Academic entrepreneurs’ effectuation logic, role innovation, and academic entrepreneurship performance: an empirical study

Although decision making lies at the heart of the entrepreneurial process, few studies have focused on academic entrepreneurs’ decision-making logic. Academic entrepreneurs are faced with high uncertainty and resource constraints. Effectuation logic provides four decision-making principles (experimentation, affordable loss, flexibility, and pre-commitments) for academic entrepreneurs to address uncertainty and obtain more resources. At the same time, academic entrepreneurs should introduce entrepreneurial behaviors to their preexisting roles and initiate role innovation to implement effectuation logic. This research focuses not only on the important role of effectuation logic, but also on the interaction between effectuation logic and role innovation that is helpful to achieving academic entrepreneurship performance. This research adopts empirical methods in taking the interaction between academic entrepreneurs’ effectuation logic and role innovation as independent variables and academic entrepreneurship performance as the dependent variable to explore the empirical results. Based on 200 valid samples, we find that academic entrepreneurs’ effectuation logic and role innovation are associated with academic entrepreneurship performance and that the four interactive effects play different roles. This study supplements the research of effectuation theory, expands its application fields, and enriches academic entrepreneurship research. In addition, we provide some practical implications for academic entrepreneurs and discuss limitations and future research suggestions.