The aim of the research is to investigate the factors influencing entrepreneurial behavior of individuals within a corporation. We define entrepreneurial behavior as “discovery, evaluation and exploitation of opportunities in order to create future goods and services”. Corporate entrepreneurial behavior, in its turn, is subject to a number of constraints and opportunities imposed by the organiz...

The present study centers on innovativeness and risk-taking. These two personality traits are among the most distinctive entrepreneurial characteristics. They provide a good starting point for a comparison of entrepreneurial behaviour between Finnish and U.S. entrepreneurs and small business owners. The Carland Entrepreneurship Index (CEI) was employed to measure the varying degrees of innovati...

Entrepreneurship is widely recognized as a key factor in economic growth [Leibenstein, 1968]. Historical studies of commercialization a d industrialization suggest that the speed of "take off' is higher when entrepreneurs in related lines of activity work well together [Grassby, 1995]. In the aggregate, ntrepreneurs may work better as a cooperative network than as a collection of competitive in...

Can German national institutional frameworks be reconfigured to allow radical innovation in science-based industries? This paper examines the development of commercial technologies for entrepreneurial biotechnology start-up firms in Germany. During the 1980s and early 1990s an inadequate institutional infrastructure stifled virtually all attempts to organize entrepreneurial biotech start-up fir...

This paper tests agency theory using unique entrepreneurial effort and financing choices data. Focusing on entrepreneurs as a special type of agent, the paper develops a modified principal-agent model within a private firm setting. In line with the typical agency theory prediction, this model suggests that the severity of entrepreneur moral hazard relates to the firm’s capital structure. Specia...

We develop theory to better understand the role of networks in accessing the entrepreneurial competencies required to create new ventures within the academic environment. We follow the initiation and early development of four university spin-offs within the UK and Norway. Following a competency perspective, we observed how each nascent venture relied on strong and weak network ties to access th...