Building or Buying? How Early-Career Entrepreneurs Evaluate Entrepreneurial Entry Modes
(2026) ENTN19 20261Department of Business Administration
- Abstract
- Entrepreneurship is not entered through a single route. Two pathways stand out: new venture creation (NVC), founding a business from scratch, and entrepreneurship through acquisition (ETA), buying and leading an existing firm. Existing research explains the choice between the two largely through differences in accumulated resources, leaving a gap at the early-career stage, where evaluative reasoning forms before such resources are in place. This study asks what role self-efficacy beliefs, outcome expectations, and personal goals play in early-career entrepreneurship students' evaluation of ETA relative to NVC.
Using a qualitative, abductive design, the study analyses twenty semi-structured interviews with master's students in a single... (More) - Entrepreneurship is not entered through a single route. Two pathways stand out: new venture creation (NVC), founding a business from scratch, and entrepreneurship through acquisition (ETA), buying and leading an existing firm. Existing research explains the choice between the two largely through differences in accumulated resources, leaving a gap at the early-career stage, where evaluative reasoning forms before such resources are in place. This study asks what role self-efficacy beliefs, outcome expectations, and personal goals play in early-career entrepreneurship students' evaluation of ETA relative to NVC.
Using a qualitative, abductive design, the study analyses twenty semi-structured interviews with master's students in a single entrepreneurship programme, applying Social Cognitive Career Theory (SCCT) as a sensitising framework and a Gioia-based analysis. The findings specify the SCCT framework in four connected ways. Within self-efficacy, pathway imaginability operates as a precondition on which the Bandurian sources act, while resource gaps are interpreted through a perceived life-stage-resource fit, with NVC gaps read as fillable and ETA gaps as structural. Outcome expectations do not aggregate into one comparison but fracture into perceived endpoint equivalence, mirror-image trade-offs, and a morally asymmetric imagination of failure that weighs on ETA even where it is acknowledged as offering stronger survival prospects. Personal goals filter the choice on two levels, with a pathway-neutral autonomy goal establishing the career category and identity selecting the pathway. Rather than producing a single decision, under three configuration conditions, the three mechanisms reinforce one another to place the pathways in a temporal sequence: seventeen of twenty interviewees chose NVC as their present step and deferred ETA to a more-resourced later self. The study concludes that the main barrier to ETA at the early-career stage is imagination rather than information, with direct implications for entrepreneurship education and the business succession gap. (Less)
Please use this url to cite or link to this publication:
https://lup.lub.lu.se/student-papers/record/9239281
- author
- von Hirschhausen, Caspar LU and Balzer, Leonard LU
- supervisor
- organization
- course
- ENTN19 20261
- year
- 2026
- type
- H1 - Master's Degree (One Year)
- subject
- keywords
- Keywords: Entrepreneurship through acquisition, new venture creation, Social Cognitive Career Theory, pathway imaginability, temporal sequencing, early-career entrepreneurship, entry mode evaluation
- language
- English
- id
- 9239281
- date added to LUP
- 2026-06-23 16:17:25
- date last changed
- 2026-06-23 16:17:25
@misc{9239281,
abstract = {{Entrepreneurship is not entered through a single route. Two pathways stand out: new venture creation (NVC), founding a business from scratch, and entrepreneurship through acquisition (ETA), buying and leading an existing firm. Existing research explains the choice between the two largely through differences in accumulated resources, leaving a gap at the early-career stage, where evaluative reasoning forms before such resources are in place. This study asks what role self-efficacy beliefs, outcome expectations, and personal goals play in early-career entrepreneurship students' evaluation of ETA relative to NVC.
Using a qualitative, abductive design, the study analyses twenty semi-structured interviews with master's students in a single entrepreneurship programme, applying Social Cognitive Career Theory (SCCT) as a sensitising framework and a Gioia-based analysis. The findings specify the SCCT framework in four connected ways. Within self-efficacy, pathway imaginability operates as a precondition on which the Bandurian sources act, while resource gaps are interpreted through a perceived life-stage-resource fit, with NVC gaps read as fillable and ETA gaps as structural. Outcome expectations do not aggregate into one comparison but fracture into perceived endpoint equivalence, mirror-image trade-offs, and a morally asymmetric imagination of failure that weighs on ETA even where it is acknowledged as offering stronger survival prospects. Personal goals filter the choice on two levels, with a pathway-neutral autonomy goal establishing the career category and identity selecting the pathway. Rather than producing a single decision, under three configuration conditions, the three mechanisms reinforce one another to place the pathways in a temporal sequence: seventeen of twenty interviewees chose NVC as their present step and deferred ETA to a more-resourced later self. The study concludes that the main barrier to ETA at the early-career stage is imagination rather than information, with direct implications for entrepreneurship education and the business succession gap.}},
author = {{von Hirschhausen, Caspar and Balzer, Leonard}},
language = {{eng}},
note = {{Student Paper}},
title = {{Building or Buying? How Early-Career Entrepreneurs Evaluate Entrepreneurial Entry Modes}},
year = {{2026}},
}