Typology of Migrant Entrepreneurs’ New Venture Ideas

Migrant entrepreneurs have diversity in their thinking about new venture ideas (NVIs), which is evident through their businesses in multiple industries, ranging from low value added to highly knowledge intensive. Nonetheless, migrant entrepreneurship literature has yet to conceptualize migrant entrepreneurs’ diversity of NVIs and explain why they vary in their thinking about new venture ideas. With this conceptual study, we have constructed a typology of migrant entrepreneurs’ new venture ideas by building on the ethnicity/non-ethnicity of market niches and value chains, which are the two essential aspects of potential business models. Consequently, we identified that migrant entrepreneurs could imagine four NVIs; ethnic NVIs, break-out NVIs, market break-out NVIs and resources break-out NVIs. In addition, we have adapted the external enablers and actors’ characteristics concepts in the context of migrant entrepreneurs’ NVIs. More specifically, we have developed ethnic, non-ethnic, and trans-ethnic enablement, embeddedness, and human capital concepts to explain variations in migrant entrepreneurs’ NVIs. We further discuss the contributions to migrant entrepreneurship and external enablers of entrepreneurship research.