Prof. Andreas Schwab (Iowa State University)
- Date: Thusday, October 15th, 2024
- Time: 12 pm - 13:30 pm
- Location: Kaulbachstr. 45, Room E006
- Title: Star Entrepreneurs on Digital Platforms
- Abstract: Researchers, policymakers, practitioners, and educators increasingly recognize the extreme variability of performance in entrepreneurship. However, corresponding variability-focused conceptualizations and investigations of entrepreneurial performance remain rare. While extreme performers draw increasing attention via case studies, celebrity status, and media stories, those who research, promote, pursue, or teach entrepreneurship tend to focus on ‘average’ entrepreneurs and ventures. In contrast, this presentation introduces my stream of research, which has investigated the learning outcome variability in various entrepreneurial ecosystems that has led to my current investigations of star performance on digital platforms, an increasingly prevalent entrepreneurial context. These studies adopt a distributional perspective as a lens to explicitly examine the variability in quantitative measures of entrepreneurial performance. They argue that the unique characteristics of many digital platforms (e.g., low marginal costs, feedback loops, and network effects) produce heavy-tailed performance distributions, indicating the existence of star entrepreneurs. Using longitudinal data from an online learning platform, proportional differentiation is identified as the most likely generative mechanism, and lognormal distribution as the most likely shape for distributions of entrepreneurial performance in digital contexts. In addition, the presentation introduces and explicates a novel framework for conceptualizing and identifying three distinct performance tail characteristics – tail extremity, tail frequency, and tail impact. The presentation concludes with an outline of promising future research directions for investigating star performance on digital platforms. In summary, this presentation introduces theory and empirical evidence for non-normal entrepreneurial performance with implications for scholars, practitioners, and educators of digital entrepreneurship.
Additional Resources:
• Gala, K., Schwab, A., & Mueller, B. A. (2024). Star entrepreneurs on digital platforms: Heavy-tailed performance distributions and their generative mechanisms. Journal of Business Venturing, 39(1), 106347.
• Gala, K., & Schwab, A. (2024). Stars everywhere: Revealing the prevalence of star performers using empirical data published in entrepreneurship research. Journal of Business Venturing Insights, 22, e00492.
• Gala, K., & Schwab, A. (2024). A Distributional Perspective of Exceptional Entrepreneurial Performance. Academy of Management Proceedings, 10134.