Optimism and chance: The elephants in the entrepreneurship room

By D. Storey. 2011

231 citations recorded by the source corpus.

This article argues that existing theories of new and small firms fail to capture the temporal diversity of such enterprises. Most are ‘one-way bets’ because they provide an explanation only for growing firms. To address this, this article combines the role of chance with the optimism of the business owner into optimism and chance (OC) theory. This provides an insight into why, for example, very few new or small firms grow continuously and why, when compared to Europe, individuals in the USA who initially failed in business, ultimately became successful.

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

View Paper: https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/45092b4857fa1ff97d211eb28aefb33e4ba0f0c6

How researchers see this paper

The researchers whose trusted networks rank it highest, strongest advocate first. Every researcher gets a different order.

In Management of Technology and Innovation

In Organizational Behavior and Human Resource Management

Citations in the corpus

A new typology of micro-firm owner-managers (2015, background): “Empirical evidence of the increasingly important role of small firms is abundant in the literature (e.g. van Stel and Storey, 2004; Storey, 2011; Westhead and Wright, 2011]).”
Strategies for superior performance under adverse conditions: A focus on small and medium-sized high-growth firms (2014, background): “In addition, the constructs that have attracted most attention (e.g. entrepreneurial, human and social capital) have been accused of being static and inapt to ‘explain changes in incremental performance, even though [they] may be linked positively to average performance’ (Storey, 2011: 307).”
Muppets and gazelles: political and methodological biases in entrepreneurship research (2014, unknown): “Starting such a firm is like entering a lottery (Storey, 2011; Vivarelli, 2011: 201), with high death rates, skewed returns with most players losing out, random growth, little or no entrepreneurial learning (“learning to roll a dice” [Frankish et al., 2013]), no influence of education on…”
Small business performance: business, strategy and owner‐manager characteristics (2013, background): “This is an important finding, as it contributes to more critical debates on growth that have argued that not all firms benefit from the promotion of sustainable growth (St-Jean et al., 2008; Storey, 2011).”
Managerial capabilities and paths to growth as determinants of high-growth small and medium-sized enterprises (2011, background): “Barringer et al. (2005) reviewed more than 55 works on high-growth businesses, and since then other studies have followed, with different empirical and theoretical perspectives (Chan et al., 2006; Gollann, 2006; Moreno and Casillas, 2007, 2008; Rauch et al., 2005; Storey, 2011 Wiklund et al.2009).”
The role of intellectual resources, product innovation capability, reputational resources and marketing capability combinations in firm growth (2014, background): “…important contributors to modern economies (e.g. Cope et al., 2007) our understanding of how they withstand an increasingly competitive environment and achieve growth is limited - particularly why some SMEs grow and others do not (Anderson and Eshima, 2013; Hansen and Hamilton, 2011; Storey, 2011).”
Rural entrepreneurship or entrepreneurship in the rural – between place and space (2015, background): “Firstly, some questions have been posed regarding the long term employment effect of the high growth firms (Storey, 2011; Gjerløv-Juel and Guenther, 2012), and secondly, it has been argued that such ventures are vulnerable to external changes in markets, and that a predominance of high growth firms…”
Passion and habitual entrepreneurship (2015, background): “As Storey (2011) emphasised, public agencies face major difficulties in picking winners.”
Born to be alive? The survival of innovative and non-innovative French micro-start-ups (2014, background): “With such a representation, we learn very little about the success of this entrepreneur: in particular, one can wonder what are the critical characteristics affecting the success of his activity regarding its innovative or non-innovative aspect? If business success can stem from the entrepreneur’s o”