Financing entrepreneurial innovation within England

Abstract

Entrepreneurship has come to serve as a platform for innovation with majority of the world’s economies seeking to promote structures, policies and environments that encourage it. For entrepreneurial firms to succeed, availability of finance has been identified as a key factor; however, despite availability of new financial tools, a demand‐side gap still exists. This is quite important as entrepreneurial firms have particularly high hurdles to cross when seeking finance due to the complexity and uncertainty associated with their products/services. Several studies have investigated the access to finance problem without yielding unique results, this study adopts a novel conceptual framework where the intellectual capital of firm and its social media capabilities are examined to investigate the empirical relationship that exists between intellectual capital and access to finance. Entrepreneurial orientation and collaboration act as mediators with environmental munificence acting as the moderator. Theoretical triangulation is applied to this study as two main theories namely the Agency theory which provides a framework to assess the agency problems which are information asymmetry and moral hazard within an entrepreneurial setting. The second theory is the resource dependency theory which highlights dependencies created between firms and financiers when external finance is raised. This research adopts a quantitative methodology using questionnaire instrument to collect 488 valid responses. The responses were collected using both in‐person and online channels. The researcher had to engage in entrepreneurial activities to build their social capital by organising global events online, hosting online fireside chats, volunteering on various entrepreneurship mentoring platforms (Posters can be found in the appendix). Data collected was analysed using covariance based structural equation modelling. A detailed and rigorous analysis of data collected is carried out to test the measurement and structural model. Findings include but are not limited to the following: There is a direct and positive relationship between social capital and access to finance due to its legitimising qualities, social media is found to promote collaboration in the firm and with competitors. Structural capital is seen to have a positive relationship with access to finance as robust processes within a firm enables it mitigate information asymmetry problems. Firms possessing entrepreneurial orientation and collaboration capabilities are seen to leverage on their intellectual capital more efficiently thus aiding them to access finance. There is also a positive and direct relationship between environmental munificence and access to finance whereby firms operating in resource rich environments tend to raise external finance more easily. Several contributions are made to academia, practice and policy making that highlight the paramount role of intellectual capital which has become more pronounced as the world moves towards service‐based economies.