Henrik Berglund
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| The purpose of this paper is to use social cognitive theory to investigate entrepreneurial intent among participants in graduate entrepreneurship programs. Specifically, the authors test whether students’ creative potential is related to their intention to engage in entrepreneurship |
| The notion of opportunities is fast becoming a central theme in the field of entrepreneurship research. As part of this growing interest, the ontological status of opportunities has been scrutinized with researchers tending to view them as either objectively existing or socially created. In the present treatment, this ontological debate is partly avoided in favor of a phenomenological examination of Mobile Internet entrepreneurs, which naturally bridges these distinctions. The empirical findings are used to propose a framework in which opportunities are seen as both existing and created in the evolving set of perceptions and projections, sometimes fixed and sometimes mutable, that provide the cognitive and practical drivers needed to guide entrepreneurial action. |
| Risk is central to innovation but in order to be theoretically interesting and of practical use the relation between risk and innovation needs to be investigated in more specific situations. This paper explores the risk conceptions of innovators in two large corporations and identifies three themes that illuminate the relationship between risk and innovation in the corporate setting. The first relates risk to the issues of boundaries and control over parts of the innovation process, the second how risk is primarily related to innovation as process and not as output, and the third on how a flexible view of business models can be used to manage risk in corporate innovation. |
| This paper develops a model of entrepreneurial learning in order to explain how VCs support the process of entrepreneurial learning and thereby add value to their ventures. We draw on two generic approaches to learning, termed the hypothesis-testing mode and the hermeneutic mode, which turn out to be closely interrelated in such learning processes. The resulting model comprises four categories, which focus on what entrepreneurs learn and how it is learnt: experimentation, evaluation, unreflective action and unverified assumptions. We then use these analytical categories to illustrate how VCs apply their different forms of expertise to increase a venture’s value once an investment has been made. |
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Berglund in Chapter 3, ‘Researching entrepreneurship as lived experience’,
presents aspects of philosophical phenomenology that are relevant to entrepreneurship and exemplifies how phenomenology can be used to capture and
communicate the meanings of different entrepreneurial experiences, allowing
for a more detailed understanding of how theoretical concepts and
empirical events are understood and translated into action by entrepreneurs. (from the book editors' introduction) |
| This chapter takes a closer look at how social networks can affect the early development of new ventures. The dynamic role of social networks is discussed and exemplified by two longitudinal cases that illustrate the radically different ways in which social networks can influence venture development. These differences relate to social or individual ownership of the innovation process, to risks or opportunities as the focus of attention, and to the creative relationship between networking and financial bootstrapping techniques. |
| As creativity is increasingly recognised as a vital component of entrepreneurship, researchers and educators struggle to reform enterprise pedagogy. To help in this effort, we use a personality test and open-ended interviews to explore creativity between two groups of entrepreneurship masters’ students: one at a business school and one at an engineering school. The findings indicate that both groups had high creative potential, but that engineering students channelled this into practical and incremental efforts whereas the business students were more speculative and had a clearer market focus. The findings are drawn on to make some suggestions for entrepreneurship education. |
| The present study aims at investigating the role of risk in the activity of independent technological venturing. Altogether 12 deep-interviews were conducted with technological entrepreneurs, who had taken part in the inventive, developmental and the commercialisation phases of a technologybased innovation process. The interviews revealed a number of enactment approaches through which these innovators encountered and affected (dealt with or transformed) risk within the innovation process. Factors thus developed from the empirical material included: human capital, pace and priority, the world moves, activating social networks, risk learning, risk incrementalism, maintaining venture agility, and creating and sustaining autonomy. The paper presents a theoretical contextualisation as to the significance of these factors, and finally suggests a number of ways in which these may be interpreted for the benefit of innovation management. |
| This paper explores the relevance of the concept of self in the process of independent technological innovation. In-depth interviews were conducted with technological innovators from start-up firms in IT, biotech and advanced services concerning the subjective and social forms of engagement in the innovation process. Emerging factors in the interview data revealed aspects pertaining to the innovator’s reflexive self-conception, innovator ego-involvement in the venture, forms of commitment and control, personal and social stakes, and various self-oriented cognitive strategies. It is argued that the self-concept allows the innovator to come into view as a social and subjective being who is involved in reflexive activities such as dynamic role-taking, ``is’’ vs ``ought’’ reflections and social negotiations. |
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Recommended reading
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Henrik Berglund, PhD Department of Technology Management and Economics Chalmers University of Technology 412 96 Göteborg, Sweden Tel: +46 708 128 138 Email: