Purpose: The purpose of this paper is to begin to explore the strategic priorities of unicorn ventures as pursuers of market disruption. This study approaches this task by drawing on the positive deviance concept for studying outliers with the intent of understanding the strategic priorities of these ventures.Design/methodology/approach: This is a comparison study of the priorities of 75 unicorn ventures, 37 early-stage ventures and 45 Fortune 500 organizations. The authors use computer-aided text analysis to conduct within-sample and between-sample means comparison tests of 12,487 newswires from 2022.Findings: Where early-stage ventures emphasize their mission, and Fortune 500 companies emphasize financial results, unicorn ventures, occupy the middle of the spectrum, balancing their priorities between pursuing market disruption and achieving financial results. These high-growth outliers indicate their priorities by using significantly less positive tone, affective and prosocial language, and focusing less on corporate social responsibility initiatives, compared to early-stage ventures (and using more of this language compared to Fortune 500 ventures). An additional finding emphasizes that public Fortune 500 companies focus significantly more on money than their topic of interest.Originality/value: This work has implications for understanding the strategic priorities of entrepreneurial ventures in different development stages. The results suggest that unicorn ventures actively work to balance their startup mission, which allows them to experience high-growth and achieve market disruption, with the financial demands of venture capital investors. This novel conclusion demonstrates the value of using positively deviant outlier cases, such as unicorn ventures, as a viable sample for studying market disruption.

Hospitality and tourism firms are central actors in sustainable tourism transitions because their operations are resource intensive and highly visible to consumers and local communities. This study examines whether board-level governance mechanisms—board independence, gender diversity, a sustainability committee, CEO duality, and board size—are associated with environmental performance, and whether environmental performance is related to firm value in global hospitality firms. Using a panel of 10 large publicly traded hospitality companies across North America, Europe, and Asia from 2013–2022 (100 firm-year observations) and fixed-effects estimation, we find positive associations between board independence, board gender diversity, and the presence of a sustainability committee and environmental performance, while CEO duality is negatively associated. Environmental performance is positively associated with firm value (Tobin’s Q) after controlling for profitability and firm size. Because the sample is intentionally bounded to large listed firms and the Refinitiv Environmental Pillar Score is disclosure based, the results should be interpreted as sector-specific associative evidence rather than as definitive causal estimates of operational environmental outcomes. To support longitudinal research on emerging practices in sustainable tourism, we also document a public-source protocol that enables researchers to extend the panel beyond 2022, broaden firm coverage, and incorporate direct environmental indicators over time. The findings highlight board sustainability governance as a potentially important private-sector practice for strengthening environmental citizenship in hospitality, while also clarifying the measurement and generalizability limits of the present design.

Purpose: This article synthesizes research on perspective taking (PT) in entrepreneurship and identifies conceptual patterns and future directions. It also positions PT as the cognitive foundation of the emerging simulated empathy theory (SET) of entrepreneurship. By illustrating how PT enables entrepreneurs to mentally simulate stakeholders’ experiences, the review provides microfoundations for understanding others in entrepreneurial processes. Design/methodology/approach: An integrative literature review of 96 peer-reviewed articles was conducted, in which PT plays a central role in entrepreneurial cognition. The review includes a descriptive analysis of trends in the field, and a thematic coding process was used to identify recurring themes and functional areas. Findings: The review reveals 10 themes across 4 entrepreneurial functions: (1) opportunity identification, (2) design thinking and new product development, (3) social entrepreneurship and prosocial motivation, (4) learning and knowledge absorption in organizations, (5) entrepreneurial education, (6) decision-making, (7) PT in teams, (8) negotiations, (9) investors and venture financing and (10) negative consequences. These intersections highlight promising directions for future research. Originality/value: The review demonstrates how PT serves as the cognitive engine of SET. It clarifies the breadth of the construct’s relevance to entrepreneurship and identifies opportunities for further theoretical and empirical development.

Taking the perspective of others is a crucial ability to identify the best entrepreneurial opportunities. In corporate entrepreneurship, constant effort goes into training and motivating employees ...

The introductory business curriculum in the United States has remained largely unchanged for more than one hundred years, even as higher education, labor markets, and student needs have shifted significantly. Although the first undergraduate business program was established at the Wharton School in 1881, the structure of pre-business or introductory business courses solidified in the 1920s and continues to shape the course sequence required in most accredited programs. This exploratory study examines the historical evolution of the introductory business curriculum by comparing archival materials from the early twentieth century with contemporary requirements from one hundred AACSB-accredited Schools of Business. Results show that many of the courses that introduce students to business education are nearly identical to those offered a century ago. We use these findings to develop a problem-solving framework for rethinking what the introductory business curriculum should accomplish in the twenty-first century. The framework highlights opportunities to reposition existing courses and to introduce more relevant, developmental, and skill-aligned learning experiences that better reflect modern organizational needs and student expectations. As the context of business and higher education continues to change, business schools must reconsider whether historically inherited introductory structures are still appropriate for preparing students for contemporary professional environments.

Perspective taking enhances an entrepreneur’s ability to recognize better market opportunities in terms of desirability, feasibility, alignment, and creativity. Although the perspective taking cons...