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EntrepreneurialEmergence

Emergence is the phenomenon of someone becoming an entrepeneur. It is the act of choosing to pursue an entrepreneurial career.

Stages of Emergence
Emergence is a multi-stage process, and we should be able to make predictions about people at the various stages of emergence.

Emergence is a process that includes a number of specific processes and milestones, including:

• Adoption of an idea
• Self-identification as a person with an entrepreneurial idea
• A decision to pursue the idea
• An ultimate undertaking of action (various legitimating activities)
• Self-identification as an entrepreneur

[Update. Identifying these stages is absolutely critical to a theory of entrepreneurship!]

Emergence becomes interesting for people like SBDCs. Emergence is a poorly understood process.

Some people go through long decision-making processes, sitting on the fence for a while. Others jump right in.

Intentionality
Entrepreneurship involves a complex series of behaviors that are difficult to carry out. As such, it seems self-evident that entrepreneurship is a reasoned, planned behavior. (Bagozzi 1989) shows that intention is the best predictor of planned behavior, better than personality and environmental influences.

Bird 1988 argues that intent to start a business is critical to starting the business. Following that thread, Krueger, Reilly and Carsrud (Kreuger 2000) test two models of intention: Azjen's Theory of Planned Behavior? and Shapero's Entrepreneurial Event?. Both of these models use a form of Valence and Self-Efficacy, though Azjen's includes Social Norms and Shapero's includes "Propensity to Act" (in this case, operationalized by Seligman's Learned Optimism). The tests demonstrate that Valence, Self-Efficacy and Learned Optimism are precursors to intention (and Social Norms were not significantly linked), but make no connection between intention and behavior.

Confidence
Choo Wong 2006 show that entrepreneurial risk factors (at least among Singaporean airline pilots) load together into certain categories, which seem to be internally focused (i.e., skills) and externally-focused (i.e., capital). Attributions might be meaningful here.

According to Krueger Dickson 1994, high self-efficacy leads to more opportunity recognition.

Stuck Aspirations
There is a category of people who are not emergent but are not the normal population. These are people who develop a business plan or struggle with emerging in some way but don't ultimately emerge. We should create a name for people who are in this phase. Let's call them "Bob."

What is the definition of a Bob? It's a person who is considering a business idea. Behaviorally, they are potentially writing a plan, talking to friends about their idea. So I suppose Bobs have an idea. But they haven't yet emerged. What's that about? They have not taken critical steps to pursue their idea. This seems slippery. What is a critical step? Is this a slippery or is there a bright line?

Ecological Issues
Singh Lumsden 1990 describe the major theories for how organizations form based on ecological/sociological influences.

Entrepreneurial Cognitions Affecting Emergence
Simon 2000 studied the cognitions of overconfidence, illusion of control and the law of small numbers to see if cognitive differences predicted support of a particular venture. They found that the presence of these cognitions predicted emergence, and propose that they also predict failure.

Miner and Raju 2004, Stewart and Roth 2001, 2004 both say that risk propensity is related to emergence. This is worth looking at.