Please use this form to submit your study for inclusion into our database. It will be checked by a member of the Innovation Growth Lab team, who may be in contact to ask for more information. Your email address * Your name * Title * The name of the study Short summary A brief description of the project's goals and its current state Abstract <p>User entrepreneurs are responsible for the most important innovations in many industries, but little research has explored the performance of firms founded by user entrepreneurs. While user entrepreneurs have a deep knowledge of customer needs that facilitates the identification of innovative solutions, they tend to lack the relevant business knowledge (e.g., market, production, operational and organizational) to successfully exploit opportunities and grow their ventures. Using a randomized field experiment, we examine the performance of user entrepreneurs, specifically, their ability to raise capital through equity crowdfunding. We find that investors’ interest in investing is significantly lower in a firm founded by a user innovator relative to a comparable firm founded by a producer innovator. While extant literature tends to conceptualize the dimensions of entrepreneurs’ prior relevant knowledge as “more-is-better,” which suggests that the dimensions of knowledge are independent, our study highlights that prior knowledge can be dual in nature. We maintain that sometimes it is not possible to conceptualize the different dimensions of relevant knowledge as independent, and importantly, that some dimensions may be perceived to be negatively related. Specifically, in the context of user entrepreneurship, knowledge of unmet needs that leads to novel solutions and business knowledge relevant to opportunity exploitation and firm growth may be perceived by investors to be negatively related. A follow-up survey of study participants confirms that experienced investors perceive this duality in user entrepreneurs’ knowledge.</p> The full abstract of the study, if available Links https://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm Links to any published papers and related discussions Authors * Affiliations Academic and other institutes that the authors of the study are members of Delivery partner Organisations involved in delivering the trial, if appropriate Year Year Year199419951996199719981999200020012002200320042005200620072008200920102011201220132014201520162017201820192020202120222023202420252026 Month MonthJanFebMarAprMayJunJulAugSepOctNovDec Day Day12345678910111213141516171819202122232425262728293031 Journal Journal publishing the study, if available Publication stage * Working Paper Published Ongoing Research Forthcoming Discussion Paper Research theme * Entrepreneurship Innovation Business Growth Country Country or countries where this study took place. Topics What sort of topics does the study cover? Sample attributes Hypotheses / research question Sample Trial population and sample selection Number of treatment groups Size of treatment groups Size of control group Unit of analysis Clustered? Yes No Cluster details Trial attributes Treatment description Rounds of data collection Baseline data collection and method Data collection method and data collected Evaluation Outcome variables Results Intervention costs Cost benefit ratio Reference Citation for use in academic references
