دانلود رایگان مقاله آیا سرمایه گذاران و کارآفرینان با یکدیگر هماهنگ هستند؟

ABSTRACT

Entrepreneurs and investors face challenges in the ‘thin market’ for early stage entrepreneurial finance. Improving this situation has been a priority of policy makers for at least a decade, however, the challenges in this matching process are still poorly understood. Theory suggests that matching problems may originate in different perceptions in areas such as evaluation criteria, risk and risk management by investors and entrepreneurs. To find a good match it seems essential to understand what is important to your counterpart. Based on a mixed methods approach using data collected in semi-structured interviews and a survey with both entrepreneurs and investors mostly active in green tech innovation, this study systematically analyses where their perceptions deviate and where frictions in the matching process may occur. We find that a mismatch exists in the perception of risk, the importance attached to risk, the search channels used to find a potential partner and the evaluation criteria applied in evaluating a proposition (i.e., exit, innovativeness, capabilities of teams). This paper suggests that increasing market transparency and creating a mutual understanding of the investment process will prevent potentially damaging perception misalignment from arising in the first place.

5.2. Limitations and future research

Although the combination of qualitative and quantitative methods addresses some concerns about the generalizability of our findings, our relatively small sample warrants some caution. Our initial simple statistical analyses give indication for misaligned perceptions. We believe this generalizes to the wider population, because our interviews and survey oversampled entrepreneurs that were already successful in finding funding. If anything, one would expect this oversampling to bias the results towards more aligned perceptions. In the survey study, about half the entrepreneur population gained investment experience. If we find misaligned perceptions in this sample, it is likely to be worse in the general population. The small sample size does not allow for more sophisticated econometrics and statistics. Future research could aim to increase our sample of investors and entrepreneurs, such that more sophisticated statistical analysis is possible. Our data also does not allow us to identify the two parties to a proposed match. In other words, this is not a matched pairs study. This implies we cannot verify that, all else equal, misaligned perceptions ex ante indeed reduce the probability of a match being made. Collecting such a dataset while preventing the oversampling of successful matches, however, proves a daunting task. In future, we aim to collect such data at events that bring investors and entrepreneurs together and/or conduct.