Seminar “La relación entre la experiencia emprendedora y la elección de la ocupación profesional”, Dr. Iñaki Peña,Universidad de Deusto, 5 de marzo 2015
La relación entre la experiencia emprendedora y la elección de la ocupación profesional“ impartido por el Dr. Iñaki Peña, Profesor Titular del Departamento de Finanzas y Contabilidad de la Facultad Deusto Business School de la Universidad de Deusto.
Career mobility implies consecutive decisions by individuals on being or not being employed in the labor market. If employed, an individual can be employed by others or simply self-employed. Understanding the transition between occupations is a challenging topic that has drawn the attention of many scholars for several decades.
Intrapreneurial experience seems to inspire individuals for becoming entrepreneurs. Guerrero and Peña-Legazkue (2013) define intrapreneurial experience as a human capital attribute of employees who have a leading role in the development and implementation of re-generation activities within an organization under a proactive, innovative, and risk-oriented focus. The authors found that the effect of intrapreneurial experience of employees on corporate venturing (i.e., the creation of spin-off firms) seems to be higher than that exerted by other human capital attributes of such individuals. Conventional wisdom suggests that individuals’ age seems to be one of the key influential factors of entrepreneurship. Hence, according to the most recent literature both intrapreneurial experience and age are associated with entrepreneurship in general. But what do we know about the influence of individuals´ intrapreneurial experience and age on serial entrepreneurship (i.e., as a legitimate choice of career mobility)? Several studies show that about 20 to 25% of entrepreneurs have created a firm before launching their current start-up. While scholars from different disciplines have often addressed the question of why people embark repeatedly in business creation (i.e., psychology, sociology, economics), our conception is far from being complete about what makes a person who gained entrepreneurial and intrapreneurial experience in the past start a business for his/her own again. Previous findings show that entrepreneurship declines beyond a threshold age . Yet, little is known on how the impetus for “serial” entrepreneurship presumably declines with age, how similar (or dissimilar) is such a decline between different types of entrepreneurship (i.e., necessity and opportunity driven entrepreneurship) and how the intrapreneurial experience accumulated by individuals mitigates the likely negative effect of older age on serial entrepreneurship.
The aforementioned knowledge gaps evinced on why, how, and when to (re-)engage into entrepreneurship demonstrate the need to broadly examine a particular behavior of individuals that consists of repeating entrepreneurship along their career mobility path. Thereby, addressing this overlooked, but relevant issue constitutes the primary objective of this study. To further explore this complex issue, we draw upon both the Douglas–Shepherd model (2002) and Kautonen et al. (2014) model to test the effect of entrepreneurial and intrapreneurial experiences on individuals’ engagement into serial entrepreneurship as they age.
Data was collected from the Global Entrepreneurship Monitor (GEM) Adult Population Survey (APS). Our database represents a sample of adult individuals who have closed (sold or shut down) a business in the past 12 months. This means that all the individuals of our sample had been entrepreneurs at least once along their lifetime, and had become candidates for serial entrepreneurship or waged labor (as we excluded the possibility of non-occupability). After cleaning up the data, we gathered information for 599 individuals from six countries and two periods (i.e., years 2008 and 2011).
We tested the effect of two dependent variables (i.e., necessity-driven serial entrepreneurship and growth opportunity-driven serial entrepreneurship) on two main independent variables (i.e., intrapreneurial experience and aging of individuals). Additionally, we controlled for individual (risk aversion, income, education) and contextual factors (unemployment and GDP). Since the dependent variables are dichotomous, we applied a binominal logistic regression analysis and also conducted several robustness checks.
This research develops a framework which enables us to better answer the questions of why, how, and whenentrepreneurs prefer to re-engage into entrepreneurship, against the alternative of being waged-employed, accounting for the (entrepreneurial and intrapreneurial) experience acquired in past organizations. We investigate the why question by looking at both the “experience” and the “expectation” of individuals about entrepreneurship. Secondly, our framework covers the how question by comparing different types of entrepreneurship (i.e., “necessity-driven” and “growth opportunity-driven” entrepreneurship). Thirdly, we address the issue of when to act entrepreneurially by analyzing the effect of aging. Our study also posits and empirically validates the idea that the workplace shapes future entrepreneurial activity. Consistent with the prediction of our framework, while the declining pattern for (serial) entrepreneurship beyond a threshold age is similar for both necessity-driven and growth opportunity-driven entrepreneurs, the age that triggers entrepreneurship comes earlier and the decline starts quicker for the later. Moreover, having intrapreneurial experience seems to be particularly important to explain growth opportunity-driven serial entrepreneurship.
The modest findings of this study are expected to shed some light on the increasingly pollinizing fields of career mobility, organizations, and entrepreneurship. The interface of occupational choice, organizational behavior, and entrepreneurship theories facilitates a fruitful dialogue leading to a better understanding on the antecedents and consequences of firm creation. In addition, novel insights derived from this investigation provide useful managerial and policy implications to better address issues related to the aging of individuals, organizations, and societies
