Impacto de las fallas cuaternarias al peligro sísmico

This dissertation makes several important contributions to the literature on new venture growth. The first contribution to the new venture growth literature is the development of a process model of opportunistic adaptation that explains growth. Although prior research has identified several broad factors that influence new venture growth such as resources, industry growth or strategic postures, these factors have been studied independently so we have little understanding of how they work together to influence new venture growth. Further, the model

127 developed in this dissertation goes beyond current firm level constructs, such as entrepreneurial orientation (Covin and Slevin, 1991; Lumpkin and Dess, 1996), used in prior research to capture a venture‟s propensity to act on market opportunities and reveals the important role of the interpretation and information processing capabilities of the entrepreneur in the process of adaptation.

Most research on new venture growth (e.g. Sandberg and Hofer, 1987; Chrisman, Bauerschmidt and Hofer, 1999; Wiklund, Patzelt and Shepherd, 2009) has exhibited a bias toward ecological models that take a deterministic stance on the growth issue with limited interest towards the adaptation process that precedes growth and to cognitive variables in particular. Population ecology models (Freeman et al., 1983; Hannan and Freeman, 1977; 1984) provide potentially powerful explanations for organizational birth, evolution and mortality. Central issues in these models are the role of structural inertia in constraining adaptation, the classification of organizational species and the important role of the environment in determining organizational survival and growth.

Although literature in the ecological perspective has contributed to our understanding of new venture growth by establishing its importance and by identifying the two major liabilities to the process of growth, smallness and newness, it overlooks the role of organizational actions, choices and decisions related to growth (Child, 1972). It cannot, therefore, explain variation in growth across new ventures, especially the success of firms that proactively pursue opportunities in their environments.

By developing a theoretically grounded model of opportunistic adaptation in which new ventures actively seek to test their environments through rapid, diverse and frequent action and testing it within the context of growth oriented new ventures, this dissertation begins to uncover

128 the characteristics and processes associated with variation in new venture performance. Further, by putting the entrepreneur at the heart of this process, this dissertation addresses the disconnect between various streams of the literature on new venture growth and points toward a possible a resolution to debates between deterministic versus a choice perspectives on growth (Hrebiniak and Joyce, 1985). This dissertation shows that both perspectives are critical to understand new venture growth. More specifically, the results of the study show that although industry context predicts the extent to which new ventures initiate frequent actions, these actions do not translate into growth. However together, cognitive and industry level variables play a significant effect in predicting diversity and speed of organizational action which do significantly impact significantly new venture growth. This suggests that new venture growth results from the combined effects of cognition, industry and firm related variables. Thus, this study answers recent calls in the literature (e.g. Nadkarni and Barr, 2008; Johnson and Hoopes, 2003) for studies that take into account context when analyzing the relationship between entrepreneurial cognition and action.

A second important contribution to the research stream on new venture growth is that the model developed in this dissertation recognizes entrepreneurial cognition as a key precursor to adaptive actions and growth in new ventures and thus extends prior research on entrepreneurial schemas. Extant research has argued that entrepreneurial cognition is at the heart of various entrepreneurial processes including growth (Mitchell et al., 2004). Yet there has been little attention to how exactly cognition influences these important outcomes. In a fashion similar to the upper echelons perspective in which corporations are regarded as a reflection of their top managers (Hambrick and Mason, 1984; Child, 1972), new ventures are often regarded as extensions of the entrepreneurs. The entrepreneur‟s personality traits, motivations, attitudes and

129 intentions have all been linked to growth. However, as prior research in strategic management has shown (West and Schwenk, 1996), demographic characteristics do not always capture managerial (entrepreneurial) mindsets and alternative approaches that capture mindsets in use are needed.

This dissertation identifies specific cognitive attributes and links them to specific organizational actions to explain growth. This approach is useful as the results of this dissertation show that not all cognitive characteristics play an equal role in growth related actions. It also shows that the role of cognition on firm action is best understood when firm and industry related influences are also considered. Furthermore, by examining cognition while simultaneously considering contextual influences this dissertation captures mindsets in use.

This study also highlights the usefulness of bringing methods of capturing cognition that are currently used in strategy and organization adaptation research to the new venture growth literature in general and the cognitive perspective in entrepreneurship in particular. Prior research that has sought to link the effect of the entrepreneur on new venture growth has used gross level proxies for cognition. By capturing a complex set of entrepreneurial schema attributes through cognitive mapping techniques, and by analyzing them in the context of new venture growth this study extends prior entrepreneurship research on entrepreneurial schemas.

At a more general level, this dissertation contributes to ongoing efforts to develop theoretical and practical models of growth that specify how microlevel variables (e.g. schema attributes) are linked to macrolevel outcomes such as firm growth. Revealing the mechanisms behind these links is a key task in entrepreneurship as a field that ascribes a central role to the individual entrepreneur (Hmieleski and Baron, 2009). In addition, this dissertation recognizes the complex and often indirect relationships between microlevel and macrolevel variables and

130 considers environmental and firm level moderating factors. By focusing on the contextual influences of the relationship between entrepreneurial cognition and organizational actions, this dissertation does not only reveal a more complete picture of the links between cognition and actions, but it also identifies variations in the effects that contextual variables such as industry growth and social network heterogeneity play in the process associated with new venture growth.