If you are an entrepreneurship scholar there is one premier entrepreneurship research conference in the world that you want to submit a paper to and that is the Babson College Entrepreneurship Research Conference. Having a paper accepted is a distinguished achievement and for this year’s conference there were 800 paper submissions with only 200 accepted papers. Two of those papers came from both of our entrepreneurship faculty, assistant professors David Lingelbach and Tiago Ratinho. In June, they will travel to the conference that will be held at the Ivey Business School located on the campus on Western University in Ontario, Canada to present.

Lingelbach joined the Merrick School of Business faculty in 2010. Before he was in academia he spent much of his career embedded in the private sector, spending a considerable time abroad, including managing interests for Bank of America as their vice president and country manager for Russia, the Commonwealth of Independent States and the Baltics.  

The paper Lingelbach submitted to the conference is titled “How Does Financial Innovation Emerge in Resource-Constrained Economies?”  In the paper he and his co-authors (Merrick School Professors Ven Sriram, Tigi Mersha, and Kojo Saffu, a Brock University professor of entrepreneurship) study financial services innovations in sub-Saharan Africa.  The study used six cases of financial innovations—two from South Africa (a biotechnology venture capital fund and private-public small-medium enterprise finance), two from Ethiopia (private placement and residential real estate finance), and one each from Ghana (smallholder cattle financing) and Botswana (private equity and venture capital fund managed by a private firm and utilizing government investment capital) are used to determine three findings:

• When innovators are embedded in a dominant elite coalition and have adequate access to resources and networks, effectuation acts as a dominant template for innovation.
• Innovators employing both effectuation and causation modes of entrepreneurial action are more likely to grow than those employing single modes.
• Innovative entrepreneurs in emerging and developing economies employ a four-stage innovation process that begins with the choice to embed in the dominant elite and follows with the utilization of both effectuation and causation, resulting in the implementation of incremental innovation and consequent firm growth.

As for Professor Ratinho’s co-authored paper with Jeroen Kraaijenbrink, and Jeroen Oude Luttikhuis, both of the University of Twente, in The Netherlands. They focused on understanding how entrepreneurs strategize in the early days of startups. The common view is that entrepreneurs plan extensively, always setting a goal before launch and look at competitors to find a market in which they solve a considerable problem. Conversely, others argue that the opposite happens, that entrepreneurs just go with the flow, eschewing forecasts or market trends, and failing to look at competition pushing their solutions to customers.

Ratinho and colleagues' research “Towards a Taxonomy of Entrepreneurial Strategies: Evidence from U.S. High-Tech Venture Business Plans,” used 495 U.S. business plans of high-tech companies who had funding at the seed or venture capital level to show that entrepreneurs combine these two opposing strategies. Several strategies are possible depending on each unique combination of factors. The paper discusses the influence of experience, team size, industry sector in detraining each strategy and its results.

Ratinho, who received his Ph.D. in 2011 from the University of Twente in Enschede, Netherlands and joined the MSB faculty in the fall, has an affinity for startups and new venture creation. His doctoral thesis looked at the impact of business incubators in new firms. By analyzing the intensity of the intervention, the research identified which incubator’s characteristics are more likely to lead to survival and superior performance of new ventures. He is also currently working with a colleague on a U.S. database trying to understand the dynamics of aggregation of incubated companies when compared to a match sample of non-incubated companies.

Ratinho concentrates his research in areas of  startups, new venture creation and entrepreneurship. He also brings added expertise to the M.S. in Innovation Management and Technology Commercialization program.

“I’m mostly interested in entrepreneurial ecosystems and entrepreneurial strategies,” said Tiago.  “Ecosystems were the focus of my doctoral thesis. I looked at the impact of business incubators in new firms. By analyzing the intensity of the intervention, the research identified which incubator’s characteristics are more likely to lead to survival and superior performance of new ventures. Currently, I’m working with a colleague on a U.S. database trying to understand the dynamics of aggregation of incubated companies when compared to a match sample of non-incubated companies.”

 There are several best papers awards for this conference and we wish them both "good luck" with their research.