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New research from Harvard Business School faculty on issues including entrepreneurship, new business ventures, and startup financing.
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Personality Traits of Entrepreneurs: A Review of Recent Literature

by Sari Pekkala Kerr, William R. Kerr, and Tina Xu

This paper brings together recent findings in the academic literature on the prevalence of various personality traits among entrepreneurs and their impact on venture performance. It focuses on three themes: (1) personality traits of entrepreneurs and how they compare to other groups; (2) attitudes towards risk that entrepreneurs display; and (3) overall goals and aspirations that entrepreneurs bring to their pursuits.

'Don’t Show Up Empty-handed' and Other Tips for Finding the Right Job at a Startup

by Sean Silverthorne

Finding a job at a startup is not the same process as hunting employment at an established business. Titles? Who needs titles?! Jeffrey Bussgang's new book, Entering StartUpLand, is an essential guide for getting a job and being productive at a new company. Includes book excerpt. Open for comment; Comment(s) posted.

How Does a Social Startup Decide to Commercialize? It May Depend on the Founder's Gender

by Carmen Nobel

How does the founder of a social venture decide to create a "hybrid" business rather than a traditional nonprofit organization? The decision has a lot to do with the founder’s gender, according to new research by Stefan Dimitriadis, Matthew Lee, Lakshmi Ramarajan, and Julie Battilana. Open for comment; Comment(s) posted.

The Most Successful Startups Have Hands-On Founders

by Dina Gerdeman

Research by Rembrand Koning and colleagues says the best-performing startups are those where the founder is hands-on with people management. Open for comment; Comment(s) posted.

Should Industry Competitors Cooperate More to Solve World Problems?

by Sean Silverthorne

George Serafeim has a theory that if industry competitors collaborated more, big world problems could start to be addressed. Is that even possible in a market economy? Open for comment; Comment(s) posted.

It’s Hard to Fix the Family Business Without Offending the Family

by Julia Hanna

Navigating complex relationships and understanding unwritten processes are among the many challenges of transitioning a family-owned business to the next generation. Len Schlesinger, Michael Raiche, and Roger Zhu discuss the dilemmas of a small Vietnamese restaurant in the case study “Pho Hoa Dorchester.” Open for comment; Comment(s) posted.

Meet the Oddball Entrepreneurs Who Invented Green Businesses

by Sean Silverthorne

Historians have hardly noticed the fringe-of-society entrepreneurs who gave birth to the green business movement starting in the 19th century. In a new book, Profits and Sustainability: A History of Green Entrepreneurship, Geoffrey Jones chronicles the pioneers of healthy food, alternative energy, and alternative living. Open for comment; Comment(s) posted.

Conversational Peers and Idea Generation: Evidence from a Field Experiment

by Sharique Hasan and Rembrand Koning

To develop a theory of innovator capability, this study extends existing research linking personality and creativity to take into account the social nature of idea generation. Using data from an experiment embedded in a bootcamp for aspiring entrepreneurs, results show that better ideas are generated by “open” innovators exposed to extroverted peers. Extroverts provide more raw information that innovators high in openness are best able to recombine into novel ideas.

Learning to Manage: A Field Experiment in the Indian Startup Ecosystem

by Aaron Chatterji, Solene Delecourt, Sharique Hasan, and Rembrand Koning

This study of 100 high-growth startups in India finds that founder-executives can learn how to improve their management style from their peers at other firms. These interfirm network connections between founders may help explain why some companies are well managed and others less so. Despite the apparent value of this peer learning, founders don’t appear to naturally connect with peers who could help them improve their management style.

Coordination Frictions in Venture Capital Syndicates

by Ramana Nanda and Matthew Rhodes-Kropf

A startup typically has more than one investor, each with different incentives. Drawing on the authors’ experience, this paper documents frictions occurring when VCs with differing objectives work together in syndicates. Entrepreneurs must be careful about selecting and building the syndicate of VCs who back their firm.

Black Business Leaders Series: A Remarkable Legacy of Firsts, Maggie Lena Walker

Re: Anthony Mayo

Maggie Lena Walker used her leadership of the Independent Order of St. Luke to form a bank, newspaper, and department store—all in the stronghold of the Confederacy. Tony Mayo discusses his case study about this pioneering African American woman. Open for comment; Comment(s) posted.

Diversity in Innovation

by Paul A. Gompers and Sophie Q. Wang

This study discusses a systematic and persistent lack of female, Hispanic, and African American labor market participation in the innovation sector, through both entrepreneurs and the venture capitalists that fund them.

The Environmental Legacies of The North Face's Doug Tompkins and Patagonia's Yvon Chouinard

by Geoffrey Jones and Ben Gettinger

The contrasting strategies taken by founders of Patagonia and The North Face provide a new lens on current debates about the ability of business to contribute to environmentalism. This paper suggests that the strategies of both founders bring positive environmental benefits but with trade-offs and limitations. Open for comment; Comment(s) posted.

Where Could More Regulation Help Small Businesses? Online Lending.

by Karen Mills and Brayden McCarthy

The regulatory system overseeing the financial technology industry is a tangle of multiple agencies and inconsistent rules. Karen Mills and Brayden McCarthy propose a six-point plan to regulate online lending. Open for comment; Comment(s) posted.

Turning One Thousand Customers into One Million

by Thales S. Teixeira and Michael Blanding

In the second part of a series on growing startups, Thales S. Teixeira explains how Uber, Etsy, and Airbnb climbed from one thousand customers to one million. Open for comment; Comment(s) posted.

Business Solutions That Help Cut Food Waste

by Dina Gerdeman

Up to 40 percent of food grown in the United States for human consumption is wasted. But solutions are starting to come together from retailers, farmers, academics, policy makers, and social service organizations, according to José Alvarez. Open for comment; Comment(s) posted.

Self-Employment Dynamics and the Returns to Entrepreneurship

by Eleanor W. Dillon and Christopher T. Stanton

Why do workers turn to entrepreneurship when many entrepreneurs appear to earn less than what they could earn in paid employment? This is the first paper to characterize how the value of resolving uncertainty about entrepreneurial earnings varies over the lifecycle after adjusting for tax differences between entrepreneurs and paid workers. Findings suggest that helping people learn about their potential earnings in entrepreneurship, either by learning from other's experiences in self-employment or by experimenting themselves, can improve the efficiency of sorting workers across sectors.

Break the Rules of How Business is Done

by Julia B. Austin

Making just small changes to how you do business inside and outside the company can help you attract bright employees and increase innovation, argues Julia B. Austin. Open for comment; Comment(s) posted.

One Quarter of Entrepreneurs in the United States Are Immigrants

by Michael Blanding

Immigrants are 15 percent of the overall United States population, but they become entrepreneurs at a much higher rate, according to new research by William Kerr and Sari Pekkala Kerr. Open for comment; Comment(s) posted.

Immigrant Entrepreneurship

by Sari Pekkala Kerr and William R. Kerr

Immigrant entrepreneurship is a topic of key policy interest but one with few facts. The authors construct a data platform using US Census Bureau administrative data to provide new statistics on the patterns of business formation by immigrant entrepreneurs and on the medium-term success of those businesses. Immigrants account for around a quarter of US entrepreneurs, and this share has been increasing since 1995. Immigrant entrepreneurs display a stronger up-or-out dynamic that is typical of young firm growth than natives—they fail more frequently, but immigrant-founded firms that persist experience greater employment growth compared to their native counterparts.