Entrepreneurship

Entrepreneurship is a featured research topic and an initiative at Harvard Business School
 
Our long tradition of research in Entrepreneurship goes back to the 1930's and 1940's with the “the father of venture capitalism,” General Georges Doriot, and Joseph Schumpeter’s theory of innovation as a process of “creative destruction.” Building on our intellectual roots, our scholars come from disciplines including economics, finance, sociology, strategy, business history, management, and social entrepreneurship. A number of our faculty come from practice as venture capitalists and start-up founders. We focus our research on the identification and pursuit of entrepreneurial opportunities; domestic and international funding of entrepreneurial endeavors; innovation, particularly technological innovation in international ventures; the environments in which entrepreneurs make decisions; and social entrepreneurship. As our research contributes new insights, we are advancing the world’s understanding of complex entrepreneurial issues and helping to increase the entrepreneurial success of our students and practitioners worldwide. 

Featured Works

 

  1. Working Paper | 2019

    Keeping the Little Guy Down: A Debt Trap for Lending with Limited Pledgeability

    Ernest Liu and Benjamin N. Roth

    Microcredit and other forms of small-scale finance have failed to catalyze entrepreneurship in developing countries. In these credit markets, borrowers and lenders often bargain over not only the division of surplus but also contractual flexibility. We show these lending relationships may lead to endogenous poverty traps for poor borrowers if future income is not pledgeable, yet richer borrowers unambiguously benefit. Improving the bargaining position of rich borrowers can harm poor borrowers, as the lender tightens restrictions and prevents them from growing. The theory rationalizes the low average impact and low demand of microfinance despite its high impact on larger businesses.

    Keywords: Entrepreneurship; Developing Countries and Economies; Microfinance; Problems and Challenges;

    Citation:

    Liu, Ernest, and Benjamin N. Roth. "Keeping the Little Guy Down: A Debt Trap for Lending with Limited Pledgeability." Working Paper, March 2019.  View Details
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  3. Working Paper | HBS Working Paper Series | 2019

    Networking Frictions in Venture Capital, and the Gender Gap in Entrepreneurship

    Sabrina T. Howell and Ramana Nanda

    Exploiting random assignment of judges to panels at Harvard Business School’s New Venture Competition (NVC) between 2000 and 2015, we find that exposure to more venture capitalist (VC) judges increases male participants’ chances of starting a VC-backed startup after HBS much more than this exposure increases female participants’ chances. A survey suggests this is in part because male participants more often proactively reach out to VC judges after the NVC. Our results suggest that networking frictions are an important reason men benefit more than women from exposure to VCs. Such frictions can help explain part of the gender gap in entrepreneurship and also have implications for how to design networking opportunities to facilitate financing of the best (rather than just the best networked) ideas.

    Keywords: Networking; frictions; Entrepreneurship; Gender; Venture Capital;

    Citation:

    Howell, Sabrina T., and Ramana Nanda. "Networking Frictions in Venture Capital, and the Gender Gap in Entrepreneurship." Harvard Business School Working Paper, No. 19-105, April 2019.  View Details
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  4. Case | HBS Case Collection | April 2019 (Revised April 2019)

    Wayfair

    Jeffrey F. Rayport, Susie Ma and Matthew Preble

    In 2016 Niraj Shah and Steve Conine, founders of online home goods retailer Wayfair, are faced with a decision about how to improve user experience on their e-commerce sites. A key driver of consumer interest and conversion to purchase in the home category is visual imagery, which has traditionally been generated not by the retail channel rather than by manufacturers. Catalog retailers, in particular, are famous for visually romancing the category. As a comprehensive offering, Wayfair hosts over seven million SKUs on its site, so it must solve for the lack of visual assets from manufacturers by generating visual assets of its own. Initially, the company embarks on a plan to produce these images using traditional photography studios and professional staffs, but costs mount and throughput is too slow. Seeking a solution, Shah and Conine assess the likelihood of using technology – specifically, high-resolution 3D modeling from low-resolution 2D images – to address the challenge. Resolving this issue is especially pressing, given that Wayfair has just launched private label lines and a host of what it calls lifestyle brands, which require support from high-end visual merchandising. As a consequence, the question of how to provision visual assets becomes a question of how fast Wayfair can grow. This case presents the factors involved in deciding what direction to take – a reliable path using traditional methods or a risky path using bleeding-edge technologies.

    Keywords: visual assets; Corporate Entrepreneurship; Decision Making; Business or Company Management; Growth Management; Innovation and Invention; Operations; Strategy; Technology; Retail Industry; Service Industry; United States; Massachusetts;

    Citation:

    Rayport, Jeffrey F., Susie Ma, and Matthew Preble. "Wayfair." Harvard Business School Case 819-045, April 2019. (Revised April 2019.)  View Details
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  5. Case | HBS Case Collection | March 2019

    MoviePass: The 'Get Big Fast' Strategy

    Benjamin C. Esty and Daniel Fisher

    In August 2017, MoviePass dramatically lowered its subscription price from $50 per month to just $10 for up to one movie per day. The idea was to rapidly scale the business to the point where they could generate incremental revenue streams from related businesses (e.g., a share of ticket and concession revenues from theaters, advertising revenue from movie studios; and revenue from ride-sharing companies). Within two days, Moviepass had gotten 150k new subscribers; within six months, they had more than 2 million. But as of February 2018, the company faced three challenges: theaters were resisting the concept, investors were shorting the stock in record numbers, and competitors were beginning to appear. Could CEO Lowe convince investors that they did, indeed, have a viable business model and could monetize their growing subscriber base? At the same time, Lowe had to decide whether to raise subscription prices to cover the growing losses or keep prices low to attract subscribers as quickly as possible.

    Keywords: Market entry; growth strategy; profit vs. growth; subscription business; cash burn; Data Analytics; get-big-fast; buyer power; strategy implementation; movie industry; Racing; Entrepreneurship; Market Entry and Exit; Growth and Development Strategy; Business Strategy; Value Creation; Disruption; Motion Pictures and Video Industry; United States;

    Citation:

    Esty, Benjamin C., and Daniel Fisher. "MoviePass: The 'Get Big Fast' Strategy." Harvard Business School Case 719-455, March 2019.  View Details
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  6. Case | HBS Case Collection | March 2019

    The DivaCup: Navigating Distribution and Growth

    Ayelet Israeli

    When the mother-daughter founders of DivaCup set out with a mission to disrupt the menstrual care industry with an innovative product form, they initially struggled to gain legitimacy and convince retailers to carry their unique product. Fifteen years later, the product was available online and in more than 35,000 retail stores worldwide, and the company was struggling with omnichannel distribution challenges and frequent violations of their pricing policy due to intense competition among channel partners. International distribution and the prevalence of gray market sellers were causing large price dispersions across markets, which was harming the brand further. In October 2018, the entry of a formidable competitor, P&G (owner of menstrual care brands Tampax and Always), into the niche product segment causes the CEO and her team to consider the best plan to reposition and differentiate its product to broaden its appeal to users of other product forms, while maintaining its market leadership in the menstrual cup segment. This challenge is made more difficult due to prevalent miseducation about menstrual care and menstrual cups in particular.

    Keywords: female; female ceo; Female Entrepreneur; female protagonist; health ＆ wellness; healthcare; price policies; minimum advertised price; differentiation; positioning; Growth; Health; Health Care and Treatment; Price; Disruption; Distribution; Distribution Channels; Competitive Strategy; Competition; Growth Management; Mission and Purpose; Product Development; Product Marketing; Product Launch; Product Positioning; Advertising; Business Startups; Internet; Entrepreneurship; Social Entrepreneurship; Social Issues; Social Enterprise; Retail Industry; Medical Devices and Supplies Industry; Manufacturing Industry; Health Industry; Green Technology Industry; Education Industry; Distribution Industry; Consumer Products Industry; Canada; United States; United Kingdom;

    Citation:

    Israeli, Ayelet. "The DivaCup: Navigating Distribution and Growth." Harvard Business School Case 519-055, March 2019.  View Details
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  7. Case | HBS Case Collection | March 2019

    Choosing the Right Esports Business Model

    David Collis and Alexander MacKay

    Two esports entrepreneurs must choose on which business model to focus their time and money. After successfully launching an online esports coaching platform, a number of new opportunities emerge in the rapidly growing esports space which now has close to 1 billion gamers and an online audience that is greater than the Superbowl. Should they focus on a B2C business, a B2B business? Develop an analytics capability to support "sabremetrics" for esports or a content creation capability? How can they best exploit ownership of the world's top team in the "Hearthstone" league. The choice will depend on the future industry structure and how the two can most effectively "follow the money".

    Keywords: entrepreneurial ecosystems; business development; Business Ventures; Entrepreneurship; Business Model; Management; Strategy; Sports; Entertainment and Recreation Industry; Information Technology Industry; Media and Broadcasting Industry; Sports Industry; Video Game Industry; North and Central America; Europe; Asia;

    Citation:

    Collis, David, and Alexander MacKay. "Choosing the Right Esports Business Model." Harvard Business School Case 719-459, March 2019.  View Details
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  9. Article | Strategic Management Journal | March 2019

    When Does Advice Impact Startup Performance?

    Aaron Chatterji, Solène Delecourt, Sharique Hasan and Rembrand Koning

    Why do some entrepreneurs thrive while others fail? We explore whether the advice entrepreneurs receive about managing their employees influences their startup's performance. We conducted a randomized field experiment in India with 100 high-growth technology firms whose founders received in-person advice from other entrepreneurs who varied in their managerial style. We find that entrepreneurs who received advice from peers with a formal approach to managing people—instituting regular meetings, setting goals consistently, and providing frequent feedback to employees—grew 28% larger and were 10 percentage points less likely to fail than those who got advice from peers with an informal approach to managing people, two years after our intervention. Entrepreneurs with MBAs or accelerator experience did not respond to this intervention, suggesting that formal training can limit the spread of peer advice.

    Keywords: entrepreneurial management; field experiment; peer effects; entrepreneurial ecosystems; advice; Management Style; Management Practices and Processes; Knowledge Dissemination; Entrepreneurship; Performance; India;

    Citation:

    Chatterji, Aaron, Solène Delecourt, Sharique Hasan, and Rembrand Koning. "When Does Advice Impact Startup Performance?" Strategic Management Journal 40, no. 3 (March 2019): 331–356.  View Details
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  10. Case | HBS Case Collection | February 2019 (Revised May 2019)

    Hot Chicken Takeover

    William R. Kerr, Manjari Raman and Olivia Hull

    By December 2018, entrepreneur Joe DeLoss’s fried chicken company, Hot Chicken Takeover, has opened three restaurants in Columbus, Ohio, using an unconventional employment model that helps people with criminal records get back on their feet. DeLoss is proud of the supportive employment environment he has cultivated but wonders how to scale it beyond Columbus.

    Keywords: Fair chance employment; fair chance hiring; open hiring; inclusive hiring; criminal record; homelessness; therapeutic employment; corporate culture; Managing the Future of Work; Food; Entrepreneurship; Social Entrepreneurship; Values and Beliefs; Fairness; Human Resources; Compensation and Benefits; Recruitment; Employees; Retention; Selection and Staffing; Innovation Strategy; Job Offer; Job Interviews; Human Capital; Leadership; Growth Management; Corporate Social Responsibility and Impact; Mission and Purpose; Social Enterprise; Social Issues; Poverty; Welfare or Wellbeing; Food and Beverage Industry; Ohio; United States;

    Citation:

    Kerr, William R., Manjari Raman, and Olivia Hull. "Hot Chicken Takeover." Harvard Business School Case 819-078, February 2019. (Revised May 2019.)  View Details
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    11.  
See all faculty publications on Entrepreneurship »

Initiatives & Projects

  • Entrepreneurship

    The Arthur Rock Center for Entrepreneurship supports Harvard Business School's mission to "educate leaders who make a difference in the world" by infusing this leadership perspective with an entrepreneurial point of view.

  • Social Enterprise

    The Social Enterprise Initiative at HBS applies innovative business practices and managerial disciplines to drive sustained, high-impact social change.

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Faculty

HBS Working Knowledge

Pic
re Howard H. Stevenson
Using business to create social change has been at the center of many entrepreneurial efforts by Harvard Business School alumni. Howard Stevenson discusses their pragmatic approaches to overcoming lo
Pic
re Rembrand M. Koning
Startup incubators used by cities and companies to jump-start innovation have a problem to overcome. Attendees tend to network with people they already know, says research by Rembrand M. Koning.
Pic
re Andy Wu
Innovative about creating new products, entrepreneurs often lose imagination when it comes to funding their dreams. Andy Wu reveals alternatives beyond friends and family.

More »

Harvard Business Publishing

Article
by Deepak Malhotra
Case
by William R. Kerr, Manjari Raman and Olivia Hull
Press Book
by Richard S. Ruback and Royce Yudkoff

More »

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