Nascent Entrepreneurship in a Longitudinal Perspective

This article examines the factors which are crucial in the decision to start business activities or not. For this purpose, we tracked nascent entrepreneurs who began the start-up process (by communicating their intentions to start a business) in order to find out whether or not they finally went into active business ( = founding success). In order to explain founding success, we defined four influencing dimensions: (1) the entrepreneur (person), (2) resources, (3) the environment and (4) the (start-up) process. Our analysis is based on a longitudinal study in which 290 nascent entrepreneurs in Austria were surveyed over a period of three years (1998—2001). After that period, 159 (54.9%) of them had already started business activities, while 131 (45.2%) had not. A binary logistic regression revealed that variables in all four influencing dimensions constitute significant predictors. Among those predictors, the most influential are intrapreneurial experience (human capital), organizational efforts (process), cohabitation (person) and the aim of a full-time start-up (process). Our results support the assumption that using as comprehensive a conception as possible (reflecting all four influencing dimensions) is useful for the purpose of explaining founding success.