Key Facts

Principal investigators: Prof. Dr. Jörg Sydow, Freie Universität Berlin

Research Associate: Dr. Eshan Samimi

Duration: 3 years

 

Project Description

In this project, we want to develop a practice-based framework for understanding entrepreneurship as a venture idea’s journey. Currently, research on entrepreneurial opportunities is struggling to differentiate between the content and the favorability of an opportunity. Therefore, instead of explaining entrepreneurial success with inherently favorable opportunities that need to be discovered or created by individuals, we will conceive venture ideas as inherently vulnerable and precious in the beginning, developing – under certain circumstances – into viable opportunities, but on this journey relying on ideation and support practices throughout their entire journey. In this journey, we want to explore the role of networked contexts by drawing on a structurationist view. According to this view, agency cannot unfold without structure and vice versa. Translated to the venture idea’s journey, this leads to the insight that – because organizational structure does not exist in the beginning – founders have to draw on practices from other contexts. These practices, including the respective rules and resources agents can draw on, are often provided by close or distant network partners. In order to better analyze the role of this context to ideation and support practices throughout the venture idea’s journey, we will study ventures in strong-tie networks (e.g., incubator settings) and in weak-tie networks (e.g., independent start-ups). Based upon these two objectives, we will develop a theory of organized creativity that is applicable to new venture creation processes that rely on ideation and support practices from founder/s, from the context and later from the emerging organization.