A contingency approach to the incubation of new ventures in entrepreneurial ecosystems: Descriptive exploratory plots for continuous and survival outcomes

Continuous and survival outcomes are important for new venture research because explaining development and growth is difficult when continuous outcomes are zero. This chapter focuses on descriptive exploratory plots with multilevel and longitudinal data to make preliminary analyses of the effects of predictors, before fitting multivariate regression models. The chapter draws on analyses of 373 academic spin-off firms active in Norway between 2000 and 2015. These data come from archival sources and show how the relation between incubation and new venture performance is conditional on other ecosystem attributes, e.g. location and issued capital. We argue that descriptive exploratory plots can be used 1) like descriptive statistics with cross-sectional data; 2) to get a concrete and nuanced sense of the between- and within-subject relations; and 3) to assess range restriction on (semi-) continuous outcome variables, e.g., sales, employees. We conclude by suggesting that descriptive exploratory plots pose little threat to cumulative knowledge.