JBV Special Issue Call: Customer Involvement in the Entrepreneurship Process of New Ventures
Special issue information: This Special Issue aims to connect entrepreneurship literature with marketing research while advancing entrepreneurship studies and reaching a broad, globally diverse authorship and readership. Therefore, we aim to be broad enough to attract a sizable number of high-quality submissions, while also being focused enough to have a clear research theme. To this end, we encourage authors to tap into the entrepreneurship, marketing, and innovation literatures to examine the unique entrepreneurial challenges and opportunities that new ventures face in involving (or not) customers in the entrepreneurship process. We believe that integrating research across the disciplines of entrepreneurship, marketing, and innovation can advance entrepreneurship theory while offering important practical implications. In particular, we encourage submissions that bridge across entrepreneurship, marketing, and innovation. This objective is consistent with JBV’s stature as a multidisciplinary, multifunctional, and multi-contextual journal and as a preeminent forum for business venturing research. A non-exhaustive list of intriguing and important questions researchers could choose to examine for the special issue includes:
1) Nature of customer involvement in new ventures
- How can customer involvement serve as a platform for the entrepreneurship process in new ventures (Morgeson, Hult, et al., 2020)?
- How do new ventures manage the dynamic interplay between the venture and its customers – characterized by collaborative engagement, iterative feedback loops, and mutual value creation (Hult et al., 2017)?
- What resources do customers contribute to the inception and growth of a new venture? Which resources are most valuable, and which resources can be detrimental to product development and market positioning?
- Can an excessive reliance on customer input without proper validation or strategic direction potentially lead to misalignment with market needs or dilution of the venture's unique value proposition?
- How do new ventures develop, deploy, and renew resources to involve customers in the entrepreneurship process while avoiding overreliance through strategic resource management and iterative refinement (Carnes, Hitt, Sirmon, Chirico & Huh, 2022)?
2) New venture success (or failure) driven by customer involvement
- Which forms of innovation in new ventures are most successful in being influenced by customers?
- How can new ventures sense and seize opportunities for innovation through customer involvement?
- What are the characteristics of new ventures and their owners and managers that support greater customer involvement in the entrepreneurship process?
- What contingencies (e.g., resource constraints, stakeholder requirements, environmental aspects) influence the relationship between customer involvement and new venture success (or failure) (Webb et al., 2011)?
- What role does marketing play in enhancing customer involvement in the entrepreneurship process in new ventures?
- Are some new venture forms (e.g., founder firms, family-owned firms, no-profit organizations) more successful than others in effectively involving customers in the entrepreneurial process?
- What conditions facilitate or constrain customer involvement in new venture entrepreneurial activities? What are the entrepreneurial challenges and opportunities that new ventures face in involving (or not) customers in the entrepreneurship process? Do the pros and cons of involving customers change over time (Newbert et al., 2020)?
3) Processes and capabilities in customer involvement in the entrepreneurship process
- What approaches to experimentation of new product ideas with customers can new ventures pursue for successful new product development?
- What collaborative processes with customers and other stakeholders (separately or jointly) during new product development are needed to achieve success in the new venture entrepreneurship process?
- What cognitive and behavioral approaches allow new venture owners and managers to break with linear thinking and lead to customer-driven innovation in the entrepreneurship process (Pryor et al., 2016)?
- What capabilities (e.g., managerial, marketing, innovation, strategic, operational, technical, financial, IT) are needed for successful customer involvement in the entrepreneurship process (Hoskisson, Chirico et al., 2017)?
- How does user entrepreneurship – “the commercialization of a new product and/or service by an individual or group of individuals who are also users of that product and/or service” (Shah and Tripsas, 2007, p. 123) – add value to the entrepreneurship process?
- How significant is user entrepreneurship and/or, more broadly, customer involvement during times of crisis stemming from internal factors (such as financial distress, the sudden death of owners/managers, restructuring events) or external factors (such as environmental shocks, financial crises, the Covid-19 pandemic) (Shah and Tripsas, 2020)?
4) Customer involvement across the life cycle stage of new ventures and beyond:
- How is the customer involved at various stages of entrepreneurship? How do entrepreneurs differ in considering and weighing customers’ rational versus emotional demands over time?
- When should a new venture listen to the customer, and when should it ignore (potential) customer requests or demands overtime? Is there a “right” or “wrong” customer to involve, and should this remain consistent throughout the entrepreneurial process?
- Market orientation is a business approach that prioritizes understanding and satisfying consumer needs. Are companies with a market orientation better off over time, or can a market orientation be detrimental in the earlier (startup) or later (growth, mature) stages of a firm’s development?
- How does customer involvement facilitate or constrain firm-level outcomes, such as disruptive/radical versus incremental innovation, across a firm’s life cycle stages? Also, how can it potentially impact entrepreneurship initiatives, such as corporate and social entrepreneurship over time?
We encourage submissions of empirical and conceptual papers that can provide a unique perspective using diverse methodological approaches, and interdisciplinary co-author teams.
Manuscript submission information: JBV's submission system will be open for submissions to our Special Issue from June 1st, 2025. When submitting your manuscript please select the article type “VSI: Customer Involvement” and indicate the manuscript is for consideration in “Customer Involvement in the Entrepreneurship Process of New Ventures”.
Please submit your manuscript before December 1st, 2025.
Read more at this opportunity here: https://www.sciencedirect.com/journal/journal-of-business-venturing/about/call-for-papers#customer-involvement-in-the-entrepreneurship-process-of-new-ventures
Guest Editors
Aron O’Cass, La Trobe University; A.OCass@latrobe.edu.au
Francesco Chirico, Macquarie University & Jonkoping University;francesco.chirico@mq.edu.au
Eileen Fischer, York University; efischer@schulich.yorku.ca
Michael A. Hitt, Texas A&M University & Texas Tech University; mhitt@mays.tamu.edu
G. Tomas M. Hult, Michigan State University; Hult@broad.msu.edu
Mary Tripsas, UC Santa Barbara; mtripsas@ucsb.edu
JBV Editor
Justin W. Webb, UNC Charlotte; justin.w.webb@charlotte.edu
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Regan Stevenson
Indiana University
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