From Education to Exploitation – New Insights to promote successful Entrepreneurial Activities

This dissertation aims to answer current research questions related to entrepreneurship. Since the works of Joseph Schumpeter (1883 - 1950), who attributed the development of capitalism to entrepreneurship, it has been one of the most important factors influencing technological progress and the growth of economic structures. The motives of a person to become an entrepreneur are complex. While some founders actively pursue the goal of realizing themselves and being able to act autonomously, others discover an opportunity and develop an entrepreneurial initiative from this discovery, which ultimately results in their entrepreneurial action. Also, the change of circumstances, the environment, or other regularities can an individual to recognize an entrepreneurial opportunity. Ourselves have been experiencing such a change since the year 2020 when the Covid-19 pandemic changed our lives to an extent unimagined at that time. As a result, new problems of everyday life also arose, which were not infrequently addressed by innovations from start-up companies to ensure the safety of society in these times and still allow normal life to continue. Two years later, taking advantage of the technologies that have emerged, we have adapted. We now carry our vaccination records digitally at all times, use apps on our smartphones to track our whereabouts, and traditional meetings in our workday are replaced by digital meetings using apps like Zoom or Teams. Society is evolving and using the products and services of innovative young companies to counter the ”new now” and move on with life. In line with the high relevance of entrepreneurship for economic and social development and the advance of technological progress, research in this field has also expanded rapidly in recent decades, encompassing a considerable number of sub-fields. However, two questions, in particular, preoccupy this field of research: The origin of entrepreneurs and how they differ from other individuals, and the question of how entrepreneurs can exercise sustainable successful entrepreneurship. Concerning the origin of the entrepreneur, the question of whether founders are born or if the skills needed for successful entrepreneurship can be learned has prevailed almost since the beginning of research in the field of entrepreneurship. In the context of this question, educational institutions such as universities are the focus of research endeavors. Concerning the sustainable success of an enterprise, the acquisition of the necessary resources is crucial. In particular, securing financial resources is the most important challenge for the entrepreneur. From these two points of view, two of the largest scopes of research in the field of entrepreneurship have developed over the past decades: entrepreneurial education and entrepreneurial finance. This dissertation consists of a total of three studies that provide new insights in both areas and thus make a significant contribution to current entrepreneurial research. The first study focuses on the field of entrepreneurial education and investigates how the university ecosystem can influence students' innovation skills. Based on a survey of over 300 students before and after their first year within the university, we demonstrate in this study that individual elements of the university ecosystem can indeed have a positive impact on students' entrepreneurial development. Thus, this study also indicates through empirical findings that individuals can indeed learn the skills for successful entrepreneurial actions, thereby underscoring universities' role and relevance in this endeavor. The second and third studies deal respectively with the field of entrepreneurial financing, referring to a still rather young phenomenon in this field: crowdfunding as an alternative to traditional financing options such as venture capital financing. The second study examines how the use of words associated with creativity in the presentation of a crowdfunding campaign can affect its likelihood of success. This study is based on a dataset of more than 39,000 crowdfunding projects conducted between 2009 and 2019. The results of the study indicate that the use of words associated with creativity, when used to describe the campaign, has significant potential to in-crease the campaign's likelihood of success. This study thus makes a further contribution in terms of identifying signals for reducing information asymmetries between founders and investors. The third study then examines how project initiators can and should inform their supporters about the current status of the campaign. Using a dataset of 909 crowdfunding projects, this study investigates which topics have a particularly high potential to convince potential supporters of the quality of the project and, as a result, to make a financial contribution to the project through this information tool ("updates"). Each study discussed in this dissertation will be conducted with the help of empirical methods. The empirical methodology is explained in detail in each underlying chapter. Likewise, each underlying chapter of a study first deals with an overview of the current state of research and the derivation of the hypotheses related to the respective study. Subsequently, the empirical results of each study are presented and dis-cussed in detail. The final section of this dissertation summarizes the theoretical and practical contribution of the results obtained.