Search

Research summary Entrepreneurs develop innovations, fulfill customer needs, and spur economic growth by recognizing, evaluating, and exploiting opportunities. Despite progress, scholarly understanding of how entrepreneurs achieve these objectives may be incomplete. For instance, little explanation exists for why entrepreneurs may pursue activities seemingly at random, nor is there a clear endpoint to the entrepreneurship process. To address these concerns, we present a framework that integrates sensemaking and structuration perspectives to specify the cognitive and behavioral influences on the entrepreneurship process. Within this framework, entrepreneurs ultimately pursue opportunities through developing and deploying capabilities to create value for customers. Managerial summary While entrepreneurs' initial insights regarding innovations and customer needs are important, these insights are only the beginning of an interactive, iterative path that ends with the formation of an organization that can reliably produce value for customers. One of entrepreneurs' most important tools along this path is their set of scripts. Scripts help define how entrepreneurs act and interact so they can fully understand market needs and develop the means for solving these needs. In this paper, our objective is to describe how these scripts help entrepreneurs do the hard work of thinking and acting to effectively create new venture capabilities and to explain how entrepreneurs, who may possess similar sets of scripts, may nevertheless conceptualize different opportunities and solutions.

Scholarly attention to strategy and entrepreneurship within the informal economy appears to be on the rise, but a large gap remains between the importance of the informal economy and the amount of research that is devoted to it. The survey reported herein is an effort to offer insights to researchers who wish to help build the knowledge base about strategy and entrepreneurship within the informal economy. Specifically, we surveyed members of the Strategic Entrepreneurship Journal's editorial board regarding what they view as the most promising theories, research questions, and methods to leverage in order to develop greater understanding of the informal economy. Board members' views vary, but in general institutional theory and network theory are seen as the best perspectives to fuel major contributions at this time. The research questions that attracted the strongest support centered on the boundaries of and interchanges between the formal and informal economies. Finally, field interviews, case studies, and ethnography were ranked as the most promising investigative methods. Taken together, these findings offer a possible agenda for research into the informal economy. Copyright © 2014 Strategic Management Society.

The informal economy consists of business activities that occur outside of formal institutional boundaries but within the boundaries of informal institutions. A large gap exists between the significant importance of the informal economy to commerce around the world and the small amount of informal economy research with which entrepreneurship and strategic management scholars have been involved. As a step toward filling this gap, this special issue includes four articles with the potential to significantly advance our understanding of business activities within the informal economy. In introducing these four articles, we discuss the myriad activities that fall within the boundaries of the informal economy and distinguish between the institutional foundations of informality in developed versus developing economies. The articles included within the special issue each offer a unique understanding of how entrepreneurs are influenced by and manage their institutional contexts in various informal economy settings, providing contributions that should give rise to a series of promising future research questions. Copyright © 2014 Strategic Management Society.

Theoretically, social capital allows entrepreneurial firms to capitalize on learning advantages of newness and gain access to knowledge as the foundation for improved performance. But this understates its complexity. We consider whether learning through social capital relationships has a direct effect on performance and whether absorptive capacity mediates and moderates this relationship. We find that network-based learning has no direct relationship with performance, but this is mediated in each instance by absorptive capacity and is moderated twice. Our findings challenge the learning advantages of newness thesis and reveal how absorptive capacity can enable business performance from a firm's network relationships.

Beginning with seminal research on organizational learning and continuing with the exploration versus exploitation and regional economics literatures, knowledge search has become central to innovation research. Drawing from these contributions, we examine the impact of a firm's geographic location munificence on benefits received either from exploiting its local knowledge base or from exploring for new knowledge beyond its local geographic boundaries. Results indicate that firm geographic context moderates the relationship between search strategies and new product development. In particular, firms located in munificent geographic locations benefit from geographically localized and international searches, while firms in less munificent geographic locations benefit from balanced and domestic search strategies. Copyright © 2009 Strategic Management Society.

Strategic entrepreneurship refers to firms' pursuit of superior performance via simultaneous opportunity-seeking and advantage-seeking activities. Both small and large firms face impediments while pursuing strategic entrepreneurship. While small firms' opportunity-seeking skills may be strong, their limited knowledge stocks and lack of market power inhibit their ability to enact the competitive advantages necessary to appropriate value from opportunities the firms choose to pursue. In contrast, large firms are skilled at establishing competitive advantages, but their heavy emphasis on the efficiency of their existing businesses often undermines their ability to continuously explore for additional opportunities. Building on a variety of theories, including network, learning, resource-based, and real options, we suggest that collaborative innovation can enable both types of firms to overcome their respective challenges. Collaborative innovation is the pursuit of innovations across firm boundaries through the sharing of ideas, knowledge, expertise, and opportunities. For small firms, we contend that pursuing entrepreneurship collaboratively allows them to preserve their creativity and flexibility while mitigating the inherent liabilities of smallness. We argue that collaborative innovation permits large firms to exploit their advantage-creating skills while concurrently exploring for opportunities outside their current domain. Thus, small and large firms that learn how to integrate strategic entrepreneurship and collaborative innovation are well positioned to create wealth. Copyright © 2008 Strategic Management Society.