Essays on entrepreneurial strategy and performance

Abstract

This dissertation examines the conditions under which entrepreneurial firms are most apt to succeed. Besides grappling with the multiple strategic choices that they face, these firms also have to address the institutional complexities in their environments. Together these three essays contribute to our understanding of how the challenges associated with addressing these multifaceted environmental conditions impact firm outcomes. The first study examines the process of entrepreneurial strategy making by analyzing the competitive history of the Internet video industry in China. Leveraging a new hand-collected dataset that records activity by all entrants into the Chinese Internet video industry from 2006-2011, this study documents how entrants who adapted to a disadvantageous shift in the environment outperform those firms that chose a strategy that did not require change; and how strategic commitments to user communities can serve as a complementary asset to enhance the resilience of a start-up against disadvantageous shifts in their environment. The second essay considers how the endogenous nature of appropriability impacts entrepreneurial strategy and performance. This study focuses on the entrepreneur's choice between investing their time and scarce resources in ensuring appropriability versus investing in the execution and operation of their fledgling businesses. We investigate these ideas empirically in the context of a unique sample of academic entrepreneurs: within a sample of ventures that could have been developed by either faculty or students (or both), we find that faculty-led ventures are much more closely associated with intellectual property, but are less agile in terms of their start-up and commercialization activities. The third essay examines the impact of local institutional arrangements on firm-level spillover effects from universities. This study provides early evidence suggesting that foreign invested firms collocated with universities in China are more innovative than their domestic counterparts. Furthermore, the performance discrepancy is most apparent among smaller firms. This finding raises some substantial policy implications about public investments in universities when the benefits of such investments are juxtaposed against localized institutional arrangements.