The influence of guided preparation on the long-term performance of new ventures James J. Chrisman a,, Ed McMullan b, Jeremy Hall b a Department of Management and Information Systems, College of Business and Industry, Mississippi State University, Mississippi State, MS 39762-9581, United States b Haskayne School of Business, University of Calgary, 2500 University Drive NW, Calgary, Alberta, Canada T2N 1N4 Received 3 February 2003; received in revised form 4 September 2004; accepted 19 October 2004 Abstract This article further develops a theory of guided preparation and new venture performance and tests its fundamental relationships on a sample of 159 new ventures that received outsider assistance 5-9 years earlier and had been in business for 3-8 years. The results suggest that the long-term growth of the ventures since start-up is significantly related to guided preparation. However, a curvilinear model rather, than a linear model, was found to best capture the relationships of interest. This suggests that there are diminishing marginal returns associated with guided preparation and that too much may even have a negative influence on performance. (c) 2004 Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved. Keywords: Guided preparation; Performance; New ventures During weeks two and three of MGMT 4853, students will synthesize and summarize the information contained in each of eight (8) research papers; four (4) will be assigned each week. The article summaries are due via the assignments tab in D2L prior to the beginning of the following week (i.e., before June 15th at 12:00 AM for week two's assigned readings and before June 22nd at 12:00 AM for week three's assigned readings. Shown below is a required format for the article summaries: 1. What is the research question(s)? 2. Which major theory or theories did the authors utilize in their paper? 3. What are the strengths and weaknesses of the paper? 4. Discuss the overall results and conclusions of the paper. 5. What are the implications of the research for practice? Each summary should consist of approximately two pages or less, single-spaced, and should be professionally composed using correct spelling, grammar, and punctuation. The students' work shall contain sufficient analysis to demonstrate that they have mastered understanding of the topic under consideration