Björn Berggren

Entrepreneurial orientation is a concept that captures the importance of how and why certain individuals decide to take higher risks than the average small business owner so as to increase their return on assets deployed. Entrepreneurial orientation is linked to the concept of control aversion, which is used to explain why certain individuals refrain from using external financing to expand their firms. Control aversion suggests that most small business owners prefer to maintain total control rather than invite in the potentially disruptive influence of an external owner/investor. This study combines these two concepts in an attempt to introduce financing and investors into the discussion of entrepreneurial orientation and performance. Equity investors are shown to have a major influence on entrepreneurial performance, because business owners with an entrepreneurial orientation gain substantially from interaction with investors through the transfer of knowledge. The model was tested with a LInear Structural RELations (LISREL) analysis on a sample of 459 Swedish small and medium-sized enterprises

The financing of entrepreneurial ventures has been at the forefront of academic debate as well as policy-making discussion for almost a century. In general, there seems to be an agreement that the risks associated with business start-ups are higher than for mature firms, hence, these ventures will have to pay a higher interest rate than more mature and large firms. In this paper the authors analyze the role of a relatively new form of financing for entrepreneurial ventures – crowdfunding – and how this form of financing is similar and different from traditional sources of finance. The authors are also presenting different forms and models of crowdfunding available on the market together with illustrations from the crowdfunding industry in Sweden. The analysis indicates that the positive effects with crowdfunding are numerous but that the size of the crowdfunding sector is relatively small in comparison with the banking and venture capital industry