Black Entrepreneurship
Opportunities & Impediments Across the Business Venturing Lifecycle
Key Finding
Impediments to Black entrepreneurship are not isolated to any single stage but compound across the venturing lifecycle, creating cascading disadvantages that existing theory has underestimated.
Overview
This paper provides a comprehensive examination of the opportunities and impediments that Black entrepreneurs face across the entire business venturing lifecycle — from opportunity recognition through resource mobilization, launch, growth, and exit. By mapping these dynamics across stages rather than examining them in isolation, the paper reveals how structural barriers compound and interact in ways that existing entrepreneurship theory has failed to capture.
Contribution to the Research Program
This work anchors the Resource Mobilization & Business Model Design stream by foregrounding a critical question: whose entrepreneurial reasoning gets supported, and whose gets structurally undermined? Within the Cyborg Entrepreneurship framework, this paper raises essential questions about whether AI and digital tools can ameliorate or exacerbate existing inequalities in entrepreneurial resource access. As AI increasingly mediates resource allocation decisions — from lending algorithms to platform governance — understanding the baseline patterns of structural disadvantage becomes foundational for responsible innovation.
Key Insights
- Impediments facing Black entrepreneurs are not stage-specific but cascade across the venturing lifecycle
- Resource mobilization barriers interact with opportunity recognition constraints to create compounding disadvantage
- The venturing lifecycle framework reveals structural patterns invisible to cross-sectional analysis
- Implications extend to how AI-mediated resource allocation systems may perpetuate or disrupt existing patterns of inequality