TY  - RPRT
A1  - Caliendo, Marco
A1  - Rodríguez Guio, Daniel Felipe
T1  - Divergent thinking and post-launch entrepreneurial outcomes
BT  - non-linearities and the moderating role of experience
T2  - CEPA Discussion Papers
N2  - Divergent thinking is the ability to produce numerous and diverse responses to questions or tasks, and it is used as a predictor of creative achievement. It plays a significant role in the business organization’s innovation process and the recognition of new business opportunities. Drawing upon the cumulative process model of creativity in entrepreneurship, we hypothesize that divergent thinking has a lasting effect on post-launch entrepreneurial outcomes related to innovation and growth, but that this relation might not always be linear. Additionally, we hypothesize that domain-specific experience has a moderating role in this relation. We test our hypotheses based on a representative longitudinal sample of 457 German business founders, which we observe up until 40 months after start-up. We find strong relative effects for innovation and growth outcomes. For survival we find conclusive evidence for non-linearities in the effects of divergent thinking. Additionally, we show that such effects are moderated by the type of domain-specific experience that entrepreneurs gathered pre-launch, as it shapes the individual’s ideational abilities to fit into more sophisticated strategies regarding entrepreneurial creative achievement. Our findings have relevant policy implications in characterizing and identifying business start-ups with growth and innovation potential, allowing a more efficient allocation of public and private funds.
T3  - CEPA Discussion Papers - 68 
KW  - divergent thinking
KW  - entrepreneurial performance
KW  - survival
KW  - business expansion
KW  - innovation
Y1  - 2023
U6  - http://nbn-resolving.de/urn/resolver.pl?urn:nbn:de:kobv:517-opus4-607408
SN  - 2628-653X
IS  - 68
ER  - 
TY  - RPRT
A1  - Caliendo, Marco
A1  - Kritikos, Alexander
A1  - Rodriguez, Daniel
A1  - Stier, Claudia
T1  - Self-Efficacy and Entrepreneurial Performance of Start-Ups
T2  - CEPA Discussion Papers
N2  - Self-efficacy reflects the self-belief that one can persistently perform difficult and novel tasks while coping with adversity. As such beliefs reflect how individuals behave, think, and act, they are key for successful entrepreneurial activities. While existing literature mainly analyzes the influence of the task-related construct of entrepreneurial self-efficacy, we take a different perspective and investigate, based on a representative sample of 1,405 German business founders, how the personality characteristic of generalized self-efficacy influences start-up performance as measured by a broad set of business outcomes up to 19 months after business creation. Outcomes include start-up survival and entrepreneurial income, as well as growth-oriented outcomes such as job creation and innovation. We find statistically significant and economically important positive effects of high scores of self-efficacy on start-up survival and entrepreneurial income, which become even stronger when focusing on the growth-oriented outcome of innovation. Furthermore, we observe that generalized self-efficacy is similarly distributed between female and male business founders, with effects being partly stronger for female entrepreneurs. Our findings are important for policy instruments that are meant to support firm growth by facilitating the design of more target-oriented offers for training, coaching, and entrepreneurial incubators.
T3  - CEPA Discussion Papers - 61 
KW  - entrepreneurship
KW  - firm performance
KW  - general self-efficacy
KW  - survival
KW  - job creation
KW  - innovation
Y1  - 2023
U6  - http://nbn-resolving.de/urn/resolver.pl?urn:nbn:de:kobv:517-opus4-572527
SN  - 2628-653X
IS  - 61
ER  -