BE-01

(Oral presentation, session Business and Ethics, 13.50 - 14.10 hrs)

Coaching and mentoring and other types of personal development became very popular since the turn of the century (Grant, 2009). Nonetheless, in the entrepreneurship field the topic can still be considered to be in its infancy. Most research on supporting the entrepreneur focuses on clarification of the involved concepts, mostly resulting in a large amount of definitions (Clutterbuck, 2008). This makes scientific progress in the field of support the entrepreneurs difficult. Consequently, the evidence on effective support practices is dispersed to say the least. To get out of this quagmire of definitions we develop a soft support model that combines the different types of support based on two dimensions (Heron, 2001). One dimension, which we label ‘role,’ is a continuum between an orientation on the business or the personal development of the entrepreneur. The other dimension, which we label ‘agenda,’ is a continuum between a directive and a non-directive coaching or mentoring style. Since soft support of entrepreneurs is such a young field, we also make use of the broader literature on executive coaching and mentoring. When using the soft support model on researching 15 top journals on entrepreneurial coaching or mentoring. We found that the soft support model can be used to value this support. We also found that most authors think about a business focus, even if they call it coaching. The definitions of coaching and mentoring differ also from the way these terms are used in the research field of entrepreneurship (Haggard, Dougherty, Turban, & Wilbanks, 2010; Hamlin, Ellinger, & Beattie, 2009). We suggest to use the soft support model to research how entrepreneurs are supported in practice. First results in this show that the model is very useful and that coaches/mentors differ from the participants in what they think the support is doing.