Uscita imprenditoriale: Panoramica, Determinanti, e Fondatori abituali

The growing literature dedicated to entrepreneurship has recently highlighted the importance of considering the founded firms’ exit not as an ending, negative stage in an entrepreneur’s work-life experience. Instead, the decision to leave one’s venture is a strategic choice undertaken for the firm’s sake or as a founding entrepreneur’s lifestyle choice and leading to various after-exit paths. The thesis contributes to the stream of literature dedicated to the entrepreneurial exit and habitual entrepreneurship fields by (i) exploring the antecedents of the cross-road choice that founding entrepreneurs take right-after an acquisition occurs using a prospect theory approach and by (ii) investigating the characteristics that differentiate habitual founders from lifestyle entrepreneurs, borrowing from human capital theory and building on recent work in the field. From a methodological viewpoint, the thesis’ main contributions include (i) the use of a large dataset of 14,881 founders, created on the bases of the Crunchbase database (data.crunchbase.com), (ii) the focus on the very-after acquisition step taken by the founding entrepreneur and investigated in North America, Europe, and Asia, and (iii) the introduction of a relatively new unit of analysis -- habitual founders -- when discussing the characteristics of habitual entrepreneurship. After introducing the thesis’ main concepts in Chapter 1, the various contributions are developed in the three following chapters. Chapter 2 offers a descriptive study of the current literature in the entrepreneurial exit field, with particular attention given to the individual voluntary choice of exiting the founded firm. Chapter 3 extends the previous study by focusing on the antecedents of the founder’s intention to leave or remain within the firm right after encountering its acquisition from external actors and investigating whether results hold across world regions. Chapter 4 centers the study on the differences leading entrepreneurs toward a lifestyle versus a multiple-ventures creation entrepreneurial approach. The Appendix offers a step-by-step explanation of the procedures undertaken to create the database; it is thought to be used by other researchers as a guideline toward the creation of a similar database.