Mapping the Temporal Structure of Entrepreneurial Start-Up Activities

企业家精神既是就业的重要来源，特别是在科学和工程领域，也是社会和经济复兴的强大力量。尽管如此，创业研究直到最近才从研究先决条件（如企业家性格特征和未开发的市场机会）扩展到研究创业的过程——开发商业模式、合并、注册知识产权、雇用第一批员工等等。本项目力求绘制开办活动领域的地图，并查明新生的企业企业在过渡该领域时所遵循的共同途径。PI假设(a)启动轨迹聚集成不同的原型；(b)原型的选择取决于创始团队、新公司和社会背景的可识别属性；(c)不同的启动顺序将产生不同的结果，这取决于这些团队、公司和背景的偶然性。如果得到证实，这些预测将代表着相对于目前“一刀切”的创业过程模型的重大进步。这种转变将对创业领域的科学、教学、实践和政策产生变革性影响。这个项目推动了创业文献最近转向“过程研究”，探索新公司出现的偶然性和展开性。对创业动力小组研究（PSED I和II）记录的36项创业活动的时间数据采用了一套未充分利用的统计技术，调查旨在确定新生创业企业早期轨迹的时间模式。首先，该项目将采用来自心理测量学的多维尺度（MDS）技术，基于各种活动的时间相似性度量，将一系列启动活动映射到多维活动空间。其次，该项目将采用基因组学的序列分析（SA）技术，通过活动空间将观察到的启动序列聚类到有限数量的原型轨迹中。第三，该项目将评估外部条件的影响，如创始人属性、组织类型和环境背景，以确定新企业的特定轨迹。第四，该项目将评估这些外生偶发事件和原型轨迹在塑造新企业生存和绩效结果方面的相互影响。为了进一步进行这些分析，该项目将改进MDS和SA方法，以更好地适应社会科学数据的独特特征，如PSED中的活动序列。该项目还将用关于答复国环境中的社会政治和经济条件的新措施补充现有的战略经济战略数据集。这些新的方法和变量将增强PSED作为数据基础设施的实用性，用于探索社会与经济、地方与全球、客观与主观环境对启动过程的影响，无论是对当前的调查还是未来几年的其他调查。

Entrepreneurship is both an important source of employment and, especially within science and engineering, a powerful force for social and economic renewal. Despite this importance, however, entrepreneurship research has only recently expanded beyond studying precursor conditions (such as entrepreneurial personality traits and untapped market opportunities) to address the process of starting a business--developing a business model, incorporating, registering intellectual property, making first hires, and so on. The present project seeks to map the field of start-up activities and to identify the common pathways that nascent entrepreneurial ventures follow in transiting that field. The PI hypothesizes (a) that start-up trajectories cluster into distinct archetypes; (b) that the choice of archetype depends on identifiable attributes of the founding team, the new firm, and the social context; and (c) that different start-up sequences will yield different outcomes, depending on these team, firm, and context contingencies. If confirmed, these predictions would represent a significant advance over current "one size fits all" models of the start-up process. Such a shift would have a transformative impact on science, teaching, practice and policy in the field of entrepreneurship.This project advances the entrepreneurship literature's recent turn toward "process studies" that explore the contingent, unfolding nature of new firm emergence. Applying a set of under-utilized statistical techniques to data on the timing of 36 start-up activities recorded by the Panel Study of Entrepreneurial Dynamics (PSED I and II), the investigation seeks to identify temporal patterns in the early trajectories of nascent entrepreneurial ventures. First, the project will adapt multi-dimensional scaling (MDS) techniques from psychometry to map the set of start-up activities onto a multi-dimensional activity space, based on various measures of the activities' temporal similarity to one another. Second, the project will adapt sequence analysis (SA) techniques from genomics to cluster the observed start-up sequences into a limited number of archetypal trajectories through the activity space. Third, the project will assess the impact of exogenous conditions such as founder attributes, organization type, and environmental context in determining a new venture's particular trajectory. Fourth, the project will evaluate the interactive impact of these exogenous contingencies and archetypal trajectories in shaping the new venture's survival and performance outcomes. In furtherance of these analyses, the project will refine MDS and SA methodologies to better accommodate the unique features of social-scientific data such as the activity sequences in the PSED. The project will also supplement the existing PSED data sets with new measures of socio-political and economic conditions in respondents' environments. These new methods and variables will enhance the PSED's usefulness as a data infrastructure for exploring social vs. economic, local vs. global, and objective vs. subjective environmental influences on the start-up process, both for the current investigation and for other investigations in years to come.