A NETNOGRAPHIC STUDY OF ENTREPRENEURIAL TRAITS:
EVALUATING CLASSIC TYPOLOGIES USING THE CROWDSOURCING ALGORITHM OF AN ONLINE
COMMUNITY
Marcos
Cerqueira Lima
De
Vinci Business Lab, PULV, Paris, France
E-mail:
marcos.cerqueira_lima@devinci.fr
Laila
Namaci
De
Vinci Business Lab, PULV, Paris, France
E-mail:
laila.namaci@devinci.fr
Thierry
Fabiani
De
Vinci Business Lab, PULV, Paris, France
E-mail: thierry.fabiani@devinci.fr
Submission: 26/11/2013
Revision: 22/01/2014
Accept: 27/01/2014
ABSTRACT
This paper evaluates how the advices of
experienced entrepreneurs to young start-up creators in an online community
reflect entrepreneurship traits commonly found in conceptual typologies. The
overall goal is to contrast and evaluate existing models based on evidence from
an online community. This should facilitate future studies to improve current
typologies by ranking entrepreneurial traits according to perceived relevance.
In order to achieve these objectives, we have conducted a “netnographic study”
(i.e., the qualitative analysis of web-based content) of 96 answers to the
question “What is the best advice for a young, first-time startup CEO?” on
Quora.com. Relying on Quora’s ranking algorithm (based on crowdsourcing of
votes and community prestige), we focused on the top 50% of answers (which we
shall call the “above Quora 50” category) considered the most relevant by its
2000+ followers and 120,000+ viewers. We used Nvivo as a Qualitative Data
Analysis Software to code all the entries into the literature categories. These
codes were then later retrieved using matrix queries to compare the incidence
of traits and the perceived
relevance of answers. We found that
among the 50% highest ranking answers on Quora, the following traits are
perceived as the most important for young entrepreneurs to develop: management
style, attitude in interpersonal relations, vision, self-concept, leadership
style, marketing, market and customer knowledge, innovation, technical
knowledge and skills, attitude to growth, ability to adapt, purpose and
relations system. These results could lead to improving existing typologies and
creating new models capable of better identifying people with the highest
potential to succeed in new venture creation.
This
paper looks at the qualitative analysis of the contents in an online community
discussion around the topic of ideal entrepreneurship traits. The idea is to contrast these community
perceptions with traits commonly found in conceptual typologies. It has a
triple objective: a) to identify entrepreneurship traits and attributes from
the literature review that are highly important in the perception of actual
entrepreneurs in the online community; b) to establish literature traits and
attributes that are considered less important c) to identify emergent
characteristics that are present in the community data but are not often
mentioned in the typologies considered. The overall goal is to contrast and
evaluate existing models based on evidence from the online community. This
should facilitate future studies to improve existing typologies by ranking
entrepreneurial traits according to perceived relevance.
In
order to achieve these objectives, we have conducted a passive or observational
“netnographic study” (KOZINETS, 2010), consisting in the qualitative analysis
of an online community answers to the question “What is the best advice for a
young, first-time startup CEO?” on Quora.com. Quora is a forum in which experts
in a given domain offer their insights based on public queries. Relying on
Quora’s ranking algorithm (based on crowdsourcing of votes and community
prestige), we focused on the top 50% of answers considered the most relevant by
its 2000+ followers and 120,000+
viewers. We shall call this the “above Quora 50” category. We contrasted the
most commonly mentioned traits in this category with a list of general
entrepreneur characteristics according to the typologies described in the
literature review.
This
article is divided in four sessions. In the first we conduct a literature
review of common entrepreneur typologies and the traits and attributes
associated with them. We then describe the empirical approach used to analyze
Quora’s contents. We then present the main findings and discuss them, then
conclude by pointing out limitations of this exploratory study and by
suggesting future developments in this field.
Three
approaches can be identified in the literature of entrepreneurship typologies:
the entrepreneurs, their actions and the context in which they operate. These
are respectively treated as the cognitive, structural and praxeological
approaches (VERSTRAETE, 2002; VERSTRAETE, et al., 2011). That is consistent
with the notion that the phenomenon of entrepreneurship revolves around the
entrepreneur (the individual, their traits), the organization (the new venture)
and the relationship between the two (JULIEN; MARCHESNAY, 1996; BRUYAT, 1993;
OMRANE, et al., 2011). In this review, we are going to focus on the individual
(the so-called “traits approach”, mostly based on cognitive and psychological
characteristics) and the attributes of the entrepreneurship process (the
“process approach”, which can be regarded as a synthesis between the structural
and praxeological approaches).
The
individual approach emphasizes entrepreneurial traits and what sets them apart
from the rest of the population. It addresses the question “who is the
entrepreneur and why do they create new ventures?” This approach is often one
of the main components of entrepreneurship typologies (FILION, 2000). It has
been severely criticized (GARTNER, 1988) for being incomplete and not taking
into account the interactive nature of the entrepreneurship process.
The
process approach emphasizes the relationship between the environment, the
organization and the entrepreneur. Less easily identifiable because of its
dynamic nature, it is usually detected indirectly in the typological treatments
of the entrepreneurship phenomenon. The following sessions will take a closer
look at both traditions.
As
previously stated, early research in entrepreneurship focused primarily on the
characteristics of new venture creators and, more specifically, their
personality traits. They focused on the psychological aspect of the individual,
trying to address questions such as: “Why under similar circumstances some
individuals decide to start their own business, while others were do not?” or
“is the entrepreneurial character innate or acquired?” (GARTNER, 1989; HO;
BARNES, 2012).
Among
the most commonly researched traits found in the literature, we can cite:
·
The
need for achievement: the
work of McClelland (1961, 1965, 1969 cited by HERNANDEZ, 1999) popularized this
concept and contributed to its development. According to this author,
entrepreneurs are primarily motivated by their drive to accomplish their
vision. They see themselves as masters of their fate, so they seek
responsibility for the planning and execution of their unique endeavors.
·
The
internal locus of control:
it is the perception, closely related to the previous trait, that an individual
can control what is happening internally. In other words, these individuals
feel that they can influence what happens to them by their behavior. Various
studies (FILION, 2000) have shown that the new venture creators have an
internal locus of control as the source to their actions.
·
The
propensity to take risks:
starting a business is an adventure full of risks. According to Belley (1990,
cited by HERNANDEZ, 1999) these risks are of different natures: financial,
psychological, business related and family related.
This
school of thought has been quite strongly criticized. Critics of the “traits
approach” rightly point out that a great number of individuals with similar
personality traits never chose to start a new venture and instead preferred
more traditional careers. The legacy of this research tradition remains highly
controversial, as it has failed to produce traits that would be necessary and
sufficient conditions to distinguish between venture creating profiles and
non-entrepreneurial types. These studies are characterized by their
one-dimensional approach of the entrepreneurial phenomenon, and clearly
overlook the role of the environment in this phenomenon.
A
more holistic approach has emerged in the past two decades. This perspective
emphasizes that entrepreneurial behaviors are not the result of individual or
contextual determinism, but of a strategic intent of specific actors under
specific circumstances (BERNOUX, 1990; AMBLARD, et al., 1996; FAYOLLE, 2001;
MOROZ; HINDLE, 2012). The entrepreneur is seen as someone who reasons and
calculates who evaluates the means they need to achieve certain ends. This
self-awareness would explain their actions and, in particular, their
professional behavior. This behavior is entirely conditioned by the situation
in which they find themselves.
Hence,
the entrepreneurial process involves several environmental variables (social,
economic, cultural, and organizational). It is proactively driven by the
activities and actions of certain individuals that decide to transform
opportunities into new ventures (BYGRAVE; HOFER, 1991, cited by FAYOLLE, 2002).
The entrepreneurial process combines behavioral descriptions and organizational
contexts into complex, dynamic models. For Hernandez (1999), this approach
requires a good understanding of organizational theory and particularly the
notion “organizational emergence”.
As an
early example of this tradition, Shapero (1975) discusses four main variables
to explain the act of creating new ventures: contextual, psychological
(motivation, attitude, etc.), sociological (family, peer group, etc.), economic
(availability of resources, economic opportunities and threats, etc.). Several
authors have been inspired by Shapero’s model. We note for example the
framework by Le Marois (1985), which is structured around three poles:
relational, personal and professional.
Over a
decade ago, Louis Jacques Filion (2000) undertook a comprehensive study of the
criteria commonly used to develop entrepreneurial typologies. He started with
the very first typologies developed by Arthur H. Cole (1942, 1946), a field
pioneer who established the Entrepreneurship Center at Harvard University with
Joseph Schumpeter in the late 1940s. He then looked at the typologies created
by Smith (1967), Collins and Moore (1970), Laufer (1975), Miles and Snow
(1978), Vesper (1980), Julien and Marchesnay (1987), Carland et al. (1988),
Lafuente and Salas (1989), his own typology Filion (1998) and Marchesnay’s
(1998). Based on this collection of typologies, Filion (2000) came up with the
following list of criteria most commonly used to develop entrepreneurial
typologies:
Table 1:
Filion’s synthesis of common entrepreneurship traits
01.
Self-concept |
13.
Need for achievement |
02.
Commitment |
14.
Need for power |
03.
Systemic root |
15.
Need for recognition |
04.
Vision |
16.
Need for security |
05.
Relations system |
17.
Attitude to growth |
06.
Delegation |
18.
Attitude in interpersonal relations |
07.
Purpose |
19.
Attitude to profits |
08.
Independence |
20.
Attitude to risk |
09.
Locus of control |
21.
Leadership style |
10.
Ability to adapt |
22.
Management style |
11.
Creativity |
23.
Decision-making style |
12.
Innovation |
24.
Strategic style |
This synthesis is clearly biased
towards the “individual traits” approach, lacking the dynamic, interactive
elements of the “process approach”. It is centered on cognitive and
psychological traits rather than contextual, sociological or organizational
variables and is therefore incomplete as a tool for understanding the
entrepreneurship phenomenon. However, for our purposes of exploring which
traits are perceived to be the most relevant in the entrepreneur’s personality,
Filion’s synthesis is a good starting point.
As the following empirical session
will show, the above list overlooks at least two characteristics perceived to be
quite important by the Quora community: “Marketing, Market and Customer
Knowledge” and “Technical Knowledge”. Those are not “psychological traits” as
most of the variables in Filion’s list, of course, but rather closer to the
“process approach”, indicating how well prepared entrepreneurs are to deal with
their organizational and socio-economic environment. Therefore, these two high
ranking variables that emerged from the Quora data seem to suggest that this
online community is quite aware of the limits of the “individual traits”
approach. More interestingly for the purposes of this paper, they seem to
suggest that “Marketing, Market and Customer Knowledge” is perceived as one of
the most important characteristics of successful entrepreneurs.
The objective of this study was to
confront Filion’s synthesis of entrepreneur traits with the perceptions of
Quora.com online community members who answered the question “What is the best
advice for a young, first-time startup CEO?” It was assumed that by “young,
first-time start-up CEO” the community had in mind an entrepreneur who founded
the new venture, as is usually the case in small businesses. The vast majority
of the verbatim statements by community members confirm this assumption.
The chosen method was the passive or
observational ethnographic study (KOZINETS, 2010). This is a more superficial,
non-immersive version of the full-blown netnography approach, which Kozinetz
(2010, p. 60) defines as a “participant-observational research based in online
fieldwork. It uses computer-mediated communications as a source of data to
arrive at the ethnographic understanding and representation of a cultural or
communal phenomenon”. In an earlier work, Kozinets (2002, p. 61) argues that
this technique uses “information publicly available in online forums to
identify and understand the needs and decision influences of relevant online
consumer groups”. Originally designed by marketers to understand consumer
behavior, it can be adapted to understand online community perceptions in
general. It is less time consuming and elaborate than traditional qualitative
methods such as focus groups and interviews besides being more timely, less
costly and less obtrusive (KOZINETS, 2002). It is based on the observation of
textual discourse, not of the individuals themselves. Informants in netnography
therefore “may be presumed to be presenting a more carefully cultivated and
controlled self-image” (p. 68).
Kozinets (2002, 2010) defines the
following six stages for a full-blown netnography: (1) making cultural entrée,
(2) gathering and analyzing data, (3) ensuring trustworthy interpretation, (5)
conducting ethical research, and (6) providing opportunities for culture member
feedback. Being the present study a “passive” version of that method without
direct participation of the researchers in the communities, phases 1 and 6 are
not as relevant. This exploratory investigation – sometimes called a
“netnographic exploration” (see PERKINS, 2010) does not have therefore any
ambition of obtaining the in-depth insights offered by the participant
immersion in an online community over an extended period of time, such as
proposed by the original netnography approach. Similar non-participative,
“passive ethnographic” explorations have been undertaken recently by several
authors (BEAVEN; LAWS, 2007) and by Kozinets himself (BROWN; SHERRY; KOZINETS,
2007).
Out of the 102 answers available in
the community in February 2013, 96 were considered “valid” (6 off-topic answers
were eliminated by community members). These answers were contributed over a
period of over three years since the question was first formulated. The
following statistics give an idea about the respondent’s profile: 90% are male
and 60% declare themselves to be either founders or CEOs of start-up
themselves; among the 60% of respondents whose location was known, the vast
majority live in the US (50%), followed by India (15%), the UK (10%) and Canada
(8%), which reflect the native English-speaking bias of the community members.
Quora became one of the most popular
question-and-answer services on the web due to the efficiency of its
answer-ranking algorithm. Using a combination of a public voting system with
community reputation scores, it makes sure that the most relevant contributions
will emerge to the top. We’ll call “Quora Relevance” (QR) the position of an
answer relative to the others according to Quora’s ranking algorithm. Note that
answers with a very high number of votes can be ranked lower than a
contribution with less votes; community prestige and the quality of previous
answers sometimes are more important in Quora’s algorithm than the mere number
of votes.
Figure 1 shows the number of votes
received by answers in four categories: 75-100% QR (the top 24 answers, which
we will call “Quora 100”), 50-75% QR (the 24 answers that follow, “Quora 75”),
25-50% QR and 1-25% (the 50 lowest ranking answers, respectively “Quora 50” and
“Quora 25”).
As indicated by the above Figure,
only 3 “nodes” (answers) in the “Quora 100” tier had 5 votes or less. That
proportion jumps to 70% in “Quora 75” and over 90% in the “Quora 50”and “Quora
25” tiers. We had the choice of focusing only on the top 25% or using the
“above Quora 50” cutting point (half the total number of answers). We decided
for the latter option, in spite of the high number of questions with few votes
in the “Quora 75” category. We did this because, as explained previously, the
number of votes is only one of the criteria used by Quora’s algorithm to rank
the relevance of an answer. The fact that an answer is in the “better half” of
the list means it is considered much more relevant than an answer with a
similar number of votes which are ranked lower. Therefore, all answers “above
Quora 50” were deemed relevant.
Figure
1: Number of Votes in Four Levels of “Quora Relevance”
We
used Nvivo 10 as Qualitative Data Analysis Software to code fragments of the
answers into the categories of Filion’s synthesis. Cross-coding was used among
the authors to ensure consistency. When a Quora statement didn’t seem to fit
any of Filion’s variables, new categories or “nodes” were created. These 9 new
“emergent variables” are listed below:
Table
2: Entrepreneur characteristics emerging from the Quora data which were not
listed by Filion
25.
Marketing, Market and Customer Knowledge |
30.
Patience |
26.
Lifestyle |
31.
Communication Skills |
27.
Technical Knowledge and Skills |
32.
Attitude Towards Failure |
28.
Ethics |
33.
Ability to Learn |
29.
Reputation Management |
|
The frequency with which these nodes
appeared in the Quora community was then retrieved using matrix queries with
NVivo. The top 12 results are presented on Table 1 below.
Table 3: Top 12
entrepreneur traits ranked above “Quora 50” (asterisks indicate emerging
categories)
It is
perhaps unsurprising that “management style” emerged as the top characteristic;
the term is so vague that it can encompass several of the “process approach”
variables related with organizational and environmental contexts. By breaking
down this category into sub-categories (Table 4), we found that the vast
majority of comments (64%) were related with hiring and firing practices. Peter
Berg (whose answer was ranked number one by far with astounding 320 votes!) for
example advises young entrepreneurs to “Be really picky with your hiring, and
hire the absolute best people you possibly can”. The comment “Hire people
smarter than you” by Adrian Aoun was the only sentence he contributed to the
discussion; it earned him 82 votes. Mark Otero had 186 votes with the comment
“Hire for passion: Hire for passion over experience. When you can afford it,
hire employees who have both”. Eleven other “Quora 100” answers had similar
recommendations.
The
other components of “Management Style” recommendations were “Structure and
Governance” (comments such as “build a great board and/or advisory board” by
Jared Kim, 52 votes), “Processes” (“Trust your team but constantly measure them
on goal” by Paul Singh, 13 votes) and “Culture” (one single comment by Chris
Prescott, “Build the company culture around achievement and momentum and the
rest will generally fall into place”, 17 votes).
Table
4: Breaking down of the “Management Style” category into its sub-nodes
For
the sake of synthesis, Table 5 reproduces some of the representative comments
for each one of the other 11 top ranking traits above.
Table 5: Sample
comments for top ranking entrepreneur traits on the online community at
Quora.com
# |
Trait |
Above- |
Sample
Comments (numbers in parenthesis = votes on Quora; |
2 |
Attitude in interpersonal relations |
12 |
"Find a couple trusted, experienced
advisors/mentors" (320), "When fundraising, ask people for advice,
not money" (320), "Share, don't be afraid that others will go out
and copy your business" (29),
"Don't be afraid to have tough conversations" (8),
"Being actively social (in the real world, too!)" (8),
"Trust your co-founders" (10) |
3 |
Vision |
11 |
"you're responsible for steering the vision of
the company, including setting long-term goals for your eventual total world
domination" (320), "Focus Sounds simple, but probably the best bit
of advice I've received so far" (17), "Learn to Say No In the early
months" (17), "Find a co-founder who shares your vision" (14) |
4 |
Self-concept |
10 |
"Know your weaknesses" (187), "Stay
Humble, Stay Positive" (17),
"the best answer I can give you is not to call yourself a
CEO" (9), "Be honest to yourself" (14), "consider
removing your tear ducts" (8). |
5 |
Leadership style |
9 |
"Communicate and be transparent with your
team" (52), "Eat with your team often" (21), "Find
someone who disagrees with you often to be in your think tank" (8),
"have an inventory of your team's strengths and weaknesses. their
attitudes and personalities" (6) |
6 |
Marketing, Market & Customer Knowledge* |
8 |
"Go to industry-specific events" (186),
"The most important thing is to understand what constitutes value to
your customers" (9), "Read a lot about your market and talk to
smart people" (4), "Learning by doing including things like: -
constantly talking to people - listening to customers" (7), "Know
your market - research, ask, be mentored, be a sponge of data about your
market" (6) |
7 |
Innovation |
6 |
"Fail fast: start with a working set of
assumptions and test them out in the market very fast" (186), "Get
*someone* to pay you to test product/market fit" (135), "Without
the right product, you're building your house on sand with no foundation and
everything else will fall apart" (17), "Keep your
idea/product/feature simple and gradually expand" (6), "Try it fast
with little money. Make adjustments" (3) |
8 |
Technical Knowledge and Skills* |
6 |
"Learn how to set up and run the hell out of an
Amazon Mechanical Turk, Google Analytics, etc. now" (135), "Read up
on what successful and smart people have written about the topic" (7),
"Know your financials - burn rate, capital, expenditures, etc."
(6), "Do something within your area of expertise" (5), "Learn
how to sell or find a partner that can" (5) |
9 |
Attitude to growth |
5 |
"Don't give away equity too easily" (320),
"don't be a startup, be a business" (47), "50% of a successful
company is better than 100% of a failure" (8), "Always raise more
capital than you think you need" (0). |
10 |
Ability to adapt |
5 |
"Get used to feeling not good enough"
(135), "Dont waste time in the pursuit of perfection" (4),
"Learn to quickly balance pros and cons" (6), “Do everything that
makes sense to you but be aware of red flags and remain resilient to change”
(5) |
11 |
Purpose |
5 |
"Be obsessed with your idea" (135),
"Catalog a list of hobbies you'll take up 'when you make it" (135),
"Build your company, product & culture with intention" (8),
"The intentional mind leaves no one behind - that is the true code of an
entrepreneur" (8) |
12 |
Relations system |
4 |
"Your choice of partners and investors should
be thought of as permanent and are therefore the most important two decisions
you make." (73), "Just pick up the phone, I want to stress that
with a few exceptions almost no one is out of reach these days." (29),
"Have your cheerleaders (friends/family/supporters) on speed dial"
(5) |
Special attention should be given to
the so-called “emerging categories”: Marketing, Market and Customer Knowledge
(ranked 6th) and Technical Knowledge and Skills (ranked 8th).
Filion seemed to be quite focused on limiting his choice of variables to the
cognitive / psychological traits of the “individual approach” when he created
his synthesis, otherwise he would have added these two components which are an
inherent part of his own “visionary process” (Filion, 1991) framework. Most of
the other elements of his model (vision, leadership style, self-concept,
relations system) are present in his synthesis and have actually ranked quite
high in our Quora study.
It is
a testament to the so-called “wisdom of the crowds” (as Web 2.0 crowdsourcing
is often called) that these two components emerged from the Quora data to
enrich Filion’s synthesis. This confirms the need to go beyond the “individual
traits” approach and to embrace more complex -- albeit difficult to measure --
variables inherent to the “process approach”.
Finally,
it is necessary to look at the attributes that scored extremely low in this
study and speculate why that was the case. Table 6 presents the Quora ranks
from the 13th to the 33rd positions.
Table 6: Lower ranking entrepreneur traits on the
online community at Quora.com
Among the least important
characteristics (in the bottom five positions) we found the following:
independence, systemic thinking, locus of control, need for achievement and
need for power. We believe that the very
low score of these traits is related to the way the original question was
formulated: “What is the best advice for a young, first-time startup CEO?…”
Very few people would advise young entrepreneurs to seek power or even
achievement for achievement’s sake. Systemic thinking and locus of control are
very abstract concepts, difficult to formulate as an advice.
Among
the “emerging traits” that were seldom mentioned in the literature review but
were considered highly relevant in the “above Quora 50” category, we found:
good lifestyle habits, patience and ethics. These could be valuable additions
to Filion’s synthesis. Traits like reputation management, ability to learn and
communication skills had surprisingly low scores in the same category (they
ranked much better in “Quora 100”, which includes all 96 respondents and not
just the 50% most relevant).
This is clearly an exploratory study based on a small
sample of users of an online questions and answers service and therefore its
findings cannot be generalized. It needs to be followed up by quantitative
studies based on a representative sample in order to allow for generalizations.
Furthermore, it is based on a specific question about advice to be given to
young start-up creators and managers, and hence has a bias towards the positive
qualities we expect these people to develop. Classic traits found in the
literature, such as the need for achievement and the need for power are
therefore ranked understandably low in the perception of the “advisers”.
The preliminary implications of our findings are
manifold: a) as well as finding “common traits” in existing typologies,
researchers should also seek to rank them according to the perceived importance
in the eyes of experienced entrepreneurs; b) young entrepreneurs may be
overwhelmed with hundreds of “best practice” advices found in both academic and
professional publications; giving them a sense of what skills and traits to
prioritize in their development may help them focus on the attributes that are
perceived by a large community of practice to be the most relevant; c) teachers
and researchers of entrepreneurship may acquire a more nuanced view of
entrepreneur traits perceived as relevant. This could lead to improving
existing typologies and creating new models capable of better identifying
people with the highest potential to succeed in new venture creation.
Online communities such as Quora and their “relevant
content algorithms” are becoming increasingly meaningful as a resource for
understanding how certain groups feel about specific issues; one must be
reminded that behind the 50% most relevant answers used in our ranking system
there are the “voices” of thousands of users who voted them up and down in
Quora’s relevance hierarchy during a period of more than 36 months. Even if
online communities have been a major source of qualitative research insights in
the recent past, the collaborative nature of Web 2.0 “crowdsourcing”
technologies, which evolved in the last five years, remains underappreciated in
academic discussions.
Future studies could use a similar “passive
netnography” approach to expand the sample used in this exploratory
investigation, or even follow the immersive procedures suggested by Kozinets
(2010) by interviewing community members about their opinions and validating
the findings with them later. Parallel communities have been formed at
Quora.com based on questions such as “What does it take to be a successful
entrepreneur?” (54 answers, 5000+ viewers, 200+ followers) or “What should you
do if you want to be an entrepreneur, but have no background in business?” (44
answers, 19000+ viewers, nearly 400 followers). Filion’s synthesis, enriched by
some of the emerging categories found in this study, could be used to compare
results among these communities and improve the overall value of the present
findings.
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