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Open research questions in Private Equity and Venture Capital

30 unresolved questions extracted from the limitations and future-work sections of 1,320 Private Equity and Venture Capital papers in our library. Each links back to the study that raised it.

What the literature leaves open

  • Future research should explore whether this discrepancy poses a general obstacle for PE investors in co-investing in SFs or whether it is specific to regional contexts, such as the United States and Western Europe.

    Entrepreneurial acquisitions and small-cap private equity overlaps: A resource-based view · 2026 · DOI

  • By setting sail to this under-researched topic and utilising elements of the RBV as a heuristic device, we discovered evidence that might be useful for practitioners and researchers.

    Entrepreneurial acquisitions and small-cap private equity overlaps: A resource-based view · 2026 · DOI

  • The influence of trust, ethnic networks, community ties, and informal governance norms on the formation and outcomes of VC and AI partnerships remains poorly understood and warrants dedicated investigation, particularly in settings like Akure, where informal social structures play a significant role in economic life.

    Venture capital, angel investment, and SME empowerment in emerging urban economies · 2026 · DOI

  • While recent research acknowledges AI’s unique learning capabilities and the necessity to integrate AI within firms’ business model contexts, it remains unclear how firms create economic value using AI.

    Towards Value Creation Of Ai Startup Business Models: A Typology And Their Interdependencies · 2026

  • This study expands our understanding of the role of uncertainty in investment decisions, offers deeper insight into how language operates in financial markets, and sheds light on the increasingly popular, but understudied, SPAC vehicle.

    Communication under Uncertainty and the Role of Founders’ Information Advantage: Evidence from SPAC IPOs · 2024 · DOI

  • Originality/value Although major statistical work to test the authors’ typology of SE models remains to be carried out, mainly through the exploitation of the international ICSEM database (which covers over 700 SEs from more than 40 countries), this paper represents a first—although limited—attempt to collect empirical evidence for testing this typology.

    Mapping social enterprise models: some evidence from the “ICSEM” project · 2017 · DOI

  • " While there is no consensus definition of this term, we believe that it is best understood, for purposes of legal analysis, as "an organization that utilizes an earned income strategy to accomplish a primary organizational mission of creating value for one or more stakeholders besides the organizations' shareholders or owners.

    Social Enterprise, Corporate Objectives, and the Corporate Governance Narrative · 2015 · DOI

  • It asks two questions: Do firms in deprived areas perceive different barriers to success than other firms? And is this because of their location (a ‘place’ effect) or other characteristics (a ‘firm’ effect)? We find only limited evidence that ‘place’ effects are in operation: of nine potential obstacles only a lack of access to finance is significant, controlling for other firm characteristics.

    Place, sorting effects and barriers to enterprise in deprived areas: Different problems or different firms? · 2012 · DOI

  • As the microenterprise field nears the end of its second decade in the United States, experts and practitioners agree that the field is in a difficult place; there appears to be relatively widespread agreement on the nature of the problems, which include a lack of standardized data, decreasing funding from some key sectors, increased competition, and difficulty in reaching the target market.

    Microenterprise Development in the United States: Current Challenges and New Directions · 2006 · DOI

  • It remains to be seen whether in the long run, inequality and concentration of capital among a select group of people reaches a point where it induces their gradual de- mise, and capitalism undermines itself through the tensions it produces.

    Bringing ownership in: a conjunctural approach to venture capital valuations · 2026 · DOI

  • The dynamics of coopetition in small firms, including new and micro-firms, however, remains under-explored raising questions about how they both engage with and manage this complex paradoxical relationship.

    Coopetition in the small business sector: Taking stock and looking forward · 2024 · DOI

  • Abstract Although equity-compensation grants for rank-and-file employees are common in startups and are considered an ingrained part of their business culture, little is known about how employees approach this form of compensation.

    Equity illusions · 2023 · DOI

  • Previous work has examined how audiences evaluate category-spanning organizations, but little is known about how their entrance affects evaluations of other, proximate organizations.

    A Spanner in the Works: Category-Spanning Entrants and Audience Valuation of Incumbents · 2021 · DOI

  • This paper will attempt to shed new light on this so far under-explored issue by specifically analyzing exits as financial strategy for investors and entrepreneurs.

    When startups exit: comparing strategies in Europe and the USA · 2018 · DOI

  • Although the entrepreneurship literature has advanced our understanding of start‐up financing, little is known about the mechanisms founders use to finance the beginning of a venture.

    Start‐up financing: How founders finance their ventures' early stage · 2018 · DOI

  • We situate our theoretical argument in the for bricolage understudied context of a declining industry, where we focus on the role of chance in how resources are combined and separated in state interventions, connecting to the literature on the ‘state as entrepreneur’.

    Chance interventions – on bricolage and the state as an entrepreneur in a declining industry · 2014 · DOI

  • We confirm the importance of this kind of social embeddedness in the biotech industry where personalized ties—as opposed to institutional and contractual relationships—at the interorganizational level had not yet been examined systematically.

    Bringing Personalized Ties back in: Their Added Value for Biotech Entrepreneurs and Venture Capitalists Interorganizational Networks · 2011 · DOI

  • However, few studies have considered the factors that might bias an investment decision in a way that is idiosyncratic to a given investor–entrepreneur dyad.

    ‘I Like How You Think’: Similarity as an Interaction Bias in the Investor–Entrepreneur Dyad · 2010 · DOI

  • The purpose of this article is to fill this gap in the literature by examining the determinants of innovation, measured by patent applications and new products, in Japanese technology-based start-up firms, using original firm-level data.

    Determinants of Innovative Activity in Japanese Technology-based Start-up Firms · 2004 · DOI

  • New business startups with venture capital backing depend on mutual cooperation between entrepreneurs and venture capitalists, but little is known about what makes these relationships work.

    A PRISONER'S DILEMMA APPROACH TO ENTREPRENEUR-VENTURE CAPITALIST RELATIONSHIPS · 1997 · DOI

  • While faster may be better, speed brings with it pressures that, for certain types of technological ventures, can lead to failure if they are not clearly understood and managed.

    When Speeding Concepts to Market Can Be a Mistake · 1992 · DOI

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30 open questions have been extracted from the limitations and future-work passages of 1,320 Private Equity and Venture Capital papers in our library. Each one below links back to the study that raised it, so you can read the original claim in context.

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