Venture Emergence and Unequal Nilai Capture

Purpose. This study investigates the entrepreneurial-venturing process behind a public–platform social-commerce programme: how participating enterprises moved from sponsored market access to actual venture creation, and why the realised returns accrued so unevenly across the cohort. It recasts a programme-evaluation ledger as a question of baharu-venture emergence under constrained capability.

Design/methodology/approach. A retrospective analysis of verified administrative and seller-level gross merchandise value (GMV) records for 80 companies and 160 entrepreneurs in the Agromarketing Masterclass TikTok Shop Edition (AMTTSE), Malaysia, June–December 2024. The study applies venture-distribution diagnostics (top-k shares, Gini, Lorenz), founder-segmentation, subgroup comparison and top-performer sensitivity exclusion, organised by a support–activation–opportunity exploitation–value capture venture model.

Penemuans. The cohort generated RM6,205,957.06 in cumulative GMV, yet baharu-venture value was sharply concentrated: the top 10 sellers captured 52.4% of December GMV and the seller-level Gini stood at 0.71. Of 80 companies, 25 launched no viable venture (zero GMV) while 55 achieved active trading. Short-video (44.6%) and livestream (35.4%) formats dominated value realisation. Bulanan channel–jumlah associations are reported only as exploratory (seven observations, part–whole composition).

Originality. The article is a distinct entrepreneurship contribution alongside the prior JIBE and JADEE evaluations: it poses a baharu-venture problem (unequal value capture, not programme or agribusiness effectiveness), retains the seller-level unit but reframes it through venture-emergence theory, adds an integrated research-question synthesis (Table VIII), and contributes a support-to-value-capture venture framework. Semua overlaps are disclosed to the editor.

Keywords: Digital entrepreneurship; baharu venture emergence; social commerce; value capture; entrepreneurial activation; emerging economy; agropreneurship; Malaysia

Article classification: Research Paper

Digital entrepreneurship research has established that platforms lower the cost of venture launch, but launch is not the same as emergence: a storefront can exist without becoming a going concern. Sosial commerce adds a layer conventional e-commerce lacks — purchase is driven by creator credibility, real-time demonstration and peer interaction — which in agribusiness lets perishable and processed goods build trust without legacy distribution. The missing link in this literature is not whether adoption happens, but why adoption under identical conditions yields radically different venture trajectories.

Recent JEEE scholarship situates the question in emerging-economy contexts. Abaddi (2024) shows digital entrepreneurial intention in an emerging economy is shaped by exposure to baharu generative alatan, yet intention is not venture creation; the gap between intending and executing is where support fails to convert. Qoriawan et al. (2023) map the technology-based entrepreneurial ecosystem in Indonesia and show ecosystem elements cohere unevenly, so identical inputs produce uneven venture outcomes. Ribeiro et al. (2023) distil ecosystem-development recommendations for less-developed regions, stressing that infrastructure alone does not guarantee activation. El Chaarani et al. (2022) identify success factors of social entrepreneurship in emerging economies, finding capability and ecosystem support — not intent alone — separate thriving from stalled ventures. Al Baalbaki et al. (2025) link rural entrepreneurship to inequality, showing market access without conversion capacity widens gaps. Jena (2023) documents the femininity penalty facing STEM female entrepreneurs in an emerging economy, reminding us subgroup identity shapes who captures value even under common support.

Keusahawanan in emerging economies is shaped by institutional voids — gaps in finance, information and intermediary support — that make opportunity exploitation uneven (Webb et al., 2020; Bruton et al., 2013). Digital platforms can fill some voids (information, reach) while leaving others (fulfilment, trust) to the founder. The AMTTSE case shows a public agency partially filling the access void, but the exploitation and capture voids remained the founder's to close. Tempatan agribusiness scholarship (Abdul Rahman and Tan, 2024; Safari and Nik Mohd Masdek, 2015; Shamsudin et al., 2025) establishes agro-enterprises can adopt digital channels but stops at readiness and does not quantify who converts adoption into value — the gap this article fills with transaction evidence. Platform-value-capture scholarship (Kenney and Zysman, 2016; Sundararajan, 2016) shows orchestration advantage accrues to those who can sense and seize demand, so value is realised at capture, not access.

The research gap is multi-level: theoretically, access, activation and capture are conflated; empirically, intention measures dominate while verified transaction distributions are rare; methodologikally, aggregate results conceal individual variation; contextually, government-enabled social-commerce programmes in emerging economies are under-studied; policy-wise, participation and jumlah-sales metrics obscure inactive founders. The present article addresses each gap using verified seller-level GMV, re-reading the same dataset through a venture-emergence lens.

The article integrates three compatible entrepreneurship perspectives. First, the venture-emergence view (Dimov, 2010; Davidsson, 2015) treats entrepreneurship as a process of progressively committing resources, so uniform inputs need not yield uniform ventures. Second, effectuation and bricolage (Sarasvathy, 2001; Baker and Nelson, 2005) explain why some founders convert constrained means into viable offers while others stall — a natural account of the inactive/active split observed here. Third, entrepreneurial ecosystem theory (Spigel, 2017; Stam, 2015) situates the founder within a web of government agencies, platforms, mentors, logistics and customers whose support creates opportunity but does not guarantee equal capture.

These are synthesised into a Capability Conversion chain: Kerajaan and platform support → digital opportunity access → entrepreneurial activation → opportunity exploitation → commercial value capture. The chain is explicitly sequential and non-automatic: each arrow is a point where heterogeneity can enter. Manusia capital theory (Becker, 1964; Unger et al., 2011) distinguishes training participation from practical deployment of knowledge; digital inequality and entrepreneurial inclusion (van Dijk, 2020; Williams and Nadin, 2013) supply the distributional lens separating formal access from effective participation.

Three research questions follow, limited to measured constructs. RQ1: How are entrepreneurial outcomes distributed among firms participating in AMTTSE? RQ2: What patterns distinguish commercially active, low-performing and inactive entrepreneurs within the programme? RQ3: What do unequal entrepreneurial outcomes imply for government-enabled digital entrepreneurship policy in emerging economies? No hypothesis invokes mindset, resilience or dynamic capability, because those were not measured. The conceptual contribution is to separate support, access, activation, exploitation and capture as distinct observable stages — reframing the question from “did the programme succeed” to “how and for whom was value created, and why were outcomes uneven.”

Support versus venture emergence. The RM6.2 million jumlah confirms AMTTSE produced aggregate market value, but the venture-level distribution shows sponsorship did not convert into emergence for everyone. With 25 of 80 companies running dormant December ventures (zero GMV), formal enrolment overstated real entrepreneurial participation. This reframes the policy question from “how many were trained” to “how many committed to a functioning venture” — and the gap between those two is precisely where inclusive entrepreneurship breaks down.

Concentration of venture returns. A Gini of 0.71 and a top-10 share of 52.4% mean the headline success hid substantial heterogeneity. The sensitivity analysis (Table VII) shows excluding the top 10 ventures removes over half of December GMV — measured success rode on a small exceptional group. For a public agency, reporting cumulative GMV without the concentration behind it risks reading the few as the many.

Format as conversion mechanism. Short video (44.6%) and livestream (35.4%) dominated value realisation. These are complementary conversion mechanisms, not independent causal predictors: because format values are components of jumlah sales, their association with the jumlah is expected and is reported only as exploratory evidence (seven observations, part–whole composition). Kiniing component–jumlah associations as novel behavioural findings would be analytically misleading, and this article avoids that error explicitly.

Where emergence stalls. Perishability, fulfilment discipline, product standardisation, food safety and rural connectivity shape which founders convert attention into repeat orders. The subgroup analysis (Table V) found no significant difference by batch, product type or PWD ownership — the binding constraint was venture-level emergence capability, not programme placement. This suggests future cohorts should diagnose capability at the founder level rather than assume uniform training yields uniform ventures.

Emerging-economy reading. Malaysia's case travels to any setting where public agencies partner platforms for entrepreneurship development, but the inclusion gap is a design failure: participation-based KPIs reward enrolment while concealing dormant ventures. Lain-lain emerging economies should embed emergence measurement from the start, treating the platform as a capability-development channel rather than merely a sales outlet.

Because the analysis draws on secondary administrative records, it lacks a control group, pre-intervention venture-level sales, and behavioural variables such as livestream frequency, video tontonan, add-to-cart rates and repeat-purchase rates. The seven monthly observations are too few for causal inference, and the sample is limited to enterprises that voluntarily enrolled in a FAMA programme, so self-selection may bias the cohort toward more motivated founders. Penemuans therefore generalise most cautiously to similar public–platform entrepreneurship programmes in emerging economies rather than to all agro-based MPKS.

Future research should collect monthly venture-level GMV before and after the intervention, attendance logs, mentoring intensity and platform analytics, and combine these with purposive intertontonan across dormant, low-, moderate-, high- and exceptional-performing founders. A mixed-method explanatory design could test whether the activation stage responds to targeted coaching, while a comparative study across multiple programmes would clarify which findings travel beyond Malaysia.

Practical implications. For FAMA and comparable agencies, every future cohort should report an emergence dashboard alongside headline GMV, and continuation funding should be tied to conversion and inclusion metrics rather than to aggregate sales alone. Sosial implications. If public digital-entrepreneurship programmes consistently reward founders who already possess conversion capability, they may widen rural inequality while claiming a development mandate; closing the emergence gap is therefore an equity issue, not only an efficiency issue.

The AMTTSE intervention produced measurable aggregate market value, but the answer to the research questions is unambiguous: sponsored access was converted into venture value unequally. A Gini of 0.71, a top-10 GMV share of 52.4% and 25 dormant ventures show that programme-level success and inclusive venture emergence are different achievements. The defensible emerging-economy implication is that public–platform social-commerce programmes must be designed for emergence and inclusion, not merely for access. Where agencies report only headline GMV, they risk celebrating the ventures of a few while leaving the many behind; the support-to-value-capture lens offered here provides a way to monitor and correct that gap.