Research Design and Methodology

During an earlier study of entrepreneurial policies by the present author (Manimala, 1988a, 1999), it was found that entrepreneurs’ policies, especially the start-up policies, are generally not stated or articulated clearly by the promoters for enforcement in their firms. There were cases where entrepreneurs were not even aware of their policies, or professed different policies than what they practiced. An incident from the researcher’s experience of interacting with entrepreneurs in connection with the previous study would illustrate this phenomenon. The conversation (as part of the pilot study) was with an entrepreneur who was in the growth-stage of his venture and has set up two additional units in two different states of the country. Reports in the business-media stated that the expansion of operations to two other states was a strategy for spreading risk, as his home-state had occasional problems of power-shortage and trade-union-activism. It was, therefore, obvious that this entrepreneur was following the ‘heuristic’ expressed in a commonly used business-proverb, “Don’t put all your eggs in one basket”. As this proverb could express the ‘risk-spreading heuristic’ very well, this was used in the conversation to explain the implied heuristic. The response of the entrepreneur, however, was rather surprising. Nodding his head in disagreement, he said: “This is what the merchants would do, but I do what the hen does. If she puts her eggs in different baskets and shifts from one basket to another by turns, none of the eggs will hatch”. While his statement made a lot of sense about the heuristic/policy he would prefer to follow in the start-up stage, he was actually following a different one at the growth-stage, although without acknowledging it. Content analysis of cases, where the judgment is made based on the actions (rather than the statements) of the protagonists is a better way of capturing the policies actually being practiced by start-up entrepreneurs. Moreover, it offers an opportunity to generate such data from the biographical information about the start-up stage policies of great entrepreneurs, from whom it is not possible to get questionnaires filled up…