better Lives, Singapore Management University

Perspectives@SMU

How a social enterprise used coffee to help lift those from challenging backgrounds

How Inheritance Law Affects Family Firm Performance: Evidence From A Natural Experiment, Yong Kyu Gam, Min Jung Kang, Junho Park, Hojong Shin

Research Collection Lee Kong Chian School Of Business

We argue that changes in the inheritance system affect incentives leading to sibling rivalry among descendants and therefore have a material impact on family firm performance. Using South Korea's 1991 inheritance law reform that stipulates the equal distribution of a deceased person's property to descendants, we find that the performance and operating growth rate in family firms show significant enhancement compared with those of nonfamily firms. Moreover, the positive effects are greater for family firms that undergo a business succession with multiple sons and married daughters. Overall, our results suggest that changing to equal bequests of inheritance has a positive …

The Confucian Merchant, Singapore Management University

Perspectives@SMU

Profits and virtue are not opposites, and businessmen can become gentlemen by observing Confucian values

Female Transnational Entrepreneurs (Ftes): A Case Study Of Korean American Female Entrepreneurs In Silicon Valley, June Y. Lee, Jane Lee

Research Collection School of Social Sciences

Increasingly, studies of entrepreneurship and migration have examined the role of immigrant entrepreneurs in revitalising and diversifying the economy of the host society. Further, recent transnational skilled entrepreneurs have been understood as being much more mobile in building international networks and collaborations between their home and host societies. These studies have tended to focus on the technically oriented entrepreneurs and to produce a single grand narrative about a particular migrant group that transfers knowledge and becomes a technical pioneer in their home society. This article scrutinises a group of first-generation Korean American female transnational entrepreneurs (FTEs) living in Silicon Valley …

The Invisible Hand Of Evolutionary Psychology: The Importance Of Kinship In First-Generation Family Firms, Xiaodong Yu, Laura Stanley, Yuping Li, Kimberly A. Eddleston, Franz W. Kellermanns

Research Collection Lee Kong Chian School Of Business

While previous studies focus on differences between family and nonfamily firms regarding CEO selection and executive compensation, this study investigates differences among family firms with different types of kinship ties. We find that, compared with family firms with close kinship ties, those with distant kinship ties are more likely to appoint a nonfamily CEO and to pay nonfamily executives lower salaries. This relationship is moderated by firm performance and family ownership. Based on evolutionary psychology, we propose that family firms with close versus distant kinships have different motivation levels to preserve socioemotional wealth.

An Analysis Of Open Innovation Determinants: The Case Study Of Singapore Based Family Owned Enterprises, Annie Koh, Esther Kong, Giuseppe Timperio

Research Collection Lee Kong Chian School Of Business

Family businesses play an important role in the growth of global economy, and while they are arguably perceived as a conservative form of organization with high risk aversion and reluctance to change, counterintuitive empirical evidence show that they are most effective in ideation and commercialization of innovation projects. In the current business environment of rapid change in work patterns, fast adoption of enabling technologies for seamless collaborations across industry and geography, along with intense competition and high uncertainty, enterprises have no choice but to maximize returns on innovation investments. Therefore, they are increasingly dependent on an ecosystem-based approach to innovation …

Family Firms And Labor Market Regulation, Morten Bennedsen, Sterling Huang, Hannes F. Wagner, Stefan Zeume

Research Collection School Of Accountancy

In a panel across twenty-eight countries over 10 years, we show that family firms on average enjoy performance advantages over nonfamily firms only when labor markets are less regulated. We confirm this result in a matched firm sample using a survey-based instrument as a family control. Furthermore, family firms exhibit lower variation in employment levels in less-regulated labor markets, supporting the notion that labor relations drive family firms’ performance advantages. Our results are consistent with the notion that both family ownership and labor market reforms provide employment protection and thus partly substitute as governance mechanisms.

Role Of Financial, Human And Social Capital In Survival Of Start-Ups, Tiong Kiat Wong

Dissertations and Theses Collection (Open Access)

In new business ventures, growth in itself is often not the main intention in the beginning, but rather a mean to ensure survivability first, follow by sustainability and secure profitability. Not all small businesses survived over time and are always confronted with the liability of newness and contending externalities such as fierce competition and internal limitations like resources to survive. Only about half of newly founded start-ups survived after 5 years.

The presence or absence of resources and the critical role it plays on the effect of venture’s survival, provides substantive advancement in understanding of organisational theory and management practice …

Crowdfunding: Sharing The Entrepreneurial Journey, Anirban Mukherjee, Hannah H. Chang, Amitava Chattopadhyay

Research Collection Lee Kong Chian School Of Business

No abstract provided.

The Impact Of Entrepreneurial Leadership On Team Climate And Innovation Work Behaviour In Start-Up Contexts, Kin Kah Neo

Dissertations and Theses Collection (Open Access)

Achieving start-up success is a multi-dimensional challenge. Against this background, this research centres around the experiences gained at an Asian University with a postgraduate Master of Science in Innovation program (MI) aimed at creating novel and viable business ventures as part of so-called Capstone Projects. Given concerns about the - at times - somewhat mediocre nature of ideation and business model creation outcomes of some of the students’ capstone projects in contrast to a couple of very successful, award-winning innovation projects, emphasis was put on identifying and understanding the type of leadership that drives high-quality new ventures, namely entrepreneurial leadership …

How Ties With Family Members Influence Professionals' Creativity In Family Businesses: The Role Of Hive Effect And Trust, Rameshwari Ramachandra

Dissertations and Theses Collection (Open Access)

Many Asian enterprises are family businesses. In recent years, there has been a growing body of research on creativity in Asian firms, but few studies on the creativity of the professionals working in Asian family businesses. Given the importance of creativity in family businesses for their continued success, I examined how a professional’s ties to family members in a family business influenced their creativity. I proposed that the number of family members in a professional’s network would positively predict the professional’s creativity, and that this effect would be mediated by the family members’ affective and cognitive trust in the professional. …

A Recipe For Success: Asia's F&B Franchising, Kek Sin Koh

Asian Management Insights

Asian food and beverage (F&B) brands are exploding in popularity all over the world. Since 1999, Asian fast food restaurants have grown by 500 percent globally, making it the single fastest-growing food category, outstripping the growth of the next four, i.e. Middle Eastern, Chicken, Pizza, and Latin.1 At the same time, there is a huge opportunity for F&B franchising in Asia Pacific—over the past decade, the sector has flourished with the entry and expansion of both international and Asian brands, and in 2016, the restaurant industry in this region was estimated to be worth some US$1.5 trillion.2 Going forward, there …

Against All Odds, William Heinecke

Asian Management Insights

William Heinecke, the founder and Chairman of Minor International, a Bangkok-based multinational company operating in hospitality, restaurants and lifestyle brands distribution, shares his journey as an American-born Thai businessman and serial entrepreneur.

Family Togetherness, Navneet Bhatnagar

Asian Management Insights

Family-controlled businesses are the dominant form of business organisation across the world, and particularly so in many Asian countries. A major challenge that family businesses face is the lack of togetherness or cohesion among the members of the owner family, especially across generations. This often leads to confusion, differences and confl icts within the family and poses a serious threat to the sustained growth and long-term survival of the business. Lack of family togetherness also puts the founder’s legacy at risk. Breakups and splits in large business families have the potential to create macro-level disturbances, especially given their massive scale …

Research On Extreme Poverty Governance Based On Social Network Analysis, Wenyong Lei

Dissertations and Theses Collection (Open Access)

In this dissertation, the author goes inside some of China's most remote and poorest villages and tries to reveal the determinants, correlates and strategies to address the gap of existing poverty governance system and the complexity and diversity of poor population. He offers in-depth insights into what the poor people think about poverty with two major indicators, identifies evidence on the feasibility of duel-network embedding strategy to reduce poverty, and explains how diverse groups hit by extreme poverty could develop entrepreneurship relationship with diversified market and available social economic resources. Drawing on examples that take place in Xide County, a …

How Does Energy Matter? Rural Electrification, Entrepreneurship, And Community Development In Kenya, Antoine Vernet, Jane N. O. Khayesi, Vivian George, Gerard George, Abubakar S. Bahaj

Research Collection Lee Kong Chian School Of Business

We examine the impact of rural electrification on individuals and businesses within a community in order to test a resource-based theory of entrepreneurship. We show that access to electricity increases average households’ income and entrepreneurial activities. The impact of electricity on entrepreneurial activity has wide-ranging implications for development policy in countries where access to electricity is sparse. Results show a significant difference in entrepreneurial opportunities with respect to firm formation, with the electrified site reporting more new micro-enterprises than the control site after implementation. Electrification affects both households’ income, individuals’ perceptions of their social position, and opportunities for business development. …

Agility In Responding To Disruptive Digital Innovation: Case Study Of An Sme, Calvin M. L. Chan, Say Yen Teoh, Adrian Yeow, Gary Pan

Research Collection School Of Accountancy

Disruptive digital innovation (DDI) often creates hypercompetitive market environment that forces firms to be agile to survive and remain competitive. Whereas most studies have focused on larger firms' effort to be agile, few have looked at how small‐ and medium‐sized enterprises (SMEs) respond to DDI. The study attempts to answer the research question of how SMEs achieve agility to respond to DDI. Drawing on a case study of an innovative SME, our study develops a framework on agility based on the processes of mitigating organizational rigidity, developing innovative capabilities, and balancing the tension of organizational ambidexterity. Specifically, our findings show …

Taking Leaps Of Faith: Evaluation Criteria And Resource Commitments For Early-Stage Inventions, Phillip H. Kim, Reddi Kotha, Sebastian P. L. Fourné, Kristof Coussement

Research Collection Lee Kong Chian School Of Business

Successfully developed academic inventions have the potential to spawn new technological domains, form the basis of thriving business ventures, and improve the well-being of society. However, evaluating whether an early-stage scientific invention truly has such potential is extremely difficult, and financially backing such inventions is highly risky. And yet, organizations and their evaluators still back some of these inventions with resources for further development. We investigate this puzzle to pinpoint how and why evaluators decide to offer resource commitments at early stages, despite the red flags raised using standard evaluation criteria. Many academic inventions need these initial resources to dispel …

Lighting The Spark In The Philippines, Rosemarie Andres

Asian Management Insights

An interview with Rosemarie 'Bubu' Andres

In this edition, we are introducing a new section called ‘The Entrepreneur’s Corner’, in which we will present Asia’s entrepreneurs and their journeys, complete with the ups and downs, and twists and turns.