Jared S. Allen
Resources
Are you interested in entrapreneurship research?
Below are some of my faviorite academic articles and practical resources. Check them out and see what you think.
01
Why the Lean Start-Up Changes Everything
Harvard Business Review
"Launching a new enterprise—whether it’s a tech start-up, a small business, or an initiative within a large corporation—has always been a hit-or-miss proposition. According to the decades-old formula, you write a business plan, pitch it to investors, assemble a team, introduce a product, and start selling as hard as you can. And somewhere in this sequence of events, you’ll probably suffer a fatal setback. The odds are not with you: As new research by Harvard Business School’s Shikhar Ghosh shows, 75% of all start-ups fail."
02
The art of the pivot: How new ventures manage identification relationships with stakeholders as they change direction.
Academy of Management Journal
"Many new ventures have to “pivot”—radically transform what they are about—because their original approach has failed. However, pivoting risks disrupting relationships with key stakeholders, such as user communities, who identify with ventures. Stakeholders may respond by withdrawing support and starving ventures of the resources needed to thrive. This can pose an existential threat to ventures, yet it is unclear how they might manage this problem. To explore this important phenomenon, we conduct a qualitative process study of the Impossible Project, a photography venture that encountered significant resistance from its user community as it pivoted from an analog focus to an analog–digital positioning. We develop a process model of stakeholder identification management that reveals how ventures can use identification reset work to defuse tensions with stakeholders whose identification with the venture is threatened. A core finding is that ventures can remove the affective hostility of stakeholders and rebuild connections with many of them by exposing their struggles, thus creating a bond focused around these shared experiences. Through this study and its findings, we offer contributions to scholarship on identification management, user community identification, and the lean start-up."
03
The origins of firm strategy: Learning by economic experimentation and strategic pivots in the early automobile industry.
Strategic Management Journal
"We explore the effectiveness of experimentation as a learning mechanism through a historical exploration of the early automobile industry. We focus on a particular subset of experiments, called strategic pivots, that requires irreversible firm commitments. Our analysis suggests that strategic pivoting was associated with success. We identify lessons that could only plausibly be learned through strategic pivoting and document that those firms that were able to learn from the strategic pivots were most likely to succeed. Even though firms may use lean techniques, market solutions may only be discovered through strategic pivots whose outcomes are unknowable ex-ante. Therefore, successful strategies reflect an element of luck."
04
Blue Ocean Strategy
Harvard Business Review
"A onetime accordion player, stilt walker, and fire-eater, Guy Laliberté is now CEO of one of Canada’s largest cultural exports, Cirque du Soleil. Founded in 1984 by a group of street performers, Cirque has staged dozens of productions seen by some 40 million people in 90 cities around the world. In 20 years, Cirque has achieved revenues that Ringling Bros. and Barnum & Bailey—the world’s leading circus—took more than a century to attain..."
05
What is a pivot? Explaining when and how entrepreneurial firms decide to make strategic change and pivot
Strategic Management Journal
"The term “pivot” is used extensively by practitioners and scholars alike, yet little is known about when and how entrepreneurial firms actually choose to change their strategies and when that change constitutes a pivot. We find that entrepreneurial firms choose to change their strategies only after receiving new information that conflicts with or expands their beliefs about their firm or uncertainties they face. However, this is more rare than the norm. Rather than make wholesale change with one decision firms incrementally exit or add a single element to their strategies. A firm pivots and reorients their strategic direction by reallocating or restructuring the firm's activities, resources, and attention through an accumulated series of decisions to address the on-going stream of problems and opportunities early-stage firms confront.