Early indicators of high potential entrepreneurship: implications for venture capital and policy making

Abstract

Identifying the most promising early-stage projects is a critical yet daunting challenge, which can benefit entrepreneurs and investors, but also society at large. Moreover, given the overwhelming failure rates, supporting those projects is of paramount importance since enormous amounts of public and private resources are devoted to these endeavors hoping that they will contribute significantly to employment and wealth creation. This dissertation addresses critical gaps in the study of entrepreneurial success by focusing on venture success in its broadest sense. To the best of our knowledge, it conducts the most comprehensive, evidence-based review of the antecedents of success to date, laying a solid foundation for both theoretical and practical advancements. In addition, we introduce the Five Fundamental Features Pyramid, a new framework that significantly advances how variables used in entrepreneurship research are classified, enhancing clarity and posing important implications even for advancing the training of Large Language Models (LLMs) and future similar innovations. Practically, the research develops a novel assessment tool specifically designed for evaluating entrepreneurial teams. Unlike similar approaches that import practices from general contexts such as human resources, this tool aims to improve decision-making for investors and policymakers by focusing on entrepreneurial traits for which we found in the literature some evidence of association with success. These contributions form a holistic framework for the study of entrepreneurial success, making the findings more meaningful and useful for practitioners. And with this work, we also hope to suggests new directions for future studies, aiming to lower the high failure rates of new ventures and boost their societal benefits.