| New venture creation is at the heart of entrepreneurship research. Despite its importance, substantial gaps remain in our understanding of the earliest stages of venture creation. This dissertation addresses this gap by exploring venture creation in a unique context: post-disaster venturing. This context allows for the identification of ventures at their earliest stages, avoiding methodological pitfalls that hampered prior studies. In exploring venturing in this context I ask: how do new venture creators' existing resources and responses to environmental threats influence the creation of value in the form of both organizational outputs and personal benefits? To address this research question I developed two primary databases. The first sample includes 89 individuals who endured the Black Saturday Bushfire natural disaster, which occurred near Melbourne, Australia. In Study 1, I use this sample to explore how variance in individual's resource stocks (i.e., human capital) and flows (resource loss) influences venture creation and subsequently individual functioning. I find that human capital can function as a "double-edged sword," where it has the potential to either positively or negatively influence post-disaster functioning depending on whether possessors of human capital take action (i.e., start new ventures). The second database consists of 143 new ventures created in the aftermath of the same disaster event (Black Saturday). In Study 2, I use this dataset to develop a mixed-method social network analysis technique, which I then apply in Study 3. Developing a method to assess social networks is useful in understanding social capital as a resource stock, which is the contextual complement to human capital. In Study 3 I assess how variance in venture creators' stocks of two types of social connections (bridging and bonding brokerage) influence early resource procurement and management decisions, and how these together influence early venture activities. I found evidence that both bridging and bonding brokerage are associated with venturing, but that they differ in how they influence early venture activities. Taken together, these studies suggest that new venture value creation is a function of venture creator resource stocks, flows, and action. |
