Innovation

England, Lauren

doi: 10.1080/14479338.2021.2019043pmid: N/A

Early-career crafts graduates often face a perceived dilemma, that of balancing passionate work with their need to make a living. This paper explores the negotiation undertaken by early-career crafts graduates and the entrepreneurial strategies they adopted which variably combine the logics of passion and economics. The paper draws on qualitative interviews with 25 early career crafts graduates in England conducted in 2018. Five strategies -support, streams, synthesis, segment and synergy – are identified, including the different income generation and creative production models they represent. The challenges associated with particular strategies are also considered. The identification of these strategies provides a more nuanced understanding of the organisation and management of craft practices, particularly during the early career period, that goes beyond the acknowledgement of portfolio working as prominent feature of creative work. The paper contributes to the literatures on the organisation of craft work and creative entrepreneurship by identifying ways in which craft practitioners structure and manage their work to sustain and develop their practice. It argues that the positioning of craft micro enterprises as hybrid organisational forms provides an opportunity to redress the binary opposition between passion and work in the creative economy in favour of a more balanced approach. A call for further research on craft production at the micro-enterprise and sole trader level is made to develop new knowledge and recommendations to support the growth and sustainability of the craft sector.

Cavotta, Valeria; Phillips, Nelson

doi: 10.1080/14479338.2022.2026225pmid: N/A

We add to recent calls for more research on corporate corruption and argue that entrepreneurship researchers need to pay more attention to entrepreneurs who engage in entrepreneurial activities that corrode institutions and undermine the rule of law: what we call corrupt entrepreneurship. We conceptualise corrupt entrepreneurs as individuals who simultaneously act as traditional entrepreneurs seeking out and exploiting opportunities to profit from institutional voids; as institutional entrepreneurs involved in the creation and maintenance of the institutional voids that they profit from; and as cultural entrepreneurs that draw on various cultural resources to legitimate themselves in the communities in which they operate in order to maintain community support for their activities. As an example, we discuss the Sicilian Mafia and briefly describe how the existence of an institutional void played a central role in the formation of the Sicilian Mafia, how it continues to profit from institutional voids, what it does to maintain the voids it profits from, and how it legitimises itself in the local community by helping members of the community mitigate problems caused by the institutional voids that they are complicit in creating and maintaining in the first place. Building on this discussion, we highlight important future directions for research on corrupt entrepreneurship.

Pierrakis, Yannis; Owen, Robyn

doi: 10.1080/14479338.2022.2029706pmid: N/A

We investigate the role of entrepreneurs’ human capital on the potential of newly created ventures to receive equity funding from Accelerators and Business Angels using a resource-based approach to entrepreneurship theory. Using data from 10,563 for-profit innovative ventures, we find significant differences between those two groups. More specifically, formal education and founding experience of the entrepreneurial team is positively associated with the likelihood of the team to receive equity from Angels but negatively associated with the likelihood of the team to receive equity from Accelerators. Overall, our results are in line with the theoretical argument that human capital signals are important in reducing the information asymmetries faced by angels and ultimately driving entrepreneurs’ success in securing angel funding, but our results also suggest that some aspects of human capital signals do not contribute to the entrepreneur’s success in receiving accelerator funding. Our findings have important repercussions for the quality of design and operation of both private and state supported programmes and accelerator managers.

Chouchane, Rahma; St-Jean, Étienne

doi: 10.1080/14479338.2022.2029708pmid: N/A

Psychological health at work is important for creating new projects and renewing the company’s strategy, both of which help maintain organisational performance. This study, based on organisational support theory (OST), investigates the moderating role of job anxiety among employees in the indirect link between perceived organisational support (POS) and their intrapreneurial behaviour through intrapreneurial intention. The data were collected from a sample of 199 employees of four service sector SMEs in the province of Québec (Canada). The regression analysis results provide a positive link between POS and intrapreneurial behaviours and that these behaviours are planned and based on an intention that is favourable to such behaviour. Furthermore, we have observed that anxious employees are less inclined to develop intrapreneurial intention, and job anxiety negatively moderates the positive effect of POS on intrapreneurial intention and intrapreneurial behaviour. These findings suggest that business executives and managers must consider job anxiety as a psychosocial risk in the dynamics of intrapreneurship and must therefore act effectively towards highly anxious employees by implementing their own well‐being‐oriented human resource management practices. This paper reveals that in the context of SMEs, employees that perceive support from the organisation do not engage in intrapreneurial behaviours when they are highly anxious.