Current Projects

Project coordination: Prof. Dr. Philipp Sieger

We investigate several important topics in the context of new venture creation in order to better understand why and how individuals create new businesses. Examples are founder social identities, causal and effectual decision-making logics, the nascent-active gap, entrepreneurial teams, and new venture performance. Here, we mostly conduct quantitative studies using large-scale global datasets (e.g., from the GUESSS project, one of the largest research projects on student entrepreneurship that we organize jointly with the University of St.Gallen). 

http://www.guesssurvey.org/

Project coordination: Prof. Dr. Philipp Sieger, Simon Nobs

We seek to better understand how established companies can remain entrepreneurial in the long run (or become more entrepreneurial again). Therefore, we investigate several related topics like portfolio entrepreneurship, strategic entrepreneurship, entrepreneurial orientation, franchising, and decision-making. Also, we are interested in how firms can overcome survival-threatening crises, for instance by examining turnaround strategies or the performance consequences of unplanned successions.

Project coordination: Dr. Simone Schweiger

An entrepreneurially oriented firm is capable of revitalizing businesses and venturing into new business opportunities. Especially, in times of shortened product and business life cycles, higher degrees of technological intensity, and uncertain profit streams, an Entrepreneurial Orientation (EO) is essential for sustaining competitiveness. Proactively searching for new opportunities, being innovative when satisfying customer demand and venturing projects with uncertain outcomes, provides a chance to bring a company ahead of competition, i.e., being a fist mover. An entrepreneurially oriented firm exhibits the proper alignment of its operations, decisions-making processes and strategy-making in this respect. EO can serve to “target premium market segments and charge correspondingly high prices, control access to the market by dominating distribution channels, and establish their products as the industry's standard” (Zahra and Covin 1995, p. 46). Nevertheless, being a pioneer may also entail higher costs and risks, but research suggests that the benefits outbalance the drawbacks. This seems to be especially true in hostile environments, where a higher need to seek out new opportunities governs in order to be successful.