Madhavan Parthasarathy

Purpose. The literature has long recognized the importance of the conscientious entrepreneurial personality. This study explores how seven of its facets/sub-dimensions (Achievement-Striving, Efficiency, Responsibility, Industriousness, Self-Control, Conventionality, and Persistence) relate to three performance outcomes (Ventures Started, Years at Current Venture, and Annual Sales.)Design/methodology/approach. 166 active entrepreneurs were surveyed via an entrepreneurship center at a Western US university. Data was then modeled via Ordinary Least Squares to obtain regression estimates for the dependent variables.Findings. Counter to expectations, results indicate that facet measures relate very differently in terms of magnitude, direction, and significance to the performance outcomes. These more nuanced relations are lost when using broad/aggregate dimensional measures.Research implications. Broad personality measures, as conventionally used, are suboptimal for entrepreneurial research as they potentially yield misleading results. Studies should instead apply the more-specific facet measures, which offer more accurate personality assessments. Practical implications. Practitioners should also use the more-specific facet measures. Doing so will be of value across a variety of public, private, and educational settings.Originality/Value. For decades, entrepreneurship has addressed the effects of broad/aggregate personality dimensions. This article is the first to approach the entrepreneurial personality from a more-specific facet level, an approach offering substantial research opportunities.

Background: Lockdowns and shelter-in-place orders during COVID-19 have accelerated the adoption of remote and virtual care (RVC) models, potentially including telehealth, telemedicine, and internet-based electronic physician visits (e-visits) for remote consultation, diagnosis, and care, deterring small health care businesses including clinics, physician offices, and pharmacies from aligning resources and operations to new RVC realities. Current perceptions of small health care businesses toward remote care, particularly perceptions of whether RVC adoption will synergistically improve business sustainability, would highlight the pros and cons of rapidly adopting RVC technology among policy makers. Objective: This study aimed to assess the perceptions of small health care businesses regarding the impact of RVC on their business sustainability during COVID-19, gauge their perceptions of their current levels of adoption of and satisfaction with RVC models and analyze how well that aligns with their perceptions of the current business scenario (SCBS), and determine whether these perceptions influence their view of their midterm sustainability (SUST). Methods: We randomly sampled small clinics, physician offices, and pharmacies across Colorado and sought assistance from a consulting firm to collect survey data in July 2020. Focal estimated study effects were compared across the three groups of small businesses to draw several insights. Results: In total, 270 respondents, including 82 clinics, 99 small physician offices, and 89 pharmacies, across Colorado were included. SRVC and SCBS had direct, significant, and positive effects on SUST. However, we investigated the effect of the interaction between SRVC and SCBS to determine whether RVC adoption aligns with their perceptions of the current business scenario and whether this interaction impacts their perception of business sustainability. Effects differed among the three groups. The interaction term SRVC×SCBS was significant and positive for clinics (P=.02), significant and negative for physician offices (P=.05), and not significant for pharmacies (P=.76). These variations indicate that while clinics positively perceived RVC alignment with the current business scenario, the opposite held true for small physician offices. Conclusions: As COVID-19 continues to spread worldwide and RVC adoption progresses rapidly, it is critical to understand the impact of RVC on small health care businesses and their perceptions of long-term survival. Small physician practices cannot harness RVC developments and, in contrast with clinics, consider it incompatible with business survival during and after COVID-19. If small health care firms cannot compete with RVC (or synergistically integrate RVC platforms into their current business practices) and eventually become nonoperational, the resulting damage to traditional health care services may be severe, particularly for critical care delivery and other important services that RVC cannot effectively replace. Our results have implications for public policy decisions such as incentive-aligned models, policy-initiated incentives, and payer-based strategies for improved alignment between RVC and existing models.

BACKGROUND Lockdowns and shelter-in-place orders during COVID-19 have accelerated the adoption of remote and virtual care (RVC) models, potentially including telehealth, telemedicine, and internet-based electronic physician visits (e-visits) for remote consultation, diagnosis, and care, deterring small health care businesses including clinics, physician offices, and pharmacies from aligning resources and operations to new RVC realities. Current perceptions of small health care businesses toward remote care, particularly perceptions of whether RVC adoption will synergistically improve business sustainability, would highlight the pros and cons of rapidly adopting RVC technology among policy makers. OBJECTIVE This study aimed to assess the perceptions of small health care businesses regarding the impact of RVC on their business sustainability during COVID-19, gauge their perceptions of their current levels of adoption of and satisfaction with RVC models and analyze how well that aligns with their perceptions of the current business scenario (SCBS), and determine whether these perceptions influence their view of their midterm sustainability (SUST). METHODS We randomly sampled small clinics, physician offices, and pharmacies across Colorado and sought assistance from a consulting firm to collect survey data in July 2020. Focal estimated study effects were compared across the three groups of small businesses to draw several insights. RESULTS In total, 270 respondents, including 82 clinics, 99 small physician offices, and 89 pharmacies, across Colorado were included. SRVC and SCBS had direct, significant, and positive effects on SUST. However, we investigated the effect of the interaction between SRVC and SCBS to determine whether RVC adoption aligns with their perceptions of the current business scenario and whether this interaction impacts their perception of business sustainability. Effects differed among the three groups. The interaction term SRVC×SCBS was significant and positive for clinics (P=.02), significant and negative for physician offices (P=.05), and not significant for pharmacies (P=.76). These variations indicate that while clinics positively perceived RVC alignment with the current business scenario, the opposite held true for small physician offices. CONCLUSIONS As COVID-19 continues to spread worldwide and RVC adoption progresses rapidly, it is critical to understand the impact of RVC on small health care businesses and their perceptions of long-term survival. Small physician practices cannot harness RVC developments and, in contrast with clinics, consider it incompatible with business survival during and after COVID-19. If small health care firms cannot compete with RVC (or synergistically integrate RVC platforms into their current business practices) and eventually become nonoperational, the resulting damage to traditional health care services may be severe, particularly for critical care delivery and other important services that RVC cannot effectively replace. Our results have implications for public policy decisions such as incentive-aligned models, policy-initiated incentives, and payer-based strategies for improved alignment between RVC and existing models.

Has the Internet impacted the core values of consumers, particularly in developing nations? Unlike one-way mass media vehicles such as television, the internet's two-way, interactive nature allows individuals to communicate in a high-involvement, border-free world via social media, blogs, online forums, and the like. This will result in the trading of values and ideas, and especially in the erosion of traditional value systems in developing nations. This chapter highlights the changes in values in India between 2004 and 2014, with a marked increase in Western individualistic values such as power and achievement, eroding traditional collective values such as universalism among Indian youth during this period. Since consumers buy products that reflect their values, these findings have profound implications for business management and marketing. Further, the general notion that the core values of a society are slow to change is refuted.

Extends the diffusion of innovations paradigm to today’s pluralistic marketplace by introducing the concept of multiple diffusion, whereby an innovation diffuses in multiple sub‐social systems, each with a distinct pattern of adoption, that together comprise the aggregate diffusion pattern for a given society. Identifies variables that affect the multiple diffusion process, presents propositions related to them, and discusses implications of this framework for marketing researchers and practitioners.