Reframing entrepreneurship for early-career researchers

Last registered on September 20, 2023

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Pre-Trial

Trial Information

General Information

Title

Reframing entrepreneurship for early-career researchers

RCT ID

AEARCTR-0012127

Initial registration date

September 15, 2023

Initial registration date is when the trial was registered.

It corresponds to when the registration was submitted to the Registry to be reviewed for publication.

First published

September 20, 2023, 10:30 AM EDT

First published corresponds to when the trial was first made public on the Registry after being reviewed.

Locations

Country

Germany

Region

Primary Investigator

Name

Ferran Giones

Affiliation

University of Stuttgart

Contact Primary Investigator

Other Primary Investigator(s)

PI Name

Andreas Wahl

PI Affiliation

University of Stuttgart

Contact Investigator

PI Name

Mia-Celine Zsohar

PI Affiliation

University of Stuttgart

Contact Investigator

Additional Trial Information

Status

In development

Start date

2023-09-15

End date

2024-01-26

Keywords

Behavior, Education

Additional Keywords

Scientific career, entrepreneurship

JEL code(s)

L26, O31, Q55, C93

Secondary IDs

Prior work

This trial is based on or builds upon one or more prior RCTs.

Abstract

Early-career researchers (ECRs - PhDs and Post-docs) hold the potential to transform scientific advances into impactful new ventures. However, the prevalent restrictive framing of entrepreneurship as an individual behavior with a monetary reward narrows its appeal to an already preselected profile of a researcher with a preference for economic impact.

In this experiment, we aim to achieve three objectives: 1) establish and measure the effect size of a broader view - focused on impact - of entrepreneurship for ECRs, 2) establish to what extent the perception of entrepreneurship as an individual behavior has a similar restrictive effect, 3a) identify to what extent these alternative framings helps us to activate preferences from researchers across distinct scientific disciplines and research communities, and 3b) understand how individual characteristics, such as identity, growth mindset, or impulsivity help us to understand this differences.

External Link(s)

Registration Citation

Citation

Giones, Ferran, Andreas Wahl and Mia-Celine Zsohar. 2023. "Reframing entrepreneurship for early-career researchers." AEA RCT Registry. September 20. https://doi.org/10.1257/rct.12127-1.0

Sponsors & Partners

Experimental Details

Interventions

Intervention(s)

We use two interrelated framing interventions.
1) email content manipulation, where participants receive an invitation to be informed about a training program.
2) landing page that presents information about the program, with alternative framing and a registration button to receive further information.

Intervention Start Date

2023-09-18

Intervention End Date

2023-11-24

Primary Outcomes

Primary Outcomes (end points)

We want to understand the effect size of a broader, collaborative - impact-focused - framing of entrepreneurship by capturing their preference for this condition instead of the current individual and narrower representation.

Primary Outcomes (explanation)

Rising awareness of entrepreneurship as a career option for those currently in a scientific career.

Secondary Outcomes

Secondary Outcomes (end points)

Secondary Outcomes (explanation)

Experimental Design

1) email content manipulation, with stratified randomization - by department/institute. Individuals receive information that describes the training program as the beginning of a journey towards commercialization of science (business as usual), and the other subjects receive information that portrays the program as a a program to make an impact with their research (treatment), it has a broad understanding of entrepreneurship with a focus on impact. We will be distributing the email to the sample, tracking their response (opt-in), controlling the message they received. We will also send a questionnaire to identify their entrepreneurial identity (Sieger et al. 2016 JBV), their growth mindset (Schmitt 2022), and impulsivity (Barratt 1994) and essential descriptive data of the individual.
2) Correspondance intervention, we will be using different texts in a landing page, with more information about the program. Presenting entrepreneurship as a) an individual behavior (business as usual) suggesting a match with what makes also science and research work successful; or as b) a collaborative behavior (treatment), where tasks and activities have to be shared with a group of people, suggesting that this is also the case in succesful scientific projects.

In both cases, we are running a stratified randomization (50%/50% for every condition) inside each institute/department.

Experimental Design Details

Randomization Method

Randomization done by computer, balanced weights, 50%.

Randomization Unit

Randomization (stratified) planned by institute (group-level cluster).

Was the treatment clustered?

Yes

Experiment Characteristics

Sample size: planned number of clusters

150 institutes

Sample size: planned number of observations

2300 early-career researchers (PhD students and Post-docs)

Sample size (or number of clusters) by treatment arms

We expect an equal distribution - 50% of the planned number of individual participants (max. 1000) in each arm for the interventions.

Minimum detectable effect size for main outcomes (accounting for sample design and clustering)

In the email manipulation and landing page, we will be using the "more information" or "keep me updated" response as the main outcome. Based on similar types of treatments (see Guzmann, Oh & Sen 2020 - MS), and the first version of this experiment run in 2022, we expect to see a 25%-30% difference between the economic and social/impact framing of the program. Also for the individual vs. collective framing. This is because we have increased the text distinctiveness (calculating the cosine similarity), and believe that our treatment is now stronger that in the version of 2022. As in both interventions, it is only an "opt-in" to get more information or stay updated, we anticipate an incidence of 15% for the business-as-usual conditions and a 25% for the treatment conditions. With a Power of 0.8 and an Alpha of 0.05, we should reach at least 500 individuals (250 for each condition). Using the estimation tool developed by Rosner B. Fundamentals of Biostatistics. 7th ed. Boston, MA: Brooks/Cole; 2011.

Supporting Documents and Materials

IRB