Monitoração ambiental realizada por empreendedores em empresas incubadas e graduadas: um estudo empírico

Abstract

Environmental scanning is the acquisition and use of information about the external business environment that can assist management in making decisions and planning the organization's future courses of action. The present study investigates the scanning behavior of entrepreneurs in incubated and graduated small firms. Data were obtained by means of an Internet survey with 340 respondents in Brazil. Data analysis involved diverse statistical techniques, including Structural Equation Modeling. The relations between strategic environmental uncertainty and scanning behavior showed that entrepreneurs perceive higher uncertainty in events and trends of their immediate environment, and scan more intensively environmental sectors that are perceived as more uncertain. It was demonstrated that the use of information sources in scanning is more influenced by perceptions of source quality that of their accessibility. Technological entrepreneurs concentrate in environmental events and trends that are more closely related to their activities, as compared with the nontechnological ones. After the end of their incubation period, the entrepreneurs demonstrate more interest in scanning and actually scan the environment more intensively. When they are incubated, the entrepreneurs find it easier to make contacts with personal and external information sources and consider information obtained from these sources more relevant. It was demonstrated that the dimensions of the perceived strategic environmental uncertainty importance, complexity and dynamism must have their effects analyzed separately, which confirms the results of research outside North America dating from the last decade; in addition, the data suggests that these effects vary according to the environmental sector under consideration.