Human capital and entrepreneurial success: A meta-analytical review

By Jens M. Unger, Andreas Rauch, Michael Frese, Nina Rosenbusch. 2011

1,938 citations recorded by the source corpus.

The study meta-analytically integrates results from three decades of human capital research in entrepreneurship. Based on 70 independent samples (N = 24,733), we found a significant but small relationship between human capital and success (rc = .098). We examined theoretically derived moderators of this relationship referring to conceptualizations of human capital, to context, and to measurement of success. The relationship was higher for outcomes of human capital investments (knowledge/skills) than for human capital investments (education/experience), for human capital with high task-relatedness compared to low task-relatedness, for young businesses compared to old businesses, and for the dependent variable size compared to growth or profitability. Findings are relevant for practitioners (lenders, policy makers, educators) and for future research. Our findings show that future research should pursue moderator approaches to study the effects of human capital on success. Further, human capital is most important if it is task-related and if it consists of outcomes of human capital investments rather than human capital investments; this suggests that research should overcome a static view of human capital and should rather investigate the processes of learning, knowledge acquisition, and the transfer of knowledge to entrepreneurial tasks.

Subfields: Accounting, Management of Technology and Innovation, Organizational Behavior and Human Resource Management

View Paper: https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/0c5731b257f5fa89d0e058f61c014be4327b98ca

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Citations in the corpus

IS MICROCREDIT A BLESSING FOR THE POOR? A META-ANALYSIS (2015, background): “The increased financial and human capital resources are then likely to boost the overall level of development of the clients’ microenterprises (Cooper et al., 1994; Parker & Van Praag, 2006; Unger et al., 2011).”
Export propensity, export intensity and firm performance: The role of the entrepreneurial founding team (2012, background): “In a recent metaanalysis investigating the association between entrepreneurial human capital and firm performance Unger et al (2011) found that this relationship was particularly high in the case of specific human capital.”
Small firm innovation performance and employee involvement (2014, positive): “…differ in their measurement of human capital and in the measurement of venture success (including size, growth, profitability), a meta-analysis by Unger et al. (2011) shows that the founder’s human capital is indeed a predictor of venture success, especially in terms of size (as compared to…”
Why We Plan: The Impact of Nascent Entrepreneurs' Cognitive Characteristics and Human Capital on Business Planning (2015, background): “For instance, prior research highlights that the decision to engage in entrepreneurship is affected by an individual’s cognitive characteristics and human capital (Rauch and Frese, 2007; Unger et al., 2011).”
What matters, matters differently: a conjoint analysis of the decision policies of angel and venture capital investors (2014, background): “General human capital (e.g., education) and specific human capital (experience or training specific to the task) (Becker 1975) are important in the entrepreneurial process (Dimov 2010; Ucbasaran, Westhead, and Wright 2008; Unger et al. 2011).”
Scientists’ transition to academic entrepreneurship: Economic and psychological determinants (2012, background): “Entrepreneurship research already has a long tradition in studying an individual’s current human capital (Unger et al., 2011) and social capital (Kim & Aldrich, 2005) as antecedents of entrepreneurial outcomes (i.e., one’s decision to pursue an entrepreneurial career).”
Determinants of young firms’ innovative performance: Empirical evidence from Europe (2017, background): “Human capital characteristics, including education, knowledge and skills, have long been considered as a critical resource for success in entrepreneurial firms (e.g. Unger et al., 2011 Maschke and zuKnyphausen-Aufseβ, 2012; Klotz et al., 2014).”
Born to be alive? The survival of innovative and non-innovative French micro-start-ups (2014, background): “The meta-analysis of the various types of enterprises (innovative or not, start-ups or not) conducted by Unger et al. (2011) confirms the major importance of specific human capital and operational experience, even if the general human capital and the knowledge of support functions also have a…”
Outcomes of Entrepreneurship Education: An Institutional Perspective (2016, positive): “…viewed entrepreneurship as a result of a person-context interaction (Learned, 1992; Herron and Sapienza, 1992; Naffziger et al., 1994) and recent meta-analyses have warranted more research into potential moderators of education effects (Bae et al., 2014; Martin et al., 2013; Unger et al., 2011).”