From hobby to business: Exploring environmental antecedents of entrepreneurial alertness using fsQCA

ABSTRACT

Through a tailored survey targeting homebrewing communities in the United States, this research investigates environmental factors---feedback, collaboration offers, and awards received---triggering individuals who are not yet entrepreneurs to develop intentions of starting a business based on their hobby. The study specifically focuses on the role these factors play in influencing the three dimensions of entrepreneurial alertness phenomenon: scanning and search; association and connection; and evaluation and judgment. The results of a series of hierarchical regressions complemented by a fuzzy set qualitative comparative analysis (fsQCA) show that receiving positive feedback or collaboration offers from fellow hobbyists can stimulate individuals’ entrepreneurial alertness.

KEYWORDS:

• Entrepreneurial alertness
• social factors
• fsQCA; hobbyists; awards; feedback; collaborations

Notes

¹ Full details on C-OAR-SE procedure for scale development of constructive feedback, awards and collaborations constructs are available upon request. We would like to thank one of the anonymous reviewers for suggesting providing more information regarding this matter.

² We further tested our causal pathways for necessity analysis and confirmed that they can be classified as sufficient but not necessary conditions, since either their consistency was below 0.9 or their coverage was lower than 0.5 (George & Bennett, 2005; Legewie, 2013).