Private equity is best understood not as a financing method but as a governance structure, one that emphasizes strong performance incentives, rules over discretion, and a strong alignment between ownership and management. Briefly, private equity governance makes owners into active managers and makes managers behave like owners. As such, private equity is often regarded as a more "entrepreneuria…
The conventional approach to measuring interindustry relatedness uses the Standard Industrial Classification (SIC) system to capture the "distance" between industries. Although relatedness measures based on SIC codes (or equivalent classifications) are readily available and easy to compute, they do not screen effectively for the conditions under which related diversification creates value. This…
This article reviews and critiques the opportunity discovery approach to entrepreneurship and argues that entrepreneurship can be more thoroughly grounded, and more closely linked to more general problems of economic organization by adopting the Cantillon-Knight-Mises understanding of entrepreneurship as judgment. The article begins by distinguishing among occupational, structural, and function…
This article maintains that the consistent application of subjectivism helps reconcile contemporary entrepreneurship theory with the strategic management literature, particularly the resource-based view of the firm. The article synthesizes theoretical insights from Austrian economics, Penrose's (1959) resources approach, and modern resource-based theory, focusing on the essential subjectivity o…