The Role of Entrepreneur-Venture Fit in Online Home-Based Entrepreneurship: A Systematic Literature Review

Abstract

Home-based businesses and their founders represent an important, but under-researched facet of entrepreneurship. Far from being small, hobby-businesses with little economic impact, home-based business make significant contribution to national economies in terms of both turnover and employment. Online home-based businesses have been recognised as an important and distinct sector of the home-based business domain, offering unique opportunity for innovation and business diversity. The paper presents a systematic literature review of extant research on online home-based entrepreneurs and their businesses. The findings of the review are structured and discussed using the theoretical lens of entrepreneur-venture fit. Use of this lens allows the study to bring coherence to previously fragmented extant studies, providing a basis for future research in this domain. The study also develops a novel model of entrepreneur-venture fit in the specific case of online home-based businesses. This allows us to suggest five positive interactions between entrepreneurial and venture characteristics. It also allows us to suggest a number of previously unidentified negative interactions, which may result in entrepreneurs becoming ‘locked-in’ and suffering multiple sources of stress.