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Evaluating entrepreneurial potential: Where do disparities come from?

Presented by Siobhan O’Mahony

Feld Family Professor in Innovation and Entrepreneurship, Management & Organizations

¶Ù²¹³Ù±ð:ÌýFriday, March 28, 2025
Time:Ìý2:00 PM - 3:30 PM (EST)
Location: Bronfman building, room 360

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Participants are invited for a buffet from 4.00 – 5.30 pm, in BRONF 301.

Abstract

Organizations routinely evaluate entrepreneurial potential – the ability to create, scale and capture future value. This is challenging due to the diversity and volume of candidate pools to winnow, and the difficulty of estimating future potential based on limited past performance data. Thus, evaluators often lean on biases, heuristics, or homogenous networks, which can (re)produce disparities. Yet little research examines the process by which evaluators narrow pipelines. Evaluation at scale involves criteria, templates, quantification and comparison – each could play a role in reproducing existing disparities. How do organizations narrow pipelines of entrepreneurial potential? What consequences does this have for disparities in investment outcomes? We conducted a three-year field study with Connect, a global organization committed to investing in entrepreneurial potential in inclusive ways. We conducted 59 interviews, observed 171 hours of evaluation, and analyzed full pipeline data for 665 startups. We traced how Connect defined measurement, and quantified and compared startup data, corroborating our results with Connect’s 31 global investment partners. We explain how reducing complex data to a single score generated a veneer of certainty, although behavioral data and assumptions disappeared from collective evaluation. Comparing based on reduced data produced gender disparities, yet the sources of disparity were unobserved. Comparing based on elaborated data was rare, yet it unearthed hidden data and assumptions through collective debate. We contribute a grounded process model that explains how organizations’ data reduction processes can produce disparities in outcomes for founders that do not represent the status quo and how these disparities can be reversed.

About Siobhan O’Mahony

Siobhan O’Mahony is the Feld Family Professor of Innovation and Entrepreneurship in the Strategy and Innovation Department at Questrom School of Business and an Associate Editor at Administrative Science Quarterly. She architected Innovate@BU, a campus wide initiative to spur innovation across Boston University and created a new minor in Innovation and Entrepreneurship. Siobhan has taught undergraduates, graduates, doctoral students and thousands of executives on principles of innovation and design thinking. She has examined how venture capitalists, entrepreneurs, product development teams, high technology contractors, open source programmers, music producers, scientists, engineers and activists achieve collective innovation, creativity or growth goals. Her research has been published in the top journals in her field including Administrative Science Quarterly, Organization Science, Academy of Management Journal, Research Policy, Research in Organizational Behavior, Research in the Sociology of Organizations, Strategic Organization, Industry and Innovation, the Journal of Management and Governance among others. Her research has been featured in the New York Times, BusinessWeek, CNet News, MIT Technology Review and Inc. Magazine. She has been a guest on CNBC’s morning call program, guest radio interview for WCPT 850 Chicago and done podcasts for Harvard Business Review and the Batten Institute. Siobhan received her Ph.D. in Management Science and Engineering from Stanford University, an M.P.A from the Cornell Institute of Public Affairs, and a B.S. in Industrial Labor Relations from Cornell University.