Browsing by Author "Townsend, David"
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- Building an entrepreneurship education program in a technology-rich environment: Virginia Tech’s entrepreneurship ecosystemTseng, Chien-Chi; Townsend, David; Poff, Ron; Gnyawali, Devi (Edward Elgar Publishing, 2025-01-01)In recent years, the entrepreneurship ecosystem at Virginia Tech has rapidly evolved into one of the leading global university entrepreneurship programs. Through an integrated mix of curricular and co-curricular programs and initiatives, Virginia Tech is leading the way in building a world-class entrepreneurship ecosystem throughout the Commonwealth of Virginia to serve the students, faculty and staff, Commonwealth citizens, and the entrepreneurship community at large. Building on the historic strengths as a pre-eminent STEM-focused institution, Virginia Tech’s comprehensive ecosystem encompasses a unique blend of academic courses and programs, student experiential learning, and a broader support system to advance technology commercialization and entrepreneurship efforts. Dedicated to entrepreneurship education excellence, Virginia Tech pushes the boundaries of knowledge acquisition and generation by taking a hands-on, transdisciplinary approach to prepare students to be leaders and problem-solvers. As the commonwealth’s most comprehensive university and a leading research institution, Virginia Tech’s entrepreneurship ecosystem spans multiple campuses across the Commonwealth and is anchored by our primary campus in Blacksburg, VA. These innovative and comprehensive efforts and demonstrated success have led to Virginia Tech’s winning the National Model Program Award for entrepreneurship education from the United States Association for Small Business and Entrepreneurship in 2022.
- Conversing Opportunities into Existence: An Examination of Discourse Structures used within the Opportunity Development of Nascent EntrepreneurshipHaines, Howard K. (Virginia Tech, 2023-02-08)When entrepreneurs interact and receive feedback they sort through and transform various subjective venture ideas into intersubjective venture concepts. This dissertation examines the dialogue of entrepreneurs in the nascent stages of opportunity development from a process theory approach to understand how entrepreneurs sort, navigate and make sense of ideas they encounter through feedback exchanges. Using conversational analysis, several conversation patterns are identified that shape the emergence process. Legitimacy associations, status quo assertions, experiential actualities, engagement hypotheticals, and deontic declarations contribute to the nonlinear opportunity emergence process. These discourse structures derived from speech acts are attended to, adopted, and implemented as they align with assessment filters of credibility, feasibility, desirability, and identity plausibility which are key elements of the opportunity interpretation process used during ideation and pivoting interactions.
- Heterogeneous Entrepreneurial Action: A Knowledge Problem ApproachManocha, Parul (Virginia Tech, 2023-06-14)
- Knowledge Problems and Entrepreneurial StrategyJin, Ju hyeong (Virginia Tech, 2023-05-01)Entrepreneurs formulate and implement strategies to tackle different knowledge problems over the entrepreneurial journey. This dissertation systematically disentangled and compared the value of two strategic decision logics that have been tested little in the extant entrepreneurship literature: the strategic decision logic that leverages speed advantages versus the logic that leverages comprehensive advantages. Using a pseudo-NK simulation method first in the management and entrepreneurship fields, the comparative effectiveness of new product development strategies that leverage speed (e.g., the lean method [paper one] and a modular strategy [paper two]) versus comprehensiveness (e.g., a more comprehensive method [paper one] and a parallel strategy [paper two]) was tested in the first and second essays of the dissertation. In the third essay, I systematically reviewed, analyzed, and disentangled two existing corporate strategy constructs of decision speed and decision comprehensiveness by investigating different ways these decision strategies could be effective within entrepreneurship. I also used a multilevel meta-analysis to synthesize and test the contingent role of decision speed and decision comprehensiveness in different entrepreneurial decision contexts. That is, I found that the value of these two entrepreneurial strategies would be contingent upon the external and internal conditions of ventures. Overall, this dissertation shows that strategies that leverage comprehensiveness might even be more effective in entrepreneurship than the strategies that leverage speed advantages, depending on the internal and external decision contexts.
- Rethinking Directors' Effectiveness: The Development and Empirical Analysis of a Novel ModelCalvano da Silva, Felipe (Virginia Tech, 2022-04-01)The purpose of this dissertation is to introduce and empirically test a new theoretical perspective for assessing board effectiveness. Although the ability-motivation models provide a fruitful foundation in developing the characteristics that influence directors' job effectiveness, there are limitations this these models. First, the directors' ability and motivation dimensions are not clear, as existing conceptualizations are fungible and provide little clarity for theoretical and empirical research. Second, the ability-motivation models overlook several characteristics that are known to influence job performance but do not fit within the current dimensions. Finally, the current studies implicitly assume that all directors on the board have the same opportunity to monitor and advise in every domain. Therefore, I integrate the corporate governance literature on board effectiveness and the social psychology literature on job performance and propose that boards' effectiveness is a function of individual directors' capacity, engagement, and opportunity. This dissertation offers several contributions. First, I propose a theoretical model that illuminates and extends the core dimensions (i.e., capacity, engagement, and opportunity) of directors' effectiveness. The core dimensions of the model in my dissertation provide a much-needed conceptual clarity and coherence to the constructs that influence directors' effectiveness, which supports the development of stronger theory of directors' effectiveness. Second, by exploring the role of opportunity, I challenge one major assumption of the corporate governance field that all directors on the board have the same responsibility to monitor and advise in all domains. Third, the dissertation begins to shed light to the 'black box' of boards of directors by exploring how boards might enable directors to exert their full potential regarding their board functions.
- Strategizing in Response to Environmental Uncertainty in the Hospitality Industry: A Data-Analytical ApproachZhang, Huihui (Virginia Tech, 2024-05-23)The hospitality industry confronts continuous challenges from external environments, such as the COVID pandemic, the proliferation of short-term rentals, and the disruptive innovations of Generative AI. For businesses, understanding these external conditions and adapting strategies accordingly is crucial yet challenging, especially considering environmental uncertainties. Therefore, this dissertation investigates the effectiveness of different strategies in navigating market, competitive, and technological uncertainties, through a big-data analytical approach. It incorporates three studies, each focusing on one specific strategy and its varying outcomes under environmental changes. These studies employ machine learning algorithms to quantify strategies and utilize econometric models to infer the causal relationships between strategies and their outcomes. The first study examines how standardization affects short-term rental unit survival across two market conditions: pre-COVID growth and during-COVID decline. The results indicate that the risks arising from standardization are heightened under market decline. In addition, the effectiveness of standardization varies with design attributes to which the strategy is applied. Standardizing functional design boosts unit survival in the growing market but leads to a higher failure rate during the decline. Aesthetic standardization, on the other hand, negatively impacts survival in both conditions, with a stronger effect in the declining market. The second study identifies the impacts of differentiation on unit performance in the short-term rental context in two competitive environments: local versus city-level. The findings suggest that the effectiveness of differentiation increases with competitive pressure. At the local level where firms face localized competition, differentiation enhances unit performance. Conversely, in city-level environments where direct competition diminishes, it yields negative outcomes. Moreover, competition intensity, as reflected by the number of competitors and the degree of market concentration, is found to amplify the benefits of and mitigate the drawbacks of differentiation. The third study explores if adopting Generative AI to hotel online review response can improve customer feedback, under varying technological settings. It finds that simulated AI adoption improves customer perceptions when Generative AI models operate at high temperatures, while models with low temperatures lead to negative outcomes. The findings further underscore the importance of task-technology fit, revealing that Generative AI's effectiveness varies with review valence. Specifically, high-temperature settings for positive reviews generate significant benefits, whereas low-temperature settings lead to adverse effects. Conversely, for negative reviews, AI adoption demonstrates more stable outcomes across temperature settings, indicating balanced benefits of both low and high temperatures. In short, this dissertation identifies that the effectiveness of standardization, differentiation, and AI adoption strategies is contingent on environmental conditions. It underscores the importance of strategic adaptation in navigating contemporary challenges.