Dean A Shepherd
Biographic Data
| ID | 3438003 |
|---|---|
| NAME | Dean A Shepherd |
| GIVEN NAMES | Dean A |
| FAMILY NAME | Shepherd |
| SIGNATURE | SHEPHERD D A |
| AFFILIATIONS | Indiana University Bloomington |
| ORCID | 0000-0003-4269-1826 |
| VERIFIED | Yes |
| TOTAL WORKS | 22 |
| TOTAL CITATIONS | 3 |
| AUTHOR COUNT | 22 |
| EDITOR COUNT | 0 |
| FIRST PUBLICATION YEAR | 2002 |
| LATEST PUBLICATION YEAR | 2025 |
| H-INDEX | 1 |
An entrepreneurial journey
In this presentation, accepting the Global Award for Entrepreneurship Research, I highlight the importance of me-search and we-search in generating research opportunities. I highlight how me-search provided the experiences and motivation for me to explore how (1) entrepreneurs can regulate their grief over business failure to learn from the experience, and (2) locals to a disaster can instantaneously create new ventures without any profit motive …
A Meta-Analysis of the Impact of Entrepreneurs’ Gender on their Access to Bank Finance
This meta-analysis of 31 studies over 20 years advances our understanding of the gender gap in entrepreneurial bank finance. Findings from previous research on the relationship between entrepreneurs’ gender and bank financing are mixed, which suggests the need to pay particular attention to entrepreneurs’ social context. In this study, we develop a model of how social gender norms explain variation in women entrepreneurs’ (vis-à-vis men entrepren…
A fatigue model of social venturing
Different response paths to organizational resilience
Bribery from a micro, demand-side perspective
Entrepreneurial motivation
Given the substantial impact that new ventures have on the global economy, understanding what motivates entrepreneurs is of both practical and theoretical importance. Although research on the nature, causes, and consequences of entrepreneurial motivation has grown rapidly, it has evolved in distinct theoretical silos that tend to isolate motives based on the phase of business development (e.g., initiation, growth, and exit) rather than acknowledg…
Spontaneous Venturing
Identifying a new approach to disaster response: spontaneous, compassionate, and impromptu actions to alleviate suffering. In Spontaneous Venturing, Dean Shepherd and Trenton Williams identify and describe a new approach for responding to disaster and suffering: the local organizing of spontaneous, compassionate, and impromptu actions—the rapid emergence of a compassionate venture. This approach, termed by the authors “spontaneous venturing,” can…
Information reliability and team reflection as contingencies of the relationship between information elaboration and team decision quality
Although previous research has found a positive relationship between information elaboration and team decision quality if team members possess diverse information, we know little about the boundary conditions of this relationship. In this study, we provide a more nuanced understanding of these boundary conditions by focusing on team‐external and team‐internal contingencies. Based on a sample of 52 student teams working on a decision‐making task, …
Organizational Response to Adversity
Research on crisis management and resilience has sought to explain how individuals and organizations anticipate and respond to adversity, yet—surprisingly—there has been little integration across these two literatures. In this paper, we review the literatures on crisis management and resilience and discuss opportunities to both integrate and advance these streams of research. We identify unique lines of work on crisis and crisis management: crisi…
Building Resilience or Providing Sustenance
Disaster events threaten the lives, economies, and wellbeing of those they impact. Understanding the role of emergent organizations in responding to suffering and building resilience is an important component of the grand challenge of how to effectively respond to disasters. In this inductive case study we explore venture creation initiated by locals in response to suffering following the 2010 Haiti earthquake. In exploring six ventures we found …
Venture Capital Research
Venture capital has had an outsized influence on funding high growth ventures, backing such companies as Google, eBay, and Twitter amongst others. This article places venture capital into the funding context by classifying types of venture capital firms (corporate and traditional) amongst other equity sources like individuals (angels) and brokers. The article then details what do; specifically, it looks at the pre‐ and post‐investment activities.…
Corporate Entrepreneurial Project Failure
The success of corporate entrepreneurial project depends on the commitment of management, the project leader, and the rest of the project team to the innovation effort. Commitment toward innovation typically stems from intrinsic motivation and while innovations often begin with creative ideas, individuals are typically most creative when they are passionate about what they are doing. Yet, despite considerable commitment by organizational members …
Opportunity Identification
In this article, we summarize the bases and achievements of extant research on the identification, recognition, discovery, imagining and/or creation of entrepreneurial opportunities. After situating this topic's emergence within contemporary entrepreneurship research, we discuss a series of theoretical and methodological challenges inherent to studying opportunity identification. We then describe key empirical findings, and suggest avenues for fu…
Entrepreneurial Grief
Failure is a way of life for entrepreneurs, and experiencing failure can lead to varying degrees of grief. In this chapter, we explore the reasons entrepreneurs experience grief as a result of project failure. We then detail why certain projects elicit greater or lesser levels of grief, as a function of the project's role in satisfying the entrepreneur's individual need for competence, autonomy, and relatedness. Next, we examine the phenomenon of…
Recognizing Opportunities for Sustainable Development
Building on the entrepreneurial action and sustainable development literatures, we highlight how the current explanations of opportunity recognition, based on entrepreneurial knowledge and economic motivation, are insufficient for modeling the recognition of opportunities for sustainable development. Our model suggests that entrepreneurs are more likely to discover sustainable development opportunities the greater their knowledge of natural and c…
The New Field of Sustainable Entrepreneurship
Informed by the sustainable development and entrepreneurship literatures we offer the following definition: Sustainable entrepreneurship is focused on the preservation of nature, life support, and community in the pursuit of perceived opportunities to bring into existence future products, processes, and services for gain, where gain is broadly construed to include economic and non–economic gains to individuals, the economy, and society. To illust…
Building an integrative model of small business growth
The purpose of this article is to develop an integrative model of small business growth that is both broad in scope and parsimonious in nature. Such a “big picture” model provides an opportunity (1) to gauge how much we really know about small business growth, when we simultaneously consider the constructs from the dominant perspectives, (2) to assess the contribution of each of these perspectives, (3) to examine the indirect effects that some co…
Measuring the values that underlie sustainable development
Entrepreneurial Action And The Role Of Uncertainty In The Theory Of The Entrepreneur
By considering the amount of uncertainty perceived and the willingness to bear uncertainty concomitantly, we provide a more complete conceptual model of entrepreneurial action that allows for examination of entrepreneurial action at the individual level of analysis while remaining consistent with a rich legacy of system-level theories of the entrepreneur. Our model not only exposes limitations of existing theories of entrepreneurial action but al…
Entrepreneurial orientation and small business performance
Knowledge‐based resources, entrepreneurial orientation, and the performance of small and medium‐sized businesses
While theory suggests that management has discretion in manipulating resources in order to build competitive advantage, resource‐based research has focused on the characteristics of resources, paying less attention to the relationship between those resources and the way firms are organized. In explaining performance, entrepreneurship scholars have focused on a firm's entrepreneurial strategic orientation (EO), leaving its interrelationship with i…
Self-Employment as a Career Choice
This paper investigates the relationship between career choice and people's attitudes toward income, independence, risk, and work effort. Entrepreneurs are often described in terms of the strength or weakness of their attitudes in these dimensions. Conjoint analysis was used to determine the significance and nature of these attitudes in choosing one Job over another. We also investigated the effect these attitudes have on the intention to start o…
Information reliability and team reflection as contingencies of the relationship between information elaboration and team decision quality
Although previous research has found a positive relationship between information elaboration and team decision quality if team members possess diverse information, we know little about the boundary conditions of this relationship. In this study, we provide a more nuanced understanding of these boundary conditions by focusing on team‐external and team‐internal contingencies. Based on a sample of 52 student teams working on a decision‐making task, …
Measuring the values that underlie sustainable development
Self-Employment as a Career Choice
This paper investigates the relationship between career choice and people's attitudes toward income, independence, risk, and work effort. Entrepreneurs are often described in terms of the strength or weakness of their attitudes in these dimensions. Conjoint analysis was used to determine the significance and nature of these attitudes in choosing one Job over another. We also investigated the effect these attitudes have on the intention to start o…
Knowledge‐based resources, entrepreneurial orientation, and the performance of small and medium‐sized businesses
While theory suggests that management has discretion in manipulating resources in order to build competitive advantage, resource‐based research has focused on the characteristics of resources, paying less attention to the relationship between those resources and the way firms are organized. In explaining performance, entrepreneurship scholars have focused on a firm's entrepreneurial strategic orientation (EO), leaving its interrelationship with i…
Entrepreneurial orientation and small business performance
Entrepreneurial Action And The Role Of Uncertainty In The Theory Of The Entrepreneur
By considering the amount of uncertainty perceived and the willingness to bear uncertainty concomitantly, we provide a more complete conceptual model of entrepreneurial action that allows for examination of entrepreneurial action at the individual level of analysis while remaining consistent with a rich legacy of system-level theories of the entrepreneur. Our model not only exposes limitations of existing theories of entrepreneurial action but al…
Building an integrative model of small business growth
The purpose of this article is to develop an integrative model of small business growth that is both broad in scope and parsimonious in nature. Such a “big picture” model provides an opportunity (1) to gauge how much we really know about small business growth, when we simultaneously consider the constructs from the dominant perspectives, (2) to assess the contribution of each of these perspectives, (3) to examine the indirect effects that some co…
Measuring the values that underlie sustainable development
Recognizing Opportunities for Sustainable Development
Building on the entrepreneurial action and sustainable development literatures, we highlight how the current explanations of opportunity recognition, based on entrepreneurial knowledge and economic motivation, are insufficient for modeling the recognition of opportunities for sustainable development. Our model suggests that entrepreneurs are more likely to discover sustainable development opportunities the greater their knowledge of natural and c…
The New Field of Sustainable Entrepreneurship
Informed by the sustainable development and entrepreneurship literatures we offer the following definition: Sustainable entrepreneurship is focused on the preservation of nature, life support, and community in the pursuit of perceived opportunities to bring into existence future products, processes, and services for gain, where gain is broadly construed to include economic and non–economic gains to individuals, the economy, and society. To illust…
Venture Capital Research
Venture capital has had an outsized influence on funding high growth ventures, backing such companies as Google, eBay, and Twitter amongst others. This article places venture capital into the funding context by classifying types of venture capital firms (corporate and traditional) amongst other equity sources like individuals (angels) and brokers. The article then details what do; specifically, it looks at the pre‐ and post‐investment activities.…
Corporate Entrepreneurial Project Failure
The success of corporate entrepreneurial project depends on the commitment of management, the project leader, and the rest of the project team to the innovation effort. Commitment toward innovation typically stems from intrinsic motivation and while innovations often begin with creative ideas, individuals are typically most creative when they are passionate about what they are doing. Yet, despite considerable commitment by organizational members …
Opportunity Identification
In this article, we summarize the bases and achievements of extant research on the identification, recognition, discovery, imagining and/or creation of entrepreneurial opportunities. After situating this topic's emergence within contemporary entrepreneurship research, we discuss a series of theoretical and methodological challenges inherent to studying opportunity identification. We then describe key empirical findings, and suggest avenues for fu…
Entrepreneurial Grief
Failure is a way of life for entrepreneurs, and experiencing failure can lead to varying degrees of grief. In this chapter, we explore the reasons entrepreneurs experience grief as a result of project failure. We then detail why certain projects elicit greater or lesser levels of grief, as a function of the project's role in satisfying the entrepreneur's individual need for competence, autonomy, and relatedness. Next, we examine the phenomenon of…
Building Resilience or Providing Sustenance
Disaster events threaten the lives, economies, and wellbeing of those they impact. Understanding the role of emergent organizations in responding to suffering and building resilience is an important component of the grand challenge of how to effectively respond to disasters. In this inductive case study we explore venture creation initiated by locals in response to suffering following the 2010 Haiti earthquake. In exploring six ventures we found …
Organizational Response to Adversity
Research on crisis management and resilience has sought to explain how individuals and organizations anticipate and respond to adversity, yet—surprisingly—there has been little integration across these two literatures. In this paper, we review the literatures on crisis management and resilience and discuss opportunities to both integrate and advance these streams of research. We identify unique lines of work on crisis and crisis management: crisi…
Information reliability and team reflection as contingencies of the relationship between information elaboration and team decision quality
Although previous research has found a positive relationship between information elaboration and team decision quality if team members possess diverse information, we know little about the boundary conditions of this relationship. In this study, we provide a more nuanced understanding of these boundary conditions by focusing on team‐external and team‐internal contingencies. Based on a sample of 52 student teams working on a decision‐making task, …
Spontaneous Venturing
Identifying a new approach to disaster response: spontaneous, compassionate, and impromptu actions to alleviate suffering. In Spontaneous Venturing, Dean Shepherd and Trenton Williams identify and describe a new approach for responding to disaster and suffering: the local organizing of spontaneous, compassionate, and impromptu actions—the rapid emergence of a compassionate venture. This approach, termed by the authors “spontaneous venturing,” can…
Entrepreneurial motivation
Given the substantial impact that new ventures have on the global economy, understanding what motivates entrepreneurs is of both practical and theoretical importance. Although research on the nature, causes, and consequences of entrepreneurial motivation has grown rapidly, it has evolved in distinct theoretical silos that tend to isolate motives based on the phase of business development (e.g., initiation, growth, and exit) rather than acknowledg…
Bribery from a micro, demand-side perspective
Different response paths to organizational resilience
A Meta-Analysis of the Impact of Entrepreneurs’ Gender on their Access to Bank Finance
This meta-analysis of 31 studies over 20 years advances our understanding of the gender gap in entrepreneurial bank finance. Findings from previous research on the relationship between entrepreneurs’ gender and bank financing are mixed, which suggests the need to pay particular attention to entrepreneurs’ social context. In this study, we develop a model of how social gender norms explain variation in women entrepreneurs’ (vis-à-vis men entrepren…
A fatigue model of social venturing
An entrepreneurial journey
In this presentation, accepting the Global Award for Entrepreneurship Research, I highlight the importance of me-search and we-search in generating research opportunities. I highlight how me-search provided the experiences and motivation for me to explore how (1) entrepreneurs can regulate their grief over business failure to learn from the experience, and (2) locals to a disaster can instantaneously create new ventures without any profit motive …
Entrepreneurship (15 works) · Entrepreneurship Studies and Influences (15 works) · Business (14 works) · Political science (13 works) · Computer Science (11 works) · Psychology (11 works) · Economics (10 works) · Social Psychology (9 works) · Sociology (9 works) · Public relations (8 works)