Eric Ries was born in September 1978. He graduated from Yale University and moved to silicon Valley in the beginning of the millennium. He pioneered the philosophy of Lean Startup, based on his experience with multiple startups, primary being IMVU which he co-founded along with Will Harvey in 2004. Eric Ries originated his Lean Startup philosophy after getting inspired from the Japanese Philosophy of Lean Manufacturing.

The Lean Startup:How Today's Entrepreneurs Use Continuous Innovation to Create Radically Successful Businesses

Research Summary: Entrepreneurial ecosystems have recently emerged as a popular concept within entrepreneurship policy and practitioner communities. Specifically, they are seen as a regional economic development strategy that is based around creating supportive environments that foster innovative start-ups. However, existing research on entrepreneurial ecosystems has been largely typological and atheoretical and has not yet explored how they influence the entrepreneurship process. This article critically examines the relationships between ecosystems and other existing literatures such as clusters and regional innovation systems. Drawing on this background, the article suggests that a process-based view of ecosystems provides a better framework to understand their role in supporting new venture creation. This framework is used to explain the evolution and transformation of entrepreneurial ecosystems and to create a typology of different ecosystem structures.

Managerial Summary: Entrepreneurial ecosystems are a new buzzword within research and managerial circles. They represent the types of cultural, social, economic, and political environments within a region that support high-growth entrepreneurship. But current research does little more than look at successful ecosystems to identify best practices. This article examines what we know about entrepreneurial ecosystems and links them with existing theories like clusters and regional innovation systems. We argue that successful and unsuccessful entrepreneurship within an ecosystem generates critical entrepreneurial resources like investment capital, skilled workers, and entrepreneurial knowledge. This, in turn, supports future high-growth venture creation. The types of resources available in an ecosystem and the ability of these resources to flow through social networks helps separate strong, well-functioning ecosystems from weak, poorly functioning ones.

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Towards a process theory of entrepreneurial ecosystems

Research suggests that the risk and uncertainty associated with entrepreneurial activity deters entry and contributes to the high rates of new business failure. In this study, we examine how the ab...

Should I quit my day job?: : A hybrid path to entrepreneurship

What Are We Explaining? A Review and Agenda on Initiating, Engaging, Performing, and Contextualizing Entrepreneurship:

This paper studies the long-term impact of entrepreneurship education and training in high school on entrepreneurial entry, performance, and survival. Using propensity score matching, we compare three Swedish cohorts from Junior Achievement Company Program (JACP) alumni with a matched sample of similar individuals and follow these for up to 16 years after graduation. We find that while JACP participation increases the long-term probability of starting a firm as well as entrepreneurial incomes, there is no effect on firm survival.

The Impact of Entrepreneurship Education in High School on Long-Term Entrepreneurial Performance

Practice Makes Perfect: Entrepreneurial-Experience Curves and Venture Performance

A little bit of knowledge is a dangerous thing: Entrepreneurial experience and new venture disengagement

This study tackles the puzzle of why increasing entrepreneurial experience does not always lead to improved financial performance of new ventures. We propose an alternate framework demonstrating how experience translates into expertise by arguing that the positive experience-performance relationship only appears to expert entrepreneurs, while novice entrepreneurs may actually perform increasingly worse because of their inability to generalize their experiential knowledge accurately into new ventures. These negative performance implications can be alleviated if the level of contextual similarity between prior and current ventures is high. Using matched employee-employer data of an entire population of Swedish founder-managers between 1990 and 2007, we find a non-linear relationship between entrepreneurial experience and financial performance consistent with our framework. Moreover, the level of industry, geographic, and temporal similarities between prior and current ventures positively moderates this relationship. Our work provides both theoretical and practical implications for entrepreneurial experience — people can learn entrepreneurship and pursue it with greater success as long as they have multiple opportunities to gain experience, overcome barriers to learning, and build an entrepreneurial-experience curve.

https://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/Delivery.cfm/SSRN_ID2290664_code899772.pdf?abstractid=2290664&mirid=1&type=2

Rasmus Toft-Kehler

Papers

Practice Makes Perfect: Entrepreneurial-Experience Curves and Venture Performance

A little bit of knowledge is a dangerous thing: Entrepreneurial experience and new venture disengagement

Practice Makes Perfect: Entrepreneurial-Experience Curves and Venture Performance