The International Dimension Of Entrepreneurial Decision Making

This book focuses on understanding the international behaviours of SMEs, entrepreneurial ventures, and entrepreneurs. The collection of contributions gathered in the book highlights the importance of cultures, contexts and behaviours that pertain to the international entrepreneurship arena. The respective chapters address topics such as entrepreneurial cognition, international entrepreneurial ecosystems, innovation, international market entry decisions, family SMEs, international human resources management, cross-cultural and indigenous entrepreneurship, social capital and sustainability in international markets. All contributions are based on the latest empirical and theoretical research, and provide key findings and concrete recommendations for scholars, entrepreneurs, organizations and policy makers.

This handbook is focused on the analytical dimension in researching ​international entrepreneurship. It offers a diverse collection of chapters focused on qualitative and quantitative methods that are being practised and can be used by future researchers in the field of international entrepreneurship. The qualitative cluster covers articles, conceptual and empirical chapters as well as literature reviews, whereas the quantitative cluster analyses international entrepreneurship through a broad range of statistical methods such as regressions, panel data, structural equation modelling as well as decision-making and optimisation models in certain and uncertain circumstances. This book is essential reading for researchers, scholars and practitioners who want to learn and implement new methods in analysing entrepreneurial opportunities across national borders.

RETHINK, RETOOL AND REENGINEER YOUR CAREER This book is an entrepreneurial feasibility examination exercise divided into two essential parts with the fi rst part directed toward your decision to become an entrepreneur including numerous case studies followed by a trait and personality self-assessment chapter to determine your entrepreneurial potential and a chapter on venture selection. The second part of the book is devoted to building your body of knowledge on the key subjects that you will need to be successful, such as business plan preparation and presentation, marketing, capital formation, securities compliance, and exit strategies. The book also contains numerous graphs and fl ow charts of all the chronological stages of the entrepreneurial journey. You should fi nish this book with the knowledge that you have the right stuff to begin your entrepreneurial journey or the wisdom to pursue other life choices. For more information, please visit www.newventurecoach.org

The creation, success and long-term survival of enterprises are fundamentally linked to the effectiveness of decision-making processes and negotiation capabilities. This book provides an overview of research into how decisions permeate entrepreneurial ventures throughout their lifecycle. A multidisciplinary approach combining psychology, sociology and political science is used to investigate how entrepreneurs address and deal with decision-making. The respective contributions highlight the latest empirical, theoretical and meta-research, and bridge the gap between literature on entrepreneurship, entrepreneurial and innovative behaviours with that on decision-making and negotiation. This book is one of the first to combine these streams of research, thereby offering a new and insightful addition to the field of entrepreneurship.

This collection of studies presents an understanding of the processes, methods, and approaches towards decision-making in international entrepreneurship. It is essential reading to synthesise the process of decision-making towards exploiting entrepreneurial opportunities across national borders.

Addressing the intersection between the fields of international business and entrepreneurship, this topical Research Agenda wholly encapsulates the multi-dimensional nature of international entrepreneurship. It provides essential insight into themes for future research alongside their practical implications.

Uncertainty in Entrepreneurial Decision Making fills an existing gap in understanding three key concepts of business management: entrepreneurship, uncertainty, and strategy. By extending the impact of uncertainty on entrepreneurship and the role of strategy in reducing uncertainty, Petrakis and Konstantakopoulou emphasize that uncertainty can be converted into creative advantage. Given that the business environment is changing both very quickly and very often, any wrong decisions taken can lead to devastation. This exciting new volume explains the reasons why we cannot see the complete the future and our position in it. This uncertainty affects entrepreneurship and how it can be turned into a competitive advantage for businesses sustainability.

Previous studies revealed that around 75 percent of all start-ups fail at an early stage. One main reason for this tremendous failure rate is that entrepreneurs are typically confronted with high levels of uncertainty about the viability of their proposed business idea. Following this argumentation, entrepreneurial decision-making can be defined as complex decision-making problem under both risk and uncertainty. While risk includes quantifiable probabilities, uncertainty describes situations where neither outcomes nor their probability distribution can be assessed a priori. Consequently, the entrepreneurial decision-making context is highly complex and contains lots of “black swan events” that seems to be unpredictable. As previous research does not provide any IT-based and scalable solutions for decisional guidance in such contexts, the purpose of this study is to explore the entrepreneurial decision- making context and then suggest novel and innovative design paradigms and design principles for decisional guidance in the context of entrepreneurial decision-making.

Strategic choices made by entrepreneurs have major consequences for SME performance. This book explores the factors that influence entrepreneurial strategic decisions using a cognitive theoretical framework. The proposed model, based on a dual processing approach, integrates motivation, emotions and information processing modes and is tested in several empirical studies. The results show the model's potential for furthering interesting research agendas in entrepreneurial cognition research. The authors also reveal that entrepreneurial cognitions can be elicited and represented in the form of cognitive maps. The structural complexity of the cognitive maps (cognitive complexity) is an important prerequisite of effective strategic decisions and is a core concept for the advancement of our knowledge in entrepreneurial cognition. The book is an informed and interesting exploration of entrepreneurial cognition with both theoretical and methodological contributions to this field of research. Entrepreneurial Strategic Decision-Making will be of great interest to undergraduate students and academics in the field of entrepreneurship. Policymakers will learn from this book to understand the distinctions between various types of entrepreneurial decision-makers and the way they make strategic decisions.

Interest in the functioning of the human mind can certainly be traced to Plato and Aristotle who often dealt with issues of perceptions and motivations. While the Greeks may have contemplated the human condition, the modern study of the human mind can be traced back to Sigmund Freud (1900) and the psychoanalytic movement. He began the exploration of both conscious and unconscious factors that propelled humans to engage in a variety of behaviors. While Freud’s focus may have been on repressed sexuality our focus in this volume lies elsewhere. We are concerned herein with the expression of the cognitions, motivations, passions, intentions, perceptions, and emotions associated with entrepreneurial behaviors. We are attempting in this volume to expand on the work of why entrepreneurs think d- ferently from other people (Baron, 1998, 2004). During the decade of the 1990s the eld of entrepreneurship research seemingly abandoned the study of the entrepreneur. This was the result of earlier research not being able to demonstrate some unique entrepreneurial personality, trait, or char- teristic (Brockhaus and Horwitz, 1986). It was both a naïve and simplistic search for the “holy grail” of what made entrepreneurs the way they are. However, many of the researchers in this volume have never gave up the belief that a better und- standing of the mind of the entrepreneur would give us a better understanding of the processes that lead to the creation of new ventures.