VU Center for Entrepreneurship research

Entrepreneurship research areas

• Entrepreneurial Ecosystems

  An entrepreneurial ecosystem is ‘the whole set of players and connections that are relevant for the development of entrepreneurship in a certain area’. Also known as the innovation ecosystem and the start-up ecosystem.

  In this paper, a new typology of business incubators is developed. The paper also pays attention to the prominent role of sustainability with business incubators nowadays.

  Ballering, T., & Masurel, E. (2020). Business Incubators and their Engagement in Sustainable Development Activities: Empirical Evidence from Europe. International Review of Entrepreneurship, 18(2), 203-220.

• Entrepreneurial Competences

  Entrepreneurial competences are the combined and integrated components of knowledge, skills, and attitudes relevant to effectively engaging in entrepreneurial behavior. Read more. 

  This book chapter offers an overview and integration of theory and research pertaining to the entrepreneurial competencies of independent and corporate entrepreneurs.

  Van Gelderen, M.W. (2020). Entrepreneurs’ Competencies. In: M. Gielnik, M. Frese, & M. Cardon (Eds.), Psychology of Entrepreneurship, pp 210-227. Milton Park: Routledge.

  This article describes an entrepreneurship training in which participants, over a seven-week period, learn about deliberate practice and use this approach to develop an aspect of an entrepreneurial competency of their choosing.

  Van Gelderen, M.W. (forthcoming). Developing entrepreneurial competencies through deliberate practice. Education + Training (early cite). 

• The Life Cycle of the Small Firm

  The Life Cycle of the Small Firm is the series of stages through which the firm passes between conception and decline. Most often these stages are start-up, scale-up, maturity and decline.

  This book chapter focuses on transformative entrepreneurship during the life cycle of the small firm: how the roles exercised by the entrepreneur transform as the firm develops, or should transform in order to avoid tension within the firm.

  Masurel, E. (2021). Transformative entrepreneurship. In B. Tjemkes and O. Mihalache (Eds.), Transformative strategies (chapter 3). Routledge.

  Entrepreneurial dilemmas play an important, though heavily underexposed, role in the life cycle of the small firm. This book defines the entrepreneurial dilemma as a situation where entrepreneurs have to choose between multiple future courses of action concerning their firm, without sufficient information to make that choice.

  Masurel, E. (2019). The entrepreneurial dilemma in the life cycle of the small firm: How the firm and the entrepreneur change during the life cycle of the firm, or how they should change. Emerald.

• Corporate Entrepreneurship

  Corporate Entrepreneurship refers to entrepreneurial behavior within an existing, most often large, organisation. Previously more or less known as intrapreneurship.

  This paper is about differences in risk-taking and innovative behavior by established companies, and how this differs between the semi-conductor industry and industrial machinery. We argue and show how semi-conductor firms increase their risky innovation activities in response to positive company performance, but reduce it when confronted with disappointing performance. Industrial machinery firms do the opposite, as they increase risky innovation activities in response to low performance, yet decrease this with satisfactory performance. A key reason for these different responses is that these different firms hold different cognitions on their innovation skills and the risks they see with innovation. Whereas semi-conductor firms see themselves as generally skilled at innovation and the risks as manageable, industrial machinery see themselves as more unskilled and the risks as uncontrollable.

  Walrave, B., & Gisling, V. (2023). Game of skill or game of luck? Distant search in response to performance feedback, Technovation, 121.

• Inclusive Entrepreneurship

  Inclusive entrepreneurship aims to ensure that all people, regardless of their personal characteristics and background, have an opportunity to start and run their own businesses.

  This is the story of Ruben Brave, a Dutch citizen from Amsterdam, with a Surinamese background, and a black skin. Ruben is a successful tech entrepreneur, and more recently is also playing a key role in the start-up scene and in denouncing racial discrimination. He has experienced many situations of racial discrimination himself, as a person in general but also specifically as an entrepreneur. The ambition of this case in entrepreneurship is to contribute to the understanding by students in higher education of what racial discrimination of entrepreneurs entails.

  Masurel, E., Akhbulatova, M. and Merriënboer. M. van (2022). You are more than the color of your skin: The story of Ruben Brave - successful tech entrepreneur and iconic fighter of racial discrimination, Amsterdam Entrepreneurship Cases, IXA.

• Entrepreneurship in Emerging Economies

  Though the academic literature is predominantly western-based, entrepreneurship is a global issue. In this section, attention is paid to entrepreneurs and entrepreneurial ventures outside the western world.

  • This book chapter sheds light on the question to what extent do different business financing options affect micro-enterprises’ performance in an emerging economy. It appears that a positive relationship exists between personal financing, on the one hand, and sales growth (firm growth item) and increased spending on housing (development of personal wealth item), on the other, compared with internal and external financing.

  Adhiambo, R.A., Eijdenberg E.L., Masurel, E., & Obange, N. (2022). Business-financing options’ effects on micro-enterprise performance in the tropics: The case of Kisumu County, Kenya. In Wood, J. (Ed.). Business, industry and trade in the tropics (pp. 1 – 19). Routledge.

  • A central theme in the literature on entrepreneurship in remote communities – be they religious, indigenous, rural or migrant communities – is the balance between continuity and change or tradition and modernity and the role of entrepreneurship in maintaining or uprooting this balance. The purpose of this paper is to examine this dynamic in the context of Springfield, a small settlement of Old Order Mennonites in Belize, Central America. Drawing on ethnographic research conducted in Springfield between 2002 and 2019, this paper identifies three issues of contention between the Springfield Mennonites and the Belizean state: the agricultural census issue, the buying land issue and the cow tagging issue. Each of these revolves around state demands for assimilation into (digitalized) administrative systems and Mennonite resistance to these demands based on their religious-moral code. This study describes the negotiations around these issues.

  Roessingh, C. & Verver, M. (2021). When simplicity becomes complexity: Negotiations between a Mennonite enterprising community and the government of Belize. Journal of Enterprising Communities: People and Places in the Global Economy,  16(2), 320-340. 

  • Literature on immigrant and ethnic minority entrepreneurship almost exclusively focusses on the west, while neglecting other world regions. This neglect is problematic not only because international migration is on the rise outside the west, but also because it reveals an implicit ethnocentrism and creates particular presumptions about the nature of ethnic minority entrepreneurship that may not be as universally valid as is often presumed. The purpose of this paper is to examine ethnic minority entrepreneurship in non-western contexts to critically assess two of these presumptions, namely that it occurs in the economic margins and within clear ethnic community boundaries. The authors draw on academic literature (including the authors’ own) to develop two case descriptions of ethnic minority entrepreneurship outside the west: the Mennonites in Belize and the Chinese in Cambodia. The two cases reveal that, in contrast to characterizations of ethnic minority entrepreneurship in the west, the Mennonites in Belize and the Chinese in Cambodia have come to comprise the economic upper class, and their business activities are not confined to ethnic community boundaries.

  Verver, M., Passenier, D., & Roessingh, C. (2019). Contextualizing ethnic minority entrepreneurship beyond the west: Insights from Belize and Cambodia. International Journal of Entrepreneurial Behavior & Research, 25(5), 955-973. 

• Social Entrepreneurship

  Sustainable entrepreneurship often requires a purposeful change to the existing business environment, market regulations, and societal norms and values (institutions) to ensure sustainable products and services become legitimate and competitive. Yet, how sustainable entrepreneurs alter or create institutions remains unclear. We employ a two-year comparative case study with four entrepreneurs commercializing torrefied biomass in the Netherlands. 

  Consistent with insights from institutional entrepreneurship research, findings show that sustainable entrepreneurs create new symbols, theorize, construct new measures, build consensus, and forge new relations to alter or create new institutions. Moreover, we find that entrepreneurial collaboration, in the form of a trade association, has three feedback effects: it creates accessible modes; diversity of scope; and an increased scale of institutional change strategies. We conclude that future studies should further connect sustainable and institutional entrepreneurship research, and take group and individual factors into account when explaining how sustainable entrepreneurs engage in institutional change.

  Thompson, N. A., Herrmann, A. M., & Hekkert, M. P. (2015). How sustainable entrepreneurs engage in institutional change: Insights from biomass torrefaction in the Netherlands. Journal of Cleaner Production, 106, 608–618. 

• Practices of Entrepreneurship

  The Entrepreneurship as Practice research community aims to further advance entrepreneurship studies by studying the practices of entrepreneurship.

  This Research Handbook advances entrepreneurship theory in new ways by integrating and contributing to contemporary theories of practice. Leading theorists and entrepreneurship experts, who are part of the growing Entrepreneurship as Practice (EaP) research community, expertly propose methodologies, theories and empirical insights into the constitution and consequences of entrepreneuring practices.
  
  Thompson, N. A., Byrne, O., Jenkins, A., & Teague, B. (Eds.). (2022). Research Handbook on Entrepreneurship as Practice. Edward Elgar Publishing.

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