A Context-Choice Model of Niche Entrepreneurship

Abstract

Entrepreneurship research has gravitated towards a singular focus on the Silicon Valley model as the standard model of entrepreneurship. By contrast, some entrepreneurship scholars have more recently suggested embracing entrepreneurship as diverse and colorful. We build on this latter stream of literature by analyzing the diversity of entrepreneurship from complementary institutional arrangements inherent in national economies. Drawing from Robert’s (2004) model of complementarities between context and organizational choice variables, we analyze the contextualization of diverging entrepreneurship models. Our findings indicate that some economies are complementary to a specialized niche strategy, while others instead promote a scalable mass-market manifestation of entrepreneurship.