Entrepreneurs often pitch radically novel strategies for achieving uncommon and exceptional future performance. Chronicles of successful entrepreneurial firms usually include periods of intense evolution and exponential growth. Such cases are outliers that defy the distributional assumptions of the industrial organizational (IO) paradigm. Entrepreneurship research has begun to use the power law distribution as an alternative approach to research on samples of firms that include such outlier cases. In this paper, we use epidemiological concepts to extend the power law perspective beyond sample distributions to examine the underlying mechanisms of single outlier cases. This extension contributes a diffusion-based model that integrates internal and external venture aspects in ways that the traditional IO paradigm cannot. Finally, we discuss how the research implications of a venture diffusion approach promise to strengthen current conceptualizations of disequilibrium performance and entrepreneurial capacity.
