Entrepreneurship & Innovation

We aim to stimulate discussion on how innovation research within marketing can use a better world (BW) perspective to help innovation become a driver of positive change in the world. In this "Challenging the Boundaries" series paper, we hope to provide purposeful research opportunities for scholars seeking to bridge innovation research with the BW movement. We frame our discussion with four areas of innovation research in marketing that are particularly relevant to BW objectives.

Why do startups from mid-sized markets struggle to scale? We theorize that their home market is big enough to gain early traction, which incentivizes them to delay targeting new markets necessary for growth. This delay, however, allows adaptation costs to grow too large. We test this by exploring international expansions using interview and large-scale website language data of up to 20,000 software startups from around the world.

What is the impact of communicating strategy to employees in scaling ventures? As entrepreneurial ventures grow and add headcount, misalignment among employees can emerge, leading to inefficient and potentially detrimental decisions. Communicating strategy can realign employees' ideas to the firm's core framework but divert them from more distant and potentially optimal possibilities, constraining flexibility. Through a pre-registered field experiment involving 480 employees across 25 companies in 14 countries, we analyze the effects of a simple strategy communication intervention.

Prior work highlights the importance of cognitive approaches to strategy formation for startup growth. They enable entrepreneurs to strategically reason—logically and convincingly formulate their strategic choices before executing them. However, whether the value of strategic reasoning generalizes across contexts, particularly different financing environments, remains unclear.

How does international exposure shape entrepreneurial pivots? Through a field study of 84 startups across 27 countries, we develop a model that uncovers how international exposure not only spurs ventures to update their understandings of the international market but also generates pivots in the addressed market. Structural differences between markets and entrepreneurs' cognitive openness makes new information about the international market more salient. This new information opens ventures' eyes to novel opportunities.

Screening human capital based on signals such as job applications or entrepreneurial pitches is crucial for organizations. Signals are informative insofar as they are costly. Generative AI (GAI) complicates screening by lowering the cost of producing impressive signals. We model the informational effects of GAI, showing that applicants' use of GAI can increase-but also decrease-an evaluator's screening mistakes. This result depends on how GAI affects experts' signals compared to non-experts'.