Entrepreneurship Theories

Most entrepreneurs work for organizations before or while they start their businesses. There is macho entrepreneurship dogma that says you have to go all in, experience "the fear" and dedicate yourself for 80 hours a week to your venture. Implicit in this is the notion that an entrepreneur cannot succeed if they hedge their bets by keeping one foot in employment. But isn't this a bad assumption? Why go all in to a startup if startup success stories are probabilistic events, not givens?    Hybrid entrepreneurship refers to entrepreneurship whereby an employee starts a business on the side and keeps their stable and sustaining day job until the startup reaches a certain size. Ardianti et al. (2022) suggests that hybrid entrepreneurs experience a distinct psychological well-being than other entrepreneurs, perhaps because they are keeping their foot in the door of stability. Once the business is large enough to command the founder's full attention, then the emp...

What is the Lean Launchpad? The Lean Launchpad was developed by Steve Blank (serial entrepreneurs and adjunct professor at Stanford) and colleagues as a repeatable process to create a startup. It is probably the most popular methodology today, featuring in a great number of entrepreneurship programs for students and mature students. It is also the method used at Y-Combinator and other top incubator programs. Despite its popularity, there is little empirical research examining the method. Assumptions behind the Lean Launchpad The theory behind the Lean Launchpad can be described as a discovery theory. The entrepreneurship literature is divided about the nature of entrepreneurial opportunities. At one end of the spectrum is the creationist school that views entrepreneurship as a process of opportunity creation led by teams and individuals (McMullen and Dimov, 2013). At the opposite end of the spectrum, the discovery school defends an objective view of entrepreneurship where opportu...