Abstract:

This paper offers an integrative view about the use of services specifically designed for providing support in creating new businesses and making them grow. In particular, it addresses entrepreneurs’ decisions by considering not only firms’ internal and external resources but also entrepreneurs’ behavior within decision-making processes.

Several studies have analysed entrepreneurs’ use of business support services. However, rather than studying how the decision-making process is developed and concludes with the use of business support services, they have been mainly interested in: a) understanding the different sources of assistance in new firm creation; b) the role of public and private sectors in providing business support services; c) the frequency of use of business support services, and their impact on business performance. By contrast, this paper proposes a behavioral perspective to explain the processes by means of which entrepreneurs decide to adopt and use business support services.

To the best of our knowledge, this is indeed the first entrepreneurship study that seeks to explain entrepreneurial behaviors by integrating resource-based and behavioral decisionmaking perspectives. According to this line of reasoning, we conceive entrepreneurs’ decisionmaking on business support services as a multi-stage decision process. This process is composed by four stages: entrepreneur’s internal triggering force, search for information, assessment of alternatives, and use decision. Entrepreneur’s prior start-up experience becomes the triggering force of the decision process, while entrepreneur’s previous knowledge and experience facilitate acting precisely and accurately towards those business support services that better allow achieving business goals. Once the triggering force is activated, the entrepreneur searches information, either internally and/or externally. The importance and characteristics of these search activities vary according to prior start-up experience and firms’ resources. In fact, entrepreneurs with knowledge and experience and firms with more resources have more appropriate internal information. Therefore, these entrepreneurs and firms will be more inclined to identify and employ relevant external information sources. In addition, incoming spillovers can facilitate the identification of external information search and thus favor both the creation of opportunities and the access to specific resources. Moreover, external information sources may influence the propensity to regard the integration of new knowledge.