Entrepreneurship | Institution | Entrepreneurial Career | Field Experiments
WORKING PAPERS/PROJECTS
“The Impact of Accelerator Training on the Career Trajectory of Individual Entrepreneurs”
Prior literature shows that accelerators impact venture performance across several dimensions, such as funding, web traffic, and employee growth. However, since most of the ventures fail and founders eventually enter wage employment or found another venture, it is important to know whether accelerators have an effect on their career outcomes. Primarily based on inter-firm learning and peer learning literatures, I hypothesize that accelerator experience is likely to impact a founder's career path and success. This is due to the intense, timed, and cohort-based consultation from mentors and peers, which exposes participants to diverse functional and industry knowledge and increases their absorptive capacity. The main challenge in exploring the impact of accelerators on founders is to establish causal inference, i.e. to tease out the treatment effect from the sorting and selection effect. I use a regression discontinuity design to compare accepted and almost accepted participants of a prominent business accelerator, Start-Up Chile. The unique dataset contains detailed information about 30,000 applicants of which 3,840 founders had gone through the program. I also collect their entire career history data from LinkedIn and an original survey. I find that accelerated founders are more likely to remain in the entrepreneurship ecosystem either by continuing their accelerator venture or by founding another venture. The impact on other dimensions on career, such as earnings, and career progression is not significant. The results indicate that accelerators significantly impact the entrepreneurial ecosystem by influencing the career path of the participants.
“The Impact of Bureaucracy on Entrepreneurial Opportunity Recognition” (with Chuck Eesley)
Studies show that people working in bureaucratic environments are less likely to enter entrepreneurship. However, bureaucracy is a complex construct having many aspects. Though research shows a negative correlation between bureaucracy and entrepreneurship, we do not know if certain components of bureaucracy, e.g., formalized routines or hierarchies of authorities, specifically inhibit entrepreneurship while others do not. Furthermore, we do not know if bureaucratic environments have an impact on different stages of entrepreneurship. Since the most common outcome variable that we study is firm incorporation, which entails everything – from recognizing the opportunity to hiring employees to formal incorporation, it is difficult to assess whether or how bureaucracy impacts different stages of entrepreneurship. In addressing these research gaps, I set up a randomized field experiment in an entrepreneurship boot-camp in Bangladesh and randomly assigned 390 participants to different environments. In this study, I focus on the two most common but distinct components of bureaucracy – Rules and Hierarchy. Among different stages of entrepreneurship, this research focuses on opportunity recognition and selection because a successful entrepreneur must identify, evaluate and pursue the right opportunities for creating new ventures. I find that the number of opportunities recognized is significantly lower in the Rules condition because entrepreneurs are likely to commit omission errors, i.e. missing out on a good opportunity. However, the quality of the ideas was found to be significantly higher in the Hierarchy condition because hierarchy minimized commission error, i.e. betting on a lower quality idea.
“The Curious Case of Female Entrepreneurs: Entrepreneurial Motivation to be Blamed?” (with Chuck Eesley & Xochitl Watts)
Research shows that the gender of the entrepreneur has an effect on the venture; women are significantly less likely to enter and eventually succeed as entrepreneurs. The glaring disparity between female and male entrepreneurs is particularly visible among high-growth ventures, including high-value acquisitions or IPO ventures. Despite the wide agreement that women are underrepresented in high-growth ventures, our understanding of why this gender-based gap exists is still far from complete. There is a growing body of research studying the effects of women’s motivations to enter into entrepreneurship and its link to their success in the field. Adding to this stream, this study explores the motivation of women entrepreneurs throughout the decades and at different ages. Using data from the Stanford Alumni Survey, I find that women entrepreneurs usually start a venture to address personal problems, customer problems, or to change an industry. Women entrepreneurs are less likely to enter entrepreneurship to pursue a change in technology, financial success, and an IPO or acquisition. I further focus on two theories on the motivations of women entrepreneurs: the effect of the career revolution and the effect of the stages of life/age. Starting in the 1960s, women went through a societal change by receiving professional degrees, entering the workforce at a higher rate, and delaying marriage and children. So, it might be expected that the motivation of women to start an organization is affected by this career revolution. This research finds that the career revolution did not affect the motivations of women entrepreneurs - women entrepreneurs have the same motivation today as women entrepreneurs in the 1940s. However, the motivation for women to start their own venture in order to be their own boss is significantly affected by age, reflecting women’s responsibilities as caretakers of their children, grandchildren, and elderly. The fact that female entrepreneurs, irrespective of their age or generation, do not regard financial success or tech development as important motivational factors for starting a venture, might explain some of the gender-based disparities in entrepreneurial outcomes. This study thus offers a critical account of gender disparities and documents how the gender gap arises at the very seed of the entrepreneurship pipeline – motivation to start a venture.
“Innovative Strategies and Performance: What Makes Institutional Entrepreneurs Distinctive?” (with Chuck Eesley, Sylvain Bureau, and C. Laffineur)
Institutional entrepreneurs are defined as entrepreneurs who enter entrepreneurship with hybrid motivations to create new institutions or transform existing ones to create social (as well as financial) impact. Initial results show that institutional entrepreneurs develop more innovative strategies and that they have a higher level of performance. This study is a systematic comparison of institutional entrepreneurs with conventional entrepreneurs. This research also enables us to address limitations of prior work on institutional entrepreneurs which are more difficult to detect and study in retrospect. This paper again shows how motivation is a key indicator of entrepreneurial outcomes.
“The Effects of Entrepreneurship Training Programs on Corporate Entrepreneurship”
Received Stanford Center on Global Poverty and Development Graduate Student Research Grant
Received Research Grant from Designing Organizational Change (an initiative of the Department of Management Science & Engineering and the Stanford Technology Ventures Program (STVP), in collaboration with the Hasso Plattner Institute of Design at Stanford)
Received Grant from Stanford Thailand Research Consortium
“Entrepreneurial Top Management Team: Research Trends, Gaps, and Future Directions”
Entrepreneurial teams constitute a theoretically unique and challenging setting to study teams. The study of entrepreneurial teams is not only valuable from an academic perspective, but also from a managerial perspective. The main objective of this paper was to organize and review entrepreneurial team literature and integrate the findings across different disciplines, namely management, sociology, economics, and psychology. I integrated and summarized the disparate literature into three relevant streams – team formation, team processes, and firm performance. One overarching theme that came out from the review is that entrepreneurial ventures operate in highly uncertain contexts, and in order to minimize uncertainty, entrepreneurial teams resort to some subjective criteria, rather than objective ones. For example, during team formation entrepreneurs try to minimize uncertainty by choosing team members who are demographically similar to them. Going along, in order to convey legitimacy and reduce uncertainty, entrepreneurial teams resort to mimicking the functional structure and job titles of established firms. However, in pursuit of reducing uncertainty, entrepreneurial teams might engage in discriminatory activities, such as not rewarding team members (especially women and other minorities) based on their objective qualifications.
PUBLICATIONS
“The Impact of the Advertisements on the Social Networking Sites: A Case Study on the Social Networking Users of Bangladesh” UITS Journal, 2012, Volume 1 Issue 2; pp. 68-85
“Factors Influencing the Extent of Brand Loyalty of Toilet Soap Users in Bangladesh: A Case Study on Dhaka City” Global Journal of Management and Business Research, 2012, Volume 12 Issue 15, pp. 38-46 (With Mahmud, K.)
“Possible Causes & Solutions of Traffic Jam and Their Impact on the Economy of Dhaka City”, Journal of Management and Sustainability, 2012, Vol. 2, No. 2, pp. 112-135 (With Mahmud, K. and Chowdhury S.M.R.)
“Challenges of Implementing E-learning for Higher Education in Least Developed Countries: A case study on Bangladesh”, Proceedings of International Conference on Information and Multimedia Technology (ICIMT 2009), South Korea, also published in IEEE Xplore Database, pp. 155-159 (With Mahmud, K.)
“Prospects of Implementing Short Message Service (SMS) based E-government Model in Bangladesh”, Proceedings of International Conference on Computer Technology and Development (ICCTD 2009), Malaysia, also published in IEEE Xplore Database, pp. 153-157 (With Mahmud, K.)
“Introduction of Dynamic Weight Factor for Explicit Vertical Handoff”, Proceedings of International Conference on Computer and Electrical Engineering, 2008 (ICCEE 2008), Thailand, also published in IEEE Xplore Database, pp. 281-285 (With Mahmud, K. and Haq, K.N.)