IDEAS home Printed from https://ideas.repec.org/a/eee/jobuve/v6y2016icp36-46.html
   My bibliography  Save this article

A little bit of knowledge is a dangerous thing: Entrepreneurial experience and new venture disengagement

Author

Listed:
  • Toft-Kehler, Rasmus Vendler
  • Wennberg, Karl
  • Kim, Phillip H.

Abstract

Existing research has offered conflicting narratives of how entrepreneurial experience influences whether founders will continue working on or disengage from their ventures. We theorize and test how entrepreneurs with varying levels of experience disengage from early-stage companies. Findings reveal a U-shaped relationship, such that novices and highly experienced entrepreneurs are more likely to quit their ventures, while moderately experienced entrepreneurs are more likely to persist in their pursuits. We offer both theoretical and empirical explanations for how the propensity to disengage from new ventures evolves with entrepreneurial experience.

Suggested Citation

  • Toft-Kehler, Rasmus Vendler & Wennberg, Karl & Kim, Phillip H., 2016. "A little bit of knowledge is a dangerous thing: Entrepreneurial experience and new venture disengagement," Journal of Business Venturing Insights, Elsevier, vol. 6(C), pages 36-46.
  • Handle: RePEc:eee:jobuve:v:6:y:2016:i:c:p:36-46
    DOI: 10.1016/j.jbvi.2016.10.001
    as

    Download full text from publisher

    File URL: http://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S2352673416300208
    Download Restriction: Full text for ScienceDirect subscribers only

    File URL: https://libkey.io/10.1016/j.jbvi.2016.10.001?utm_source=ideas
    LibKey link: if access is restricted and if your library uses this service, LibKey will redirect you to where you can use your library subscription to access this item
    ---><---

    As the access to this document is restricted, you may want to search for a different version of it.

    References listed on IDEAS

    as
    1. Timothy B. Folta & Frédéric Delmar & Karl Wennberg, 2010. "Hybrid Entrepreneurship," Management Science, INFORMS, vol. 56(2), pages 253-269, February.
    2. Rocha, Vera & Carneiro, Anabela & Amorim Varum, Celeste, 2015. "Serial entrepreneurship, learning by doing and self-selection," International Journal of Industrial Organization, Elsevier, vol. 40(C), pages 91-106.
    3. Saras Sarasvathy & Anil Menon & Graciela Kuechle, 2013. "Failing firms and successful entrepreneurs: serial entrepreneurship as a temporal portfolio," Small Business Economics, Springer, vol. 40(2), pages 417-434, February.
    4. Gompers, Paul & Kovner, Anna & Lerner, Josh & Scharfstein, David, 2010. "Performance persistence in entrepreneurship," Journal of Financial Economics, Elsevier, vol. 96(1), pages 18-32, April.
    5. Frédéric Delmar & Scott Shane, 2006. "Does Experience Matter? The Effect of Founding Team Experience on the Survival and Sales of Newly Founded Ventures," Post-Print hal-02311638, HAL.
    6. Wennberg, Karl & Wiklund, Johan & DeTienne, Dawn R. & Cardon, Melissa S., 2010. "Reconceptualizing entrepreneurial exit: Divergent exit routes and their drivers," Journal of Business Venturing, Elsevier, vol. 25(4), pages 361-375, July.
    7. Cooper, Arnold C. & Woo, Carolyn Y. & Dunkelberg, William C., 1988. "Entrepreneurs' perceived chances for success," Journal of Business Venturing, Elsevier, vol. 3(2), pages 97-108.
    8. Parker, Simon C., 2013. "Do serial entrepreneurs run successively better-performing businesses?," Journal of Business Venturing, Elsevier, vol. 28(5), pages 652-666.
    9. M. Diane Burton & Jesper B. Sørensen & Stanislav D. Dobrev, 2016. "A Careers Perspective on Entrepreneurship," Entrepreneurship Theory and Practice, , vol. 40(2), pages 237-247, March.
    10. Ashish Arora & Anand Nandkumar, 2011. "Cash-Out or Flameout! Opportunity Cost and Entrepreneurial Strategy: Theory, and Evidence from the Information Security Industry," Management Science, INFORMS, vol. 57(10), pages 1844-1860, October.
    11. Moren Lévesque & Maria Minniti & Dean Shepherd, 2009. "Entrepreneurs’ Decisions on Timing of Entry: Learning from Participation and from the Experiences of Others," Entrepreneurship Theory and Practice, , vol. 33(2), pages 547-570, March.
    12. Westhead, Paul & Wright, Mike, 1998. "Novice, portfolio, and serial founders: are they different?," Journal of Business Venturing, Elsevier, vol. 13(3), pages 173-204, May.
    13. Saras D. Sarasvathy & Sankaran Venkataraman, 2011. "Entrepreneurship as Method: Open Questions for an Entrepreneurial Future," Entrepreneurship Theory and Practice, , vol. 35(1), pages 113-135, January.
    14. Dimo Dimov, 2010. "Nascent Entrepreneurs and Venture Emergence: Opportunity Confidence, Human Capital, and Early Planning," Journal of Management Studies, Wiley Blackwell, vol. 47(6), pages 1123-1153, September.
    15. Kim, Phillip H. & Longest, Kyle C. & Lippmann, Stephen, 2015. "The tortoise versus the hare: Progress and business viability differences between conventional and leisure-based founders," Journal of Business Venturing, Elsevier, vol. 30(2), pages 185-204.
    16. Thorburn, Karin S., 2000. "Bankruptcy auctions: costs, debt recovery, and firm survival," Journal of Financial Economics, Elsevier, vol. 58(3), pages 337-368, December.
    17. Toft-Kehler, Rasmus & Wennberg, Karl & Kim, Phillip H., 2014. "Practice makes perfect: Entrepreneurial-experience curves and venture performance," Journal of Business Venturing, Elsevier, vol. 29(4), pages 453-470.
    18. Barton H. Hamilton, 2000. "Does Entrepreneurship Pay? An Empirical Analysis of the Returns to Self-Employment," Journal of Political Economy, University of Chicago Press, vol. 108(3), pages 604-631, June.
    Full references (including those not matched with items on IDEAS)

    Citations

    Citations are extracted by the CitEc Project, subscribe to its RSS feed for this item.
    as


    Cited by:

    1. Ryan W. Angus, 2019. "Problemistic search distance and entrepreneurial performance," Strategic Management Journal, Wiley Blackwell, vol. 40(12), pages 2011-2023, December.
    2. Shahid, Pirzada Syed Rizwan, 2023. "Founder's Human Capital and the Entrepreneurial Process Duration," OSF Preprints yf6mg, Center for Open Science.
    3. Klyver, Kim & Steffens, Paul & Lomberg, Carina, 2020. "Having your cake and eating it too? A two-stage model of the impact of employment and parallel job search on hybrid nascent entrepreneurship," Journal of Business Venturing, Elsevier, vol. 35(5).
    4. Fan, Terence & Schwab, Andreas & Geng, Xuesong, 2021. "Habitual entrepreneurship in digital platform ecosystems: A time-contingent model of learning from prior software project experiences," Journal of Business Venturing, Elsevier, vol. 36(5).
    5. Singaram, Raja & Radu-Lefebvre, Miruna & Gartner, William B., 2023. "Gordian knot uncut: Understanding the problem of founder exit in social ventures," Journal of Business Venturing Insights, Elsevier, vol. 19(C).
    6. George Bogdan Drăgan & Andrei Alexandru Panait & George Cristian Schin, 2022. "Tracking precursors of entrepreneurial intention: the case of researchers involved in eco-label industry," International Entrepreneurship and Management Journal, Springer, vol. 18(4), pages 1605-1622, December.
    7. Thapa, Nischal, 2020. "Being cognizant of the amount of information: Curvilinear relationship between total-information and funding-success of crowdfunding campaigns," Journal of Business Venturing Insights, Elsevier, vol. 14(C).

    Most related items

    These are the items that most often cite the same works as this one and are cited by the same works as this one.
    1. Gottschalk, Sandra & Greene, Francis J. & Höwer, Daniel & Müller, Bettina, 2014. "If you don't succeed, should you try again? The role of entrepreneurial experience in venture survival," ZEW Discussion Papers 14-009, ZEW - Leibniz Centre for European Economic Research.
    2. Patel, Pankaj C. & Tsionas, Mike & Oghazi, Pejvak & Izquierdo, Vanessa, 2022. "No entrepreneur steps in the same river twice: Limited learning advantage for serial entrepreneurs," Journal of Business Research, Elsevier, vol. 142(C), pages 1038-1052.
    3. Fan, Terence & Schwab, Andreas & Geng, Xuesong, 2021. "Habitual entrepreneurship in digital platform ecosystems: A time-contingent model of learning from prior software project experiences," Journal of Business Venturing, Elsevier, vol. 36(5).
    4. Kun Fu & Anne-Sophie Larsson & Karl Wennberg, 2018. "Habitual entrepreneurs in the making: how labour market rigidity and employment affects entrepreneurial re-entry," Small Business Economics, Springer, vol. 51(2), pages 465-482, August.
    5. Emanuela Carbonara & Hien Thu Tran & Enrico Santarelli, 2020. "Determinants of novice, portfolio, and serial entrepreneurship: an occupational choice approach," Small Business Economics, Springer, vol. 55(1), pages 123-151, June.
    6. Klyver, Kim & Steffens, Paul & Lomberg, Carina, 2020. "Having your cake and eating it too? A two-stage model of the impact of employment and parallel job search on hybrid nascent entrepreneurship," Journal of Business Venturing, Elsevier, vol. 35(5).
    7. Amrita Lahiri & Anu Wadhwa, 2021. "When do serial entrepreneurs found innovative ventures? Evidence from patent data," Small Business Economics, Springer, vol. 57(4), pages 1973-1993, December.
    8. Sandra Gottschalk & Bettina Müller, 2022. "A second chance for failed entrepreneurs: a good idea?," Small Business Economics, Springer, vol. 59(2), pages 745-767, August.
    9. Rocha, Vera & Pozzoli, Dario, 2021. "Give it Another Shot: Startup Experience and the Mobilization of Human Resources in New Ventures," Working Papers 11-2021, Copenhagen Business School, Department of Economics.
    10. Louise Lindbjerg & Theodor Vladasel, 2021. "Hiring Entrepreneurs for Innovation," Working Papers 1309, Barcelona School of Economics.
    11. Parker, Simon C., 2013. "Do serial entrepreneurs run successively better-performing businesses?," Journal of Business Venturing, Elsevier, vol. 28(5), pages 652-666.
    12. Zunino, Diego & van Praag, Mirjam C. & Dushnitsky, Gary, 2017. "Badge of Honor or Scarlet Letter? Unpacking Investors' Judgment of Entrepreneurs' Past Failure," IZA Discussion Papers 11017, Institute of Labor Economics (IZA).
    13. Loren Brandt & Ruochen Dai & Gueorgui Kambourov & Kjetil Storesletten & Xiaobo Zhang, 2022. "Serial Entrepreneurship in China," Working Papers tecipa-721, University of Toronto, Department of Economics.
    14. Praag, Mirjam van & Zunino, Diego & Dushnitsky, Gary, 2017. "Badge of Honor or Scarlet Letter? Unpacking Investors’ Judgment of Entrepreneurs’ Past Failure," CEPR Discussion Papers 12329, C.E.P.R. Discussion Papers.
    15. Francine Lafontaine & Kathryn Shaw, 2016. "Serial Entrepreneurship: Learning by Doing?," Journal of Labor Economics, University of Chicago Press, vol. 34(S2), pages 217-254.
    16. Laffineur, Catherine & Dubard Barbosa, Saulo & Fayolle, Alain & Montmartin, Benjamin, 2020. "The unshackled entrepreneur: Occupational determinants of entrepreneurial effort," Journal of Business Venturing, Elsevier, vol. 35(5).
    17. Kim, Phillip H. & Longest, Kyle C. & Lippmann, Stephen, 2015. "The tortoise versus the hare: Progress and business viability differences between conventional and leisure-based founders," Journal of Business Venturing, Elsevier, vol. 30(2), pages 185-204.
    18. Elert, Niklas & Andersson, Fredrik W. & Wennberg, Karl, 2015. "The impact of entrepreneurship education in high school on long-term entrepreneurial performance," Journal of Economic Behavior & Organization, Elsevier, vol. 111(C), pages 209-223.
    19. Jenkins, Anna & McKelvie, Alexander, 2017. "Is this the end? Investigating firm and individual level outcomes post-failure," Journal of Business Venturing Insights, Elsevier, vol. 8(C), pages 138-143.
    20. Massimo Baù & Philipp Sieger & Kimberly A. Eddleston & Francesco Chirico, 2017. "Fail but Try Again? The Effects of Age, Gender, and Multiple–Owner Experience on Failed Entrepreneurs’ Reentry," Entrepreneurship Theory and Practice, , vol. 41(6), pages 909-941, November.

    Corrections

    All material on this site has been provided by the respective publishers and authors. You can help correct errors and omissions. When requesting a correction, please mention this item's handle: RePEc:eee:jobuve:v:6:y:2016:i:c:p:36-46. See general information about how to correct material in RePEc.

    If you have authored this item and are not yet registered with RePEc, we encourage you to do it here. This allows to link your profile to this item. It also allows you to accept potential citations to this item that we are uncertain about.

    If CitEc recognized a bibliographic reference but did not link an item in RePEc to it, you can help with this form .

    If you know of missing items citing this one, you can help us creating those links by adding the relevant references in the same way as above, for each refering item. If you are a registered author of this item, you may also want to check the "citations" tab in your RePEc Author Service profile, as there may be some citations waiting for confirmation.

    For technical questions regarding this item, or to correct its authors, title, abstract, bibliographic or download information, contact: Catherine Liu (email available below). General contact details of provider: https://www.journals.elsevier.com/journal-of-business-venturing-insights .

    Please note that corrections may take a couple of weeks to filter through the various RePEc services.

    IDEAS is a RePEc service. RePEc uses bibliographic data supplied by the respective publishers.