When low-income and disadvantaged individuals start businesses-herein, poverty entrepreneurs-the experience of fear can be especially impactful on their behavior. In this article, we explore the role of fear as an obstacle and facilitator in both the launching and development of ventures by poverty entrepreneurs. Two primary fears are examined. The first, fear of failure, has been examined extensively by scholars yet has received scant attention concerning poverty entrepreneurs. Our second focus is the fear of success, which has received even less emphasis and is not well-understood in the context of business. It is a seemingly paradoxical notion that individuals can perceive negative consequences from what is otherwise a successful outcome. Using experiences from the Urban Poverty and Business Initiative-an 11-month annual intervention program that operates in 32 cities across the globe and serves over 2,000 disadvantaged entrepreneurs-we developed a series of focus groups with poverty entrepreneurs to learn more about their encounters with fear. A reconceptualization of these fears in a poverty context is provided. The potential upsides and downsides of fear when it comes to entrepreneurial behavior are examined, and implications are drawn from the coexistence of fears of failure and success.

Success as an entrepreneur requires boldness, creativity, and action in the face of uncertain opportunities and idiosyncratic setbacks. Our recent research elevated and defined the concept of entrepreneurial hustle: an entrepreneur's urgent, unorthodox actions intended to be useful in addressing immediate challenges and opportunities under conditions of uncertainty. We argue this foundational construct is useful for explaining how successful entrepreneurs behave. Early scholarly research on entrepreneurial hustle has generated meaningful theoretical insights into the concept. In this article, we extend those insights into practical prescriptions for entrepreneurs, corporative innovators, and innovative changemakers, identifying what they might do and how they might use the hustle concept to effectively manage uncertain and ambiguous business scenarios. Furthermore, we examine the potential downsides of hustle and provide practical steps that can be taken to mitigate such risks.

Mentorship from other experienced individuals has become essential to entrepreneurs and their fledgling ventures, particularly in today's accelerators. However, even with the acknowledgment that mentoring and coaching improve an entrepreneur's likelihood of success, we know very little about the nuances of mentor-mentee relationships or the individual characteristics important to an entrepreneur's coachability. Therefore, we examined mentors and founders across entrepreneurial support organizations to investigate the factors that influence an entrepreneur's coachability, how coachability translates to venture outcomes, and whether or not the mentor-mentee relationship met the entrepreneur's expectations. We found that entrepreneurs that are more coachable are ultimately more successful during their time in these programs and are more satisfied with their mentorship experience. This article provides insights for the leaders of accelerators to improve mentorship opportunities and suggestions for entrepreneurs to improve their coachability.

Today's disruptive innovations are driving the creation of numerous billion-dollar startups. Venture capitalists focus on these potentially disruptive technology startups and fund them furiously, advancing their speed of growth. The idea is to scale fast and seek huge returns for investors. Terms that define this type of aggressive scaling have recently developed in Silicon Valley. Unicorn is defined as a venture with a value of $1 billion while a decacorn describes startups with a value of $10 billion. Another recent term is blitzscaling: funding a venture for extremely fast growth and prioritizing speed over efficiency in an environment of uncertainty. While blitzscaling is being used heavily by investors in Silicon Valley, we look at exactly what comprises this new phenomenon and how it is used in practice. We examine the concept, its stages, and its prevalence before reviewing the different examples of how the strategy has been implemented for success (the good), cases of its failure in practice (the bad), and the extreme cases of ethical compromise by ventures (the ugly). From these cases, we draw specific lessons that if understood and appropriately addressed would help new ventures effectively implement the strategy.

Over the last decade, explicit emphasis on the creation of social value has grown in profit-seeking firms as well as non-profits and has even led to the emergence of a new legal organizational classification known as for-benefit corporations. Like financial value, social value is dynamic and therefore subject to perpetual changes in the firm's external environment, changes that yield opportunities and threats for the firm. Although social entrepreneurship researchers have begun to study the identification and exploitation of opportunities to create social value, this research has taken place primarily within the context of start-up organizations. In contrast, corporate entrepreneurship research has emphasized value creation within existing firms, but focused primarily on the identification and exploitation of opportunities to create financial value. Combining the two, we examine the creation of social value within the firm by proposing the social corporate entrepreneurship scale (SCES), a new instrument that measures organizational antecedents for social corporate entrepreneurship and that offers managers an opportunity to analyze whether the perceived environment is supportive of corporate entrepreneurial behaviors intended to create social as well as financial value. The article concludes with a discussion of the instrument's potential contribution to managerial practice.

While corporate innovation is commonly touted as a viable strategy for sustaining superior performance in today's corporations, the successful implementation of corporate innovation remains quite elusive for most companies. A recent Accenture survey of more than 500 executives revealed that over 50% report a poor innovation process, while fewer than 18% believe their own innovation strategy provides a competitive advantage for the firm. While many causal reasons can be offered, our research on corporate entrepreneurship and innovation demonstrates there are four key implementation issues that most corporations are not recognizing or responding to effectively. Effective recognition of and response to these four implementation issues may represent the difference between those companies that create a successful corporate innovation strategy and those that do not. The four issues are: (1) understanding what type of innovation is being sought, (2) coordinating managerial roles, (3) effectively using operating controls, and (4) properly training and preparing individuals. Together, these four issues--if understood and appropriately addressed--help create an effective innovative ecosystem within the organization.

Apple, 3M, Procter & Gamble, and Google know the importance of an internal environment supportive of innovative activity. But how is that environment identified or measured? As research on corporate entrepreneurial activity has evolved, numerous researchers have acknowledged the importance of internal organizational dimensions to promoting and supporting an environment for innovation. This research has identified five specific dimensions that are important determinants of an environment conducive to entrepreneurial behavior: (1) top management support, (2) work discretion/autonomy, (3) rewards/reinforcement, (4) time availability, and (5) organizational boundaries. If an organization is serious about developing an internal environment conducive to entrepreneurial activity, then it must seek to measure the specific dimensions associated with an innovative environment. In this article we introduce an instrument, the Corporate Entrepreneurship Assessment Instrument (CEAI), as a diagnostic tool used for assessing managers' perceptions of the five major dimensions critical to creating an entrepreneurial/innovative environment. This instrument provides an indication of a firm's likelihood of being able to successfully implement an innovative strategy, and highlights areas of the internal work environment that should be the focus of ongoing development efforts.