مقاله انگلیسی رایگان در مورد استفاده از مدل کسب و کار برای بهبود روند سرمایه گذاری – امرالد ۲۰۱۷

Introduction

Business angels have become an increasingly important source of financing for seed and start-up companies (Mason and Harrison, 1996; Landström, 1998; Sohl, 2012). These types of venture capital finance affect companies in diverse ways, for example, by assisting with consulting and credibility by third parties (Rossi, 2015). Achieving an investment and the possible benefits is not an easy endeavour for entrepreneurs. The investment process, beginning with the identification of a business opportunity and continuing until the investment negotiation is finished with a deal, is still considered a “black box” (Sapienza and Villanueva, 2007; Sohl, 2012). Apparently, business angels would like to invest more often than they do, but they seem to lack the right investment opportunities (Van Osnabrugge and Robinson, 2000; Mason and Harrison, 2002). These views contradict one another and create challenges for entrepreneurs in how they approach business angels to raise capital. In other words, the entrepreneur markets the potential business opportunity to potential investors. In this process, the entrepreneur often relies on hihe/sher own business knowledge (Hill and Levenhagen, 1995) and a written business plan (Karlsson and Honig, 2009) in addition to templates for information provided by facilitators or matchmaking agents (Sohl, 2012). Several studies show that there is a mismatch between the information desired by business angels and the information that they typically receive from entrepreneurs. In fact, business angels often use a series of alternative parameters than other investors to evaluate investment proposals (Fiet, 1995; Mason and Harrison, 1996; Van Osnabrugge and Robinson, 2000; Mason and Harrison, 2002; Mason and Stark, 2004). This challenges the entrepreneurs because they then must provide information on the terms of each specific business angel with whom they would want to connect and negotiate. Historically, entrepreneurs have used the business plan as the primary framework to organise and provide an information set to business angels (Gumpert, 2002). Recently, using business plans to structure the information set has been challenged, while many previous studies have focussed on the information set required by business angels (Mason and Stark, 2004). Karlsson and Honig (2009) argued that the business plan is outdated and has a negligible effect on investment processes. This indicates a need for other types of frameworks that can assist the entrepreneurs in forming a useful information set for this purpose. In addition, Huang and Pearce (2015) show that the mutual understanding between entrepreneurs and business angels is vital to creating positive investment processes. Carlson and Wilmot (2006), for example, identified how the notion of customer value is a key element in innovation and creating successful start-ups/companies. Despite this, no research to date has been found to focus on helping the entrepreneurs create a mutual understanding between themselves and business angels. This study investigates the informational and communication structures and tensions between entrepreneurs and business angels in investment processes. This is done using business models as a platform for communication, as suggested by Bukh (2003) and specifically applying the structure of the business model canvas (Osterwalder and Pigneur, 2010) to frame information sets and discussions. The business model canvas is currently applied in several different entrepreneurial contexts (see Oyedele, 2016; Cosenz, 2017).