The big passion play in new venture creation: New insights from a moderated mediation model

Research increasingly highlights that more nascent entrepreneurs than once thought, even those passionate about founding a new venture, end up not starting a new business because of the vast challenges. This study provides new insights into how and when passionate nascent founders actually engage in new venture creation behavior. Applying a conditional moderated mediation analysis to a sample of 493 Belgian nascent entrepreneurs, we find that passionate nascent founders develop strategic action plans to reach their desired complex goal of starting a new venture. Our results demonstrate that this deliberate strategic practice of action planning, which functions as a mediating mechanism, is contingent on nascent entrepreneurs’ self-efficacy and risk-taking propensity. The results show that when passionate nascent founders feel sufficiently knowledgeable and skilled to start a new business, they will develop significantly more specific action plans to engage in new venture creation behavior. Finally, our results show that the willingness to take entrepreneurial risks moderates the extent to which action plans for a startup will be effectively converted into actual engagement in new venture creation behavior. These findings have new theoretical and practical implications that contribute to expanding the literature on the complexity of the big passion play in new venture creation.