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Entrepreneurship education has become a trending topic among higher education institutions in Indonesia as the government pushes for more entrepreneurs through its Kampus Merdeka (campus freedom) policy. This trend gets amplified with the recent burst of technology startups growing and scaling in Indonesia to heights that have never been seen by the country before. A couple of the home-grown startups eventually become publicly listed companies, increasing the overall startup fever across the nation. Lies beneath the success of this educational policy to support entrepreneurship in Indonesia is how to have a relevant curriculum and ecosystem to support student entrepreneurs. Prior research papers have proposed several aspects to be measured, namely, entrepreneurial skills, attitude, environment, and intentions. However, those studies still lack the holistic analysis regarding entrepreneurship education in the country and mostly only involved students. This dissertation studies the applicability of undergraduate entrepreneurship education and ecosystem to support startup founders by interviewing educators, students, alumni, and school leaders at selected public and private universities in Indonesia. I employ a qualitative study with open-ended interview questions for data collection and analysis. My research contributes to the gaps in the literature as this paper is the first of its kind research publication with a holistic approach, involving relevant stakeholders and more variables in the analysis. The findings of this research suggest educational policy makers and university leaders can support the applicability of the entrepreneurship curriculum and ecosystem by focusing on ecosystem building, collaboration with the broader communities, student engagement, government support, faculty development, and alumni community. [The dissertation citations contained here are published with the permission of ProQuest LLC. Further reproduction is prohibited without permission. Copies of dissertations may be obtained by Telephone (800) 1-800-521-0600. Web page: http://www.proquest.com/en-US/products/dissertations/individuals.shtml.]

In the world of hybrid organizations, an important and under-examined phenomenon is the process of transforming from a hybrid structure to an organizational form with fewer logics. This research introduces the concept of dehybridization, which I define as a process through which an organization transforms in a way that integrates fewer institutional logics than previously. To examine the phenomenon of dehybridization in the context of social enterprises, I draw on the hybridity and hybrid organizations literatures. These literatures are integral in gaining a conceptual understanding of the challenges of hybrids and their transformations. Building upon this theory, I propose a conceptual framework that describes how dehybridization occurs in hybrid organizations and empirically study this phenomenon in a three-paper dissertation. The first paper introduces and defines the concept of dehybridization and illustrates the potential process for hybrid organizations. The second paper draws on a dataset of 33,350 Community Interest Companies in the United Kingdom from 2006-2020 to examine the relationship between organizational governance and dehybridization. The third paper draws on the same dataset and examines how three exogenous shocks (2007-2008 Financial Crisis, Brexit Vote, and Covid-19 Lockdown) affected the management of hybrid tensions in social enterprises.

The growing interest in the processes and practices of entrepreneurship has been dominated by a consideration of temporality. Through a thirty-six-month ethnography of a technology incubator, this thesis contributes to extant understanding by exploring the effect of space. The first paper explores how class structures from the surrounding city have appropriated entrepreneurship within the incubator. The second paper adopts a more explicitly spatial analysis to reveal how the use of space influences a common understanding of entrepreneurship. The final paper looks more closely at the entrepreneurs within the incubator and how they use visual symbols to develop their identity. Taken together, the three papers reject the notion of entrepreneurship as a primarily economic endeavour as articulated through commonly understood language and propose entrepreneuring as an enigmatic attractor that is accessed through the ambiguity of the non-verbal to develop the 'new'. The thesis therefore contributes to the understanding of entrepreneurship and proposes a distinct role for the non-verbal in that understanding.

Abstract: Academics and practitioners tend to accept that people found new ventures only primarily for economic reasons, but is that always true? Emerging work in the field suggests other non-economic key motives that may drive entrepreneurial decisions. My dissertation explores one such critical non-economic motive, namely, founders’ feelings of constraint. A puzzle addressed in this research is whether constraints help or hinder entrepreneurial behaviors. The literature is unclear, with evidence supporting both positive and negative views. To solve this theoretical puzzle, this dissertation offers three separate empirical papers, each examining the role of constraints in different stages of a typical entrepreneurial process (i.e., idea generation, idea selection, and resource acquisition). In doing so, it developed and validated three theoretically meaningful original measures (i.e., chronic and acute constraints, and perceived constraint). Moreover, this research looked at and tested the moderating effects of one’s regulatory focus on the relationship between constraints and the entrepreneurial process. Using MTurk panels, three papers found support for the main hypotheses. As such, this dissertation makes several significant contributions to the study of entrepreneurship. While many previous studies limit their analyses to a single stage of the entrepreneurial journey, this work shows how a phenomenon (i.e., constraints) affects entrepreneurial decision-making in different stages of venture creation. Such a multi-stage perspective enhances our understanding of constraints and their roles in the entrepreneurial process. Second, this research helps us realize the conditions under which, even after facing diverse constraints, some entrepreneurs successfully meet various challenges associated with new venture creation. Third, to the best of my knowledge, this is the first empirical testing of the notion that a founder’s ability to exhibit both promotion- and prevention-oriented behaviors are instrumental for entrepreneurial success.

Drawing inspiration from lateral thinking, synergetics, psychology, creativity, and business, this research project employs an interdisciplinary approach to investigate the research process which drives innovation in the field of artificial intelligence. This research project explores methods for harnessing the synergy present in the latest, neuro-symbolic paradigm of artificial intelligence, while noting similarities between the first two waves of AI and dual process theory. It attempts to integrate unconventional, yet potentially promising interdisciplinary ideas into a proof of concept, including creative tools and techniques like the Six Thinking Hats, methods of psychotherapy, including cognitive behavioral therapy and internal family systems, as well as principles related to conflict resolution and ``tensegrity". The proof of concept is a hybrid semantic search system for research papers in computer science, constructed using a process of rapid prototyping and iteration, with special consideration for evaluating how more modular, interpretable, and human-centric approaches to system design can help narrow the gap between cutting-edge AI research and ethical, practical application in business. This research is conducted with the hope of opening the research field to greater creative possibility, as well as deliberate action towards creating more sustainable and human-centric artificial intelligence systems.

While there is a large amount of literature on the socio-cognitive theory of technology evolution, most has focused on the interpretations of technologies that are already in existence. The literature has barely attended to the role of forward-looking cognition—mental representations of possibilities in the future. How do innovators and entrepreneurs envision the possible, and how do they translate those abstract concepts into new material and social reality? This dissertation first synthesizes the vast literature on technology evolution, and offers a theoretical framework for understanding the role of forward-looking cognition in the evolution of technology. Using a large amount of historical archival data on the US robotics industry, my two empirical papers investigate (a) how a distant vision co-evolves with the actual technologies at the level of the organizational field (b) how entrepreneurial solutions and entrepreneurial search problems are co-constructed at the firm level. In the first paper of my dissertation, I review the literature on the evolution of technology. Over the last decades, scholars from a broad range of theoretical and methodological traditions have generated a vast yet dispersed body of literature on technology evolution. This essay offers a comprehensive synthesis of the major streams of scholarship on technology evolution by dividing the literature into four perspectives: technology realist, economic realist, cognitive interpretivist, and social constructionist. I further show that each perspective offers a divergent account of three central mechanisms—variation, selection, and retention—that drive discrete, continuous, and cyclical patterns of technology evolution. I integrate these perspectives by highlighting that they all emphasize recombination, environmental fit, and path dependence as central drivers of those three mechanisms. I emphasize the need for a co-evolutionary framework that cuts across the four perspectives to push the literature forward. In the second paper of my dissertation, I examine how technological visions—mental representations of technological possibilities in the future—co-evolve with the actual technologies. This paper is set in the robotics industry. The existing literature has focused on how backward-looking interpretations of technology shape its subsequent trajectory, but has rarely examined the role of forward-looking cognition in technology evolution. To examine this, I conducted an extensive archival qualitative study covering the evolution of the field of robotics during the 100-year period from 1921 to 2020. I find that in a future-oriented field, the direction of technology evolution is largely shaped by the field participants’ attempts to narrow the vision-reality gap—the perceived temporal gap between the distant vision and present reality. I identify six distinct mechanisms—linking means to the distant vision, constructing a medium-term vision, envisioning sequences, decomposing, reconstructing, and reintegrating—through which field participants strive to narrow the vision-reality gap. I also find that the vision-reality gap is extremely volatile, and can rapidly expand and contract when salient artifacts (or reverse salients) emerge. In this study, I contribute to the socio-cognitive view of technology by highlighting the role of forward-looking cognition in technology evolution. In the third paper of the dissertation, I study the process through which an entrepreneurial search problem is constructed. Previous studies have focused on search for solutions to a given problem. However, literature on entrepreneurship suggests that many entrepreneurs often start from formulating a very broad, abstract problem that a novel technological means is envisioned to be able to solve in the future. Forward-looking cognition, the mental representations of possibilities in the future, lies behind the process of problem formulation. In order to examine how construction of problems affects search for solutions, I conducted a qualitative analysis of archival data about 58 entrepreneurial firms founded by 42 entrepreneurs in the robotics industry. I find that most entrepreneurial firms start by linking a novel technological means to an abstract problem, and then proactively identify a core constraint in the solution space. In order to bypass the constraint, they engage in decomposing and reconstructing a core problem. In the stage of pursuing product-market fit, the issue of identifying core attributes, or core evaluation criteria weighted by users is brought to the fore. This paper contributes to our understandings of entrepreneurial search by highlighting the cognitive underpinnings of problem formulation.

The improvement of digital technology and human drive to connect and communicate have made social media an ever-present part of social life and, increasingly, organizational life. By reshaping the ways people interact, organize, take collective action, create and learn, social media both challenges our current understanding of individual and organizational phenomena and lends importance to the exploration of how these phenomena occur through digital-mediation. Despite this, few studies have explored the role of social media in processes of organization creation and emergent identity formation. Of research conducted on social media, more generally, Twitter and Facebook have attracted the most attention, with few studies conducted within the context of Instagram, a visually-rich social networking platform with over a billion users. Responding to increasing calls for the study of social media’s implications for organization studies and for more-specific study of the Instagram platform, this dissertation addresses the role that Instagram plays in affording new ways of organizing, the generative nature of user interactions, and responses to social media visual content in collective identity construction. To accomplish these goals, I have elected to organize my dissertation into three papers. An introductory chapter and literature review set the stage for this work, providing both the theoretical framework for this research and justification of its import to organization studies. The first paper employs qualitative content analysis to understand how users of the social networking platform Instagram enact communication affordances in practice and draws on the social and collective concept of entrepreneuring to explain their implications for organization creation. The second paper draws on narrative thematic and visual analysis to examine how user engagement within the visually-rich context of Instagram fosters the development of collective identity, revealing the important roles of resonance and play to this process. The third paper develops the concept of small social data and illustrates its use in the study of organizational phenomena on Instagram. I conclude this dissertation by integrating the main contributions of these papers to theory, highlighting opportunities for future study, and discussing practical implications for organizations in the digital age more-broadly.

This is a paper that records the changing thoughts of a Chief Technology Officer in a major telecommunication company in the Middle East. The initial problem was whether to outsource or not, but this led to reflections on decision making, systems thinking, cybernetics and many other ethical, political and professional issues. These thoughts can serve as a roadmap for decision makers and stimulate critical reflection on their actions.

The past decade has been marked by widespread social movements. While we know a great deal about how large public firms are affected by social movements, we know little about how entrepreneurs process social movements’ pressures and decide whether or not to take action, along with the eventual consequences for their businesses. In the first essay, I theorize about the connections between social movements and social entrepreneurship, focusing on how social movements encourage entrepreneurs to use their vehicles as firms to solve social problems. This paper lays a foundation to understand how social movements serve as catalysts for social entrepreneurship and the associated organizational and field implications. In my second essay, I ask the question: Whether, how, and why do entrepreneurs react to the social movements’ spillover effects, and with what consequences to their businesses? Through a qualitative study, I study how the racial justice movement has spilled into in the fiber craft industry (e.g., knitting and crochet pattern designers, yarn dyers, yarn shop owners, content creators), largely centering the experiences of Black business owners. I find that social movements prompt entrepreneurs to reconsider their personal and relational identities which results in a change of stakeholder relationships and diverse personal and business outcomes. My findings provide valuable insight into how entrepreneurs—particularly those who share an identity with a social movement—respond to social movement spillover effects. Small and young businesses numbering in the tens of millions are making strategic choices for their businesses in the wake of mass social movements. These decisions have important implications for the survivability and success of their firm. I seek to build theories at the intersection of social movements and social entrepreneurship, and to inform young and small business owners, social movement organizations, and community stakeholders about the broad reaching effects social movements have in many corners of the market.

Special Purpose Acquisition Companies (SPACs) are simply enterprises that raise money from the public with the intention of purchasing an existing business and becoming publicly traded in the securities markets. If the SPAC is successful in raising money and the acquisition takes place, the target company takes the SPAC’s place on a stock exchange in a transaction that resembles a public offering. Also known as “blank-check” or “reverse merger” companies, this process avoids many of the pitfalls of a traditional initial public offering. During late 2020 and 2021 an unprecedented surge in the popularity and issuance of Special Purpose Acquisition Companies (SPACSs) took place. John Coates, the SEC’s Acting Director of the Division of Corporation Finance, observed, “Concerns include risks from fees, conflicts, and sponsor compensation, from celebrity sponsorship and the potential for retail participation drawn by baseless hype, and the sheer amount of capital pouring into the SPACS, each of which is designed to hunt for a private target to take public.” We discuss this popular approach to capital formation within the context of the securities issuance process and examine the robust market for SPAC issuance during 2020 and 2021. Financial reporting and auditing considerations are examined, along with regulatory concerns. Several examples of these offerings are provided. We believe this paper adds to the discussion and understanding of this widely employed financing mechanism.

Roll-A-Rack, a small business based in Cleveland, Ohio, is addressing the unmet needs for solar panel mounting services and Li-ON Care, a student based startup, is addressing the unmet needs that exist in lithium ion battery's health management systems. This paper reviews the scientific and commercial developments of these two entrepreneurial ventures in the solar and the energy storage industries.