In order to understand strategic and e-leadership skills, we are interested in the literature related to innovative e-leadership, innovative and high-growth enterprises led by innovative entrepreneurs, and the skills that distinguish them from other managers and leaders.
Dyer et al. (2008) define an innovative entrepreneur as “(1) the founder of a new venture that offered a unique value proposition relative to incumbents; and (2) the person who came up with the original idea to start the venture”. In addition, they argue that innovative entrepreneurs can be distinguished from executives on the basis of four behavioural patterns through which they acquire information: (1) questioning; (2) observing; (3) experimenting; and (4) idea networking. Entrepreneurs distinguish themselves from non-entrepreneurs in their ability to recognize (business) opportunities. This ability is influenced by factors such as personality differences, cognitive differences, and social network differences. It can be argued that ICT have an influence on several of these characteristics by providing new ways of accessing, acquiring and processing information, idea networking and opportunities to build and exploit social networks. Thus, ICT can enhance the features that make people (innovative) entrepreneurs.
As part of their research, Dyer et al. (2008) interviewed a sample of innovative entrepreneurs, founders of at least one highly successful new venture (but who often also had experienced some
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This section is excerpted from van Welsum, D. and Lanvin, B. (2012). " VISION report on eLeadership Skills"
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failures). Interestingly, many of these innovative entrepreneurs30 who were interviewed are directly or indirectly related to ICT goods or services, and/or have had an innovative idea using ICT. Another noteworthy fact is that most of these innovative and highly successful ICT-related ventures more generally originated in the US (e.g. Android, Apple, Google, Microsoft, Amazon, etc.). In addition to well-known influences on entrepreneurship, such as regulation and access to capital, culture, and being allowed “to fail”, it would be interesting to analyze more closely if and where differences in skills and attitudes can be identified. For example, a commonly mentioned factor that is thought to differentiate attitudes in the US and Europe is the willingness to take risks; business skills and differences in the attitude towards “selling”, yourself or a product, are other factors thought to shape cross-Atlantic entrepreneurial differences.31
The interviews carried out by Dyer et al. (2008) revealed some of the nuances of the distinguishing features between innovative entrepreneurs and other executives. For example, both groups engage in networking, but the manner, frequency and use that the network is put to differ. Whereas executives were found to use networking mainly to promote themselves, their careers, their current company, or to build friendships with “the right people”, innovative entrepreneurs were found to use networking as a tool to build networks of people with diverse ideas and perspectives that they could tap into to test ideas and come up with new ideas and insights.
The characteristics of the entrepreneur, and therefore his/her behaviour, tend to be linked to the characteristics of small businesses and how innovative they are, especially at the time of their creation and in the early development phase,32 and also vary significantly across sectors (Romero and Martinez-Roman, 2012).33 For example, the impact of education on innovation in small businesses appears through two main channels, (i) its effect on self-employed motivations, and (ii) its influence on the management style of small businesses. In addition to education, previous work experiences, cultural values, personality, attitude, and behavioural traits, the motivation for becoming an entrepreneur has also been found to matter: whether it is to exploit a business opportunity or out of necessity because people are unemployed or unhappy in their job (Reynolds
et al., 2002). This is an important distinction as, especially in the current difficult economic times,
more people might become self-employed entrepreneurs out of necessity (because they are unemployed), but their ventures tend to be less innovative (Romero and Martinez-Roman, 2012). According to a survey carried out by Gallup in December 2009, 55% of respondents in the EU who had started up a business or were currently taking steps to start one said they were doing so because they saw an opportunity, 28% said it was out of necessity. In the US, 62% considered themselves an opportunity-driven entrepreneur. In contrast, in Korea this percentage was as low as 18% (and 64% necessity-driven). In China and Japan, 50% of respondents answered that they had
30 They included Pierre Omidyar (eBay), Jeff Bezos (Amazon.com), Michael Dell (Dell), Mike Lazaridis
(Research-in-Motion), Herb Kelleher (Southwest), Marc Benioff (Salesforce.com), Scott Cook (Intuit), David Neeleman (JetBlue), Diane Greene (VMware), Niklas Zennstrom (Skype), and Peter Thiel (PayPal).
31
For example, in a survey carried out by Gallup (2010), American respondents were more likely than EU citizens and Chinese respondents to say they were risk-takers (82%) and liked competition (77%), versus 55% and 65% in the EU, and 65% and 69% in China, respectively.
32 Although one surprising and not yet well understood finding of Bloom et al. (2012) is that, on average,
founder-owned, founder-CEO firms are the worst managed. One possible explanation offered by the authors is that the entrepreneurial skills required of a start-up (e.g., creativity and risk taking) are not the same skills required when a firm grows large enough to be included in the research sample (at least 100 employees).
33
Using data for firms in Sri Lanka, de Mel et al. (2009) also found that owner ability, personality traits, and ethnicity had a significant and substantial impact on the likelihood of a firm innovating.
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starting/were starting a business out of necessity (Gallup, 2010). The Global Entrepreneurship Monitor – GEM (2011), and its Extended Report (Bosma et al., 2012) also provide an overview of entrepreneurial attitudes and perceptions across countries. The crisis in Europe transpires in these data in the low perceptions of entrepreneurial opportunities in many European countries, including Greece, Hungary, Portugal and Spain. However, some Asian countries, including Japan and South Korea, also report very low perceived opportunities. In the US, the perception of opportunities is also relatively low, but they report greater confidence in their abilities than Europeans, combined with a lower fear of failure, overall (Table 4). More than half of the population aged 18-64 considers entrepreneurship a good career choice in all but three of the countries included in the sample (Japan, Finland and Ireland). Media attention for entrepreneurship in Europe (measured by whether or not people think there are many news and other media items on new and/or growing firms) is perceived to be especially low in Greece and Hungary.