Please use this identifier to cite or link to this item: http://hdl.handle.net/1959.3/238616

Title

Entrepreneurial success from the perspective of the entrepreneur

Author(s)

Fisher, Rosemary;  Maritz, Alex;  Lobo, Antonio

Abstract

Knowing who can achieve entrepreneurial success has important implications for the efficient allocation of resources and minimising the costs of entrepreneurial failure (Caliendo and Kritikos 2008). A measure of entrepreneurial success would facilitate the identification of current and future successful ventures, and also improve public policies designed to improve the success rate of start-ups (Fried and Tauer 2009). Despite much being known about economic, individual, and environmental factors antecedent to entrepreneurial success, how success should be measured and what indicates the achievement of entrepreneurial success is not generally agreed in the literature. However, it has recently been observed that this is an issue for entrepreneurship scholars, and one that is worthy of detailed investigation (Baron and Henry 2011). Entrepreneurial success could be broadly defined, exclude typical business and economic measures of success such as profit, revenue turnover, growth, size, wealth maximisation, and focus only on psychological indicators such as satisfaction with perceived rewards. Success could also be recognised by survival beyond a point in time, or simply by the fact that the venture is in existence and others are not. The achievement of entrepreneurial success may have a temporal aspect, that is entrepreneurial success has been achieved at this point in time. This research uses mixed methods to conceptualise and then test a construct for entrepreneurial success. An attempt to capture the construct entrepreneurial success was made using two sources of information: the entrepreneurship literature and the data emerging from qualitative interviews with 10 successful founding entrepreneurs. Ten items were developed seeking to capture the construct entrepreneurial success, which were then included in a quantitative survey of 215 founding Australian entrepreneurs. The results were subject to exploratory than confirmatory factor analysis. EFA using PCA (n=107) generated a single factor comprising five items with Cronbach's

Publication type

Conference paper

Research centre

Swinburne University of Technology

Source

Proceedings of the Joint Australian Centre for Entrepreneurship Research and DIANA International Entrepreneurship Conference (ACERE DIANA 2012), Fremantle, Western Australia, Australia, 31 January-03 February 2012

Publication year

2012

Keyword(s)

Entrepreneurs;  Entrepreneurship;  Success

Publisher

Australian Centre for Entrepreneurship Research Exchange

ISBN

9780646572673

Publisher URL

http://acereconference.com/past-conferences/

Copyright

Copyright © 2012.

Peer reviewed