NEW VENTURE CREATION

New Venture Creation

New Venture Creation

Introduction

Some entrepreneurs set up business primarily to generate lifestyle benefit and only secondary for economic gain. These lifestyle entrepreneurs, who have received little interest in the entrepreneurship literature, are “individuals who operated business closely aligned with their personal value, interest and passions” (Marcketti and Ali 2006). The motivations for becoming a lifestyle entrepreneur are as varied as their business.

Even if pursuing quality of life can compromise profitability (for example, some geographic area can restrict market access), the lifestyle orientation does not necessarily result in financial suicide or developmental stagnation. New generations of consumer offer opportunities for these entrepreneurs and permit a “niche” market positioning. Tregear (2005) argues toward the case of artisans that being lifestyle-oriented could give a commercial advantage because it makes them “specialist marketing cachet”. There is a growing segment of consumers ready to pay a premium for these attributes. A similar phenomenon, in the case of tourism industry, was observed by Ateljevic and Doorne (2000). The entrepreneurs offering “real and authentic” experiences comply with self identity oriented consumers which assure them economic viability.

One of the main specificity of this category of entrepreneur is the implementing location they choose. The choice of the location is linked with the personal motivations (it is above all a residence choice allowing a quality of life instead of the traditional economic criteria.). In the literature the area of establishment is often considered as the privileged socio-economic environment of the entrepreneur (Torres 2004). Moreover, this territory is a source of social capital (material and financial resources, business opportunities and local governance) allowed by the combination of geographical and organisational proximities (Torre and Gilly 2000).

The entrepreneur can mobilize this local social capital (collective) by three “orders” of local embeddedness (Johannisson and Ali 2002): interfirm networking, firm/institution networking and holistic networking. We can underline the limits of this conceptual framework. First, the entrepreneur has to find the resources he/she needs on this territory. We can ask us, what is happening when there are not. Secondly, there is an effect of over-embeddedness which can implement routines and constraint innovative capabilities, business expansion and information or resources access (Jack and Anderson 2002). In this context, we propose to examine if the location chosen for the lifestyle-entrepreneurs self-satisfaction is an opportunity or an obstacle for their business success. Toward the traditional framework of embeddedness, the purpose of the current study is to conduct an explorative examination of the lifestyle entrepreneur behaviours in order to identify if their chosen location they choose comply with the local embeddedness theory or if they have specific relations with territory concept.

Christmas tree Business

Before investment time and money in any business idea one must be sure that what he/she is proposing is feasible.

We are going to sell Christmas trees from an area in front of a local pub. The pub, located on a busy road, has a large grassed area which made an ideal sales area for us to set up a seasonal ...