David L. Deeds

Silicon Valley explains its success through a familiar story: exceptional founders see what others miss, exceptional investors recognize them, and markets reward both. That story starts too late and infers too much from the winners. Evidence on invention, education, social mobility, and entrepreneurial entry shows that access to the innovation economy is conditioned by family resources, childhood geography, exposure, elite education, and social networks. Once inside, participants do not receive comparable chances. Some receive repeated, well-financed trials while others receive none. Silicon Valley's real advantage is its ability to finance many experiments, absorb failure, recycle people and knowledge, and give selected participants another attempt. In a field with highly skewed outcomes, that system will produce spectacularwinners even when identifying them beforehand remains difficult. Early success then improves access to capital, employees, customers, and later opportunities. This cumulative advantage can produce genuine performance persistence without establishing that the initial result came from exceptional foresight or ability. Entrepreneurship research needs to look beyond funded ventures and examine how trials are allocated, including who never becomes visible and how an early result changes the chance of receiving another serious opportunity.

The aim of this chapter is to provide guidance to doctoral students and young researchers on how to undertake empirical research on entrepreneurial firms, how to design an empirical research project that has the potential to provide significant insights into firm-level entrepreneurial phenomena, and how to build a successful career by pursuing empirical research in entrepreneurship.

Does creativity change in the absence of markets? Does forming entrepreneurial opportunities necessitate the existence of markets? What is the role of creativity in recognizing, discovering, and/or...

As healthcare costs are rising globally and biologic treatments are a growing segment of the cost, governments have created biosimilar regulatory pathways in attempt to lower the costs of biologics. Since biosimilars are still relatively nascent, the impact of the biosimilars from a practical and academic viewpoint is emerging. This research begins to fill a current gap in the literature, quantitatively evaluating the drivers that firms face regarding entering into the biosimilars market. Further, this research contributes to the practical and academic understanding of process innovation by presenting the biosimilar phenomenon and the competitive dynamics of biosimilar market entry.

A premise of the capabilities perspective in strategy is that firm-specific capabilities allow some firms to be unusually adept at exploiting growth opportunities. Since few firms have the capacity to internally generate the quantity or variety of strategic resources needed to exploit growth opportunities, the ability to externally acquire complementary resources is critical to the acquisition of competitive advantage. However, the external sourcing of resources exposes the firm’s strategic resources to risks of expropriation. We argue this threat gives capable firms incentive to use internally generated strategic resources to pursue growth opportunities before turning to external sources. A pecking order theory of strategic resource deployment is implied. Data from a 22-year sample of cross-border investment partnership decisions made by U.S.-based venture capital firms provide strong support for our theory.

How does previous entrepreneurial failure influence future entrepreneurship? More specifically, under what conditions do entrepreneurs who rebound from failure do better in the next round? Drawing on the cognitive literature in attribution and motivation, we focus on entrepreneurs’ reaction to failure and the growth of their subsequent ventures. Leveraging a survey database of new–venture founders with failure experiences, we investigate how their internal attribution of the cause of failure, their intrinsic motivation to start up another business after failure, and the extent of their failure experiences impact the growth of their subsequent ventures.