The IUP Journal of Entrepreneurship Development

What Motivates Women Entrepreneurs? Factors Influencing Their Motivation

-- Sujata Mukherjee

The field of entrepreneurship is characterized by competition, financial gain and independence, and the socio-economic setting provides a base for individuals to venture into entrepreneurship. Individuals perform the entrepreneurial role because of a desire to achieve, and individuals with a high need for achievement venture into enterprise building, whether small or large. This paper presents findings on the reasons why women from the low-income group venture into business and what motivates them to do so. The analysis is based on primary data collected from two districts of Maharashtra. The paper also examines the basic factors that have a potential to influence the decisions taken by women engaged in entrepreneurial activities.

© 2006 IUP . All Rights Reserved.

Entrepreneurship: A Study of Its Characteristics

-- Anand Agrawal and Sunil Bhardwaj

Entrepreneurship has social as well as economic value for the nation. The paper deals with entrepreneurship on conceptual basis, and deals with its numerous definitions and the factors which lead to entrepreneurship in the society. It also discusses the personality characteristics present in the persons that make them successful entrepreneurs. The paper has practical implications for designing courses in entrepreneurship, which may help in creating a conducive environment for the development of entrepreneurship and the emergence of entrepreneurs.

© 2006 IUP . All Rights Reserved.

Social Entrepreneurship: A Grounded Model Based on Pro-social Behavior

-- Nachiket Bhawe,
Trilok Kumar Jain and Vishal K Gupta

Traditional theories of entrepreneurship have been about risk-oriented profit-seeking individuals who identify market opportunities and exploit them to earn profits. Though useful to understand a large part of entrepreneurial activities in modern economies, the focus on profit as the underlying motive of entrepreneurs is not helpful in understanding the activities of social entrepreneurs. Social entrepreneurship refers to the creation of viable socioeconomic structures, relations, institutions, organizations and practices that yield and sustain social benefits (Fowler, 2000). Extant entrepreneurship research offers little guidance to understand the motivations, mechanisms and outcomes that are central to social entrepreneurship. In this paper, the authors attempt to advance understanding in this area by developing a framework that is grounded in the theory of prosocial behavior and validated by field observations of social entrepreneurs in Western India. This framework of social entrepreneurship developed from grounded theory methods such as semi-structured interviews and document analysis with social entrepreneurs from nine pioneering social organizations incorporates both behavioral as well as situational factors.

© 2006 Nachiket Bhawe, Trilok Kumar Jain and Vishal K Gupta. Reprinted with permission.

Inequality and Entrepreneurial Risk-taking of Organizations

-- Liema Davidovich,
Sibylle Heilbrunn and Avraham Polovin

The purpose of this paper is to investigate the impact of differential-oriented organizational culture versus collective-oriented organizational culture on the distribution of the organizational risk-taking level. More specifically, the authors investigate the relation between the level of inequality in organizations and the risk-taking propensity concerning new venture creation. According to the portfolio theory, there is a positive relationship between the expected return and risk. The conventional opinion states that non-existence of the relation between income and rewards (as existing in egalitarian economies) causes a decrease in the risk-taking propensity of entrepreneurship. Without denying the reasoning behind the conventional thought, the authors claim that their results support a counterpoint to the convention. Namely, inequality aversion may reduce and even reverse the negative impact of egalitarian economy on motivation for the risky efforts. A sample of 58 Kibbutzim was investigated, out of which 36 underwent processes of organizational change towards increasing individualism between the years 1997 and 2004, whereas the remaining 22 continued the traditional collective-oriented model. The authors gathered data of entrepreneurial activities in the Kibbutzim and divided them into groups in terms of operational risk level. In addition, demographic, economic and financial data of the Kibbutzim served as independent variables. Comparison of differential-oriented Kibbutzim and collective-oriented Kibbutzim in 2004 reveals a difference of distribution of operational risk level between the two organizational cultures: the more collective-oriented cultures show a higher degree of risk-taking. The proportion of risky entrepreneurship was higher in the egalitarian organizations. The implications of this study will enable policymakers to better understand the economical impacts of entrepreneurial policy caused by organizational change. The added value of this paper is the insight of an existing trade-off in the marketplace between risk aversion and inequality aversion. Suppression of inequality enables the inequality-averse person to assume higher risk levels.

© 2006 Liema Davidovich, Sibylle Heilbrunn and Avraham Polovin. Reprinted with permission.

Case Study

Pete Kight's CheckFree: Pioneering Online Bill Payments in the US

-- Abdul Samad and Sumit Kumar Chaudhuri

Since the 1990s, e-commerce has transformed tangible money into a piece of information, which can drive the finances of the corporate world thorugh the click of a mouse. Pete Kight captured this opportunity to pioneer a system to provide electronic bill payment and presentment (EBPP) services to his customers. He removed the hassles of writing checks, paste envelops and postage for paying bills by establishing CheckFree in 1981. CheckFree is an online service provider for e-commerce and payment services, which became the biggest player in the industry by 1993. In 2004-2005, CheckFree had annual sales of $757 million.

© 2006 IBS Case Development Center. All Rights Reserved.