Abstract

This dissertation consists of three essays that study entrepreneurial actions in uncertain and resource-constrained situations by focusing on effectuation, bricolage, and bootstrapping literature. The first essay fills some important gaps in the literature on antecedents of effectuation. It does so by introducing three non-economic antecedents of effectuation and scrutinizes the impact of perceived disruptiveness of the business idea, entrepreneurs’ motivation, and their ambiguity tolerance (indicators of innovators) with regard to taking effectual processes. 75 hand-collected responses from nascent ventures that are active in Montreal, Canada, and 200 responses via Qualtrics from new ventures operating across Canada form the sample of the first essay. The results are consistent in both samples and show the significant impact of perceived disruptiveness of the product/service and autonomous type of motivation on using effectuation.
The second essay starts a new dialogue in the literature of effectuation/causation and focuses on the performance of entrepreneurs rather than firms. It addresses the questions about whether entrepreneurs can cognitively recognize when effectual/causal approaches are likely to yield better performance and execute them. Based on a sample of 200 entrepreneurs in Canada, the second essay studies the effect of openness to change, optimism, ambition, and team size on the entrepreneurs’ capability of choosing and fulfilling the best approach (effectuation vs causation) at different levels of product/service disruptiveness.
The third essay is meant to obviate some limitations regarding entrepreneurial approaches to overcome resource scarcity (bricolage, effectuation, and bootstrapping), namely, the considerable amount of overlap among approaches, unclear boundaries between what entrepreneurs do and how they do it, different antecedents of the approaches, and the multidimensional nature of them. To obviate the mentioned limitations, the third essay makes two major contributions to the literature. First, it introduces four distinct, single-dimensional, and easily measurable innovative courses of action that entrepreneurs undertake to overcome resource scarcity. Second, to stress the differences among the courses of action and to stimulate empirical studies in the future, it elaborates on process-related, organizational, environmental, and individual factors that affect the decision of entrepreneurs on prioritizing some innovative courses of action over others to overcome resource scarcity.