Antecedents of entrepreneurial attention and new product commercialization in small firms

Abstract

Despite the importance of small and new firms in product innovation, current research still lacks a unified framework that explicates why large variation exists in innovation among those firms. We develop and empirically test an attention-based model of new product commercialization. In prior research, entrepreneurial attention has been associated with firm innovation. We investigate how entrepreneurial attention placed to the product-market domain problem affects innovative organizational activities (i.e., information search and external knowledge acquisition) and the likelihood of product commercialization in the firm. Further, we explore the antecedents of entrepreneurial attention from an organization-environment alignment approach—i.e., the intensity of entrepreneurial attention is a result of the firm’s alignment between its organizational newness and environment conditions such as dynamism and adversity.