Secondary Outcomes (end points)
The research team plans to also examine additional categories of outcomes of interest:
DOMAINS:
Studying how broad domains and scientific thinking impact entrepreneurial idea quantity (number of alternative frameworks devised for the same idea), breadth (number of contexts of application for the same idea, distance among the contexts of application), and quality (performance and startup size).
Within one of the RCTs (Spain), these relationships will be studied through a 2x2 manipulation entailing a domains treatment (manipulating the breadth of domains) in addition to the main treatment.
Within another RCT (India), these relationships will be studied with respect to one specific domain: social and demographic background. In particular, we will study the impact of social / religious background on the types of ideas generated (target markets, target customers).
Main outcome variables:
- Number of alternative frameworks for the same idea
- Number of ideas developed
- Idea breadth
- Number of application contexts
- Distance among application contexts
- Changes in target markets (niche vs. mass), target customers, solution, value proposition
- Startup size
ENTREPRENEURIAL TEAMS:
Analyzing whether our interventions are associated with a higher likelihood and number of team changes in treated startups and with a higher adoption of a dual team formation strategy rather than resource-seeking or interpersonal attraction strategy alone.
Main survey measures related to this outcome:
- Team formation strategies
- Team member joining/leaving and reasons
- Transactive Memory System.
FUNDING:
Analyzing whether our interventions are associated with a higher likelihood of receiving funding from professional investors.
Main survey measure related to this outcome:
- Received funding from professional investors (binary variable)
GOAL ORIENTATION:
Investigating whether exposure to different types of entrepreneurship training changes entrepreneurs’ goal orientation, and whether different goal orientations affect the relationship between the training received (treatment) and the strategic decisions entrepreneurs make (outcome). Goal orientation is a multi-dimensional construct that includes three related dimensions:
- Performance-approach goal orientation
- Performance-avoid goal orientation
- Learning goal orientation.
MOTIVATIONS:
Studying whether entrepreneurs who are classified as belonging to different categories based on their motivations and growth aspirations have differing outcomes in terms of method application, pivoting and termination. The four categories will be created according to a 2x2 matrix generated from the following survey measures:
- Intrinsic or Extrinsic motivation to entrepreneurship
- High or Low growth aspiration.
PARSIMONY/ SUBTRACTION:
Analyzing the effect of the treatments on the parsimony of the entrepreneurs’ reasoning and formulation of business models, as well as studying the effects of parsimony as a mediator towards performance, pivoting and termination outcomes. The expectation is that a scientific treatment will be positively related to parsimony/ subtraction.
Main measures related to this outcome:
- Output of a computer simulation task where we measure additive and subtractive changes performed by entrepreneurs to a 10x10 digital grid pattern
- Survey measure of self-reported additive or subtractive changes to each entrepreneur’s business idea
- Analysis of the business idea descriptions submitted by entrepreneurs to identify additive or subtractive changes to their business models over time
- Changes over time in the number of elements in the target customers, value proposition, and solution components of the business idea.
PERCEPTION OF CHALLENGES:
Analyzing the effect of the intervention on entrepreneurs’ perceptions of challenges to entrepreneurship and their perceived ability to respond to these challenges. The expectation is towards a higher perceived ability for the theory-driven intervention, especially in relation to challenges related to the business development rather than on the external environment. We ask entrepreneurs in the survey to:
- Indicate the top-3 challenges among a list of proposed challenges
- Indicate, for each of the proposed challenges, their perceived ability to deal with them (Likert scale)
- Open-ended question about challenges and obstacles to business goals in the phone interview, to both validate results from the questionnaire and get richer information.
The analysis will also look at potential moderation effects and correlation with overconfidence traits, specifically using a battery of questions capturing the “illusion of control” bias.
PITCH DEVELOPMENT: study whether training entrepreneurs to think like scientists leads them to produce narratives of their ideas that elicit more positive evaluations of their written ‘pitch’ (i.e., description of their business idea) from external audiences. Main measures related to this outcome (coded by external raters on 1-5 scales):
- Perceived idea novelty
- Perceived cognitive legitimacy
- Perceived business viability.