Antecedents and consequences of early entrepreneurial behaviors: Planning, action, and inaction

Despite the extensive research on business planning, this research stream has not sufficiently considered what the alternatives to planning might be. Particularly in nascent firms, we suggest that taking other startup activities and being inactive should be discriminated as alternatives of planning because the two have different implications on performance, potentially blurring the performance implications of business planning. In this paper, we investigate the antecedents of the different entrepreneurial behaviors (i.e. early planning and early actions) and propose that people with advanced education tend to engage in early planning. On the other hand, entrepreneurs with more experiences are more likely to engage in early action but less likely to engage in early planning. We also argue for positive performance implications of early actions as well as early planning. Examining a panel of 343 nascent entrepreneurial firms over a period of six years, we find that our hypotheses are largely supported.