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Overconfidence in one’s entrepreneurial abilities is often assumed to motivate the behaviors of founders of high growth ventures. However, when founders encounter significant obstacles in the firm growth process, some begin to doubt their efficacy of their abilities to manage these growth processes successfully. In these circumstances, prior research suggests that such self-doubt creates significant cognitive constraints on an entrepreneur’s growth ambitions. Similar to other types of resource constraints, cognitive constraints are thought to impact firm performance outcomes negatively. Despite these claims, in this study, phenomenological analysis of the experiences of a group of entrepreneurs creating and managing high-growth ventures based largely in Silicon Valley suggests that a number of these entrepreneurs experience significant levels of self-doubt but still persist in growing their ventures. Yet current entrepreneurship theory provides limited guidance regarding how entrepreneurs overcome these self-doubts and persist in creating a new venture. To address these theoretical limitations, in this chapter, we examine the cognitive process through which entrepreneurs wrestle with self-doubt in order to overcome self-imposed, cognitive constraints on firm growth. Based on this analysis, we develop a process model using a unique sample of interviews with 27 high-tech, high-growth entrepreneurs who have received venture capital funding. This model suggests entrepreneurs overcome self-doubt by managing the emotional impact derived from the discrepancy between their ideal and actual selves. Furthermore, entrepreneurs engage in an active process of transforming negative mental states by leveraging their intentionality, engaging in forethought, taking consistent action, and relying on the support of others. Overall, we find that entrepreneurs display a high level of entrepreneurial agency when attempting to transform negative mental states in order to persist with their ventures. Implications of these findings for cognitive theories of entrepreneurial action are discussed.

In this article we consider how cultural resources rooted in religion help to constitute and animate people working in industrialized societies across both religious and nonreligious domains. We argue that redemptive self-narratives figure prominently in the symbolic constructions people attach to their experiences across the many domains of human experience; such redemptive narratives not only can shape their identities and sense of life purpose, they inform their practices and choices and animate their capacity for action. To consider how redemptive self-narratives can provide a basis for agency in organizations, we analyze and compare the career narratives of a retired Episcopal Bishop and a celebrated CEO.

This chapter provides an in-depth analysis of the cleanup and closing of the nuclear weapons facility at Rocky Flats (RF), Colorado, United States, which was completed 60 years ahead of schedule and $30 billion under budget. We demonstrate how the events leading to the successful completion of the project was an instance of generativity made possible by the Appreciative Intelligence of the project leaders and participants. At the end of the Cold War, production at RF was terminated and experts considered cleaning up of the dangerous facility technically impossible, risky, and impractical. Yet, working in collaboration with contractors, local officials, and community leaders, the RF team achieved extraordinary results. After the unprecedented cleanup, 4,000 acres were transferred to the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service and became a national wildlife refuge. Generativity is an approach to life that directs our actions toward positive outcomes. For generativity to happen, stakeholders in the RF project had to care about the environment around them for innovative solutions to emerge. Instead of stagnation or blind acceptance of circumstances, they chose to reframe and find new ways to perceive situations facing them. This case study shows that individuals with high Appreciative Intelligent acknowledge present circumstances, choose to reframe, see possibilities for the future, and take the necessary actions to achieve them. They also expand their Appreciative Intelligence beyond their personal lives. At RF, despite the imminent closing of the plant, stakeholders generated socially responsible solutions and transformed a public liability into a community asset.

This chapter aims to investigate how a range of emerging trends within the international community can be used to build a connective educational ecosystem based on an inclusive and universal process (Biggeri et al., 2017; Ziegler, 2017). The starting question is: how multidisciplinary teams in Italy could take action toward inclusive education?

Partnering is becoming a central system organization strategy for schools to adopt for successful innovative teams with creative educational ideas (Kelly et al., 2002), and here it is declined in the Italian context in which inclusive education was officially embraced in 1977 as a national policy (D'Alessio, 2011). National legislation (104/92 Law) made explicit the mandate that students with disabilities receive their education (to the maximum extent possible) with nondisabled peers in the general education classroom using appropriate supplemental aids and services in the least-restrictive environment (Anastasiou et al., 2015; Canevaro & de Anna, 2010).

It is crucial to encourage new forms of practice which require collaboration capabilities (Hattie, 2015; Vangrieken et al., 2015) between multidisciplinary teams that comprised general teachers, special education teachers, health professionals, school psychologists, school leaders, and the students' family (Meirink et al., 2010). These resources could be distributed across inclusive ecosystems to support all students by enabling them to prosper in an increasingly diversified and complex environment in which creativity, ability to innovate, entrepreneurship, and a commitment to continuous learning are joint and connective (EU, 2008). This creates a state of positive multiagency collaboration that promotes the well-being of students and the system.

Entrepreneurship is a form of empowerment as it provides a way for individuals to pursue their dreams. The generation of ideas is at the heart of entrepreneurship and involves assessing new opportunities. Recognizing gaps in the marketplace that new products, services or processes can fill is central to the idea of entrepreneurship. There are many different types of entrepreneurship including social, technological, sport and international that provide a way for ideas to enter the marketplace. This chapter focuses on the way entrepreneurship empowers people and provides a way for novel ideas to gain momentum. By taking a knowledge spillover and ecosystems perspective, the chapter highlights the way entrepreneurship gives strength to those with a creative idea. Thereby, acting as a form of empowerment, entrepreneurship provides a way for practitioners and researchers to make a positive contribution to society.

To innovatively address challenges faced by corporate entrepreneurship (CE) in this modern age of globalization and digitalization, this chapter takes a fresh look at questions of learning and leadership from the perspective of organization development (OD), a field that has long studied questions of planned and emergent change. This alternate perspective adds to our knowledge and understanding of the role of individuals and teams in CE and presents opportunities to integrate learning and leadership. In particular, the OD literature provides us with multilevel measurement methods and tools to better analyze the employee and team level-of-analysis. As a result, these insights should enable us to better explain the interaction between CE strategic orientation and the performance of corporate venturing employees and teams, as well as the progress of organizational strategic renewal and market (re)creation efforts.

In this paper, we reflect on the origins and development of our theory of cultural entrepreneurship. We highlight the serendipity that was part of its genesis, and note how our arguments and thinking evolved over time with the literature. We conclude by suggesting some fruitful lines of scholarly focus moving forward, and emphasize the importance of context and cultural process in understanding our own ideational development as well as those of all entrepreneurs – whether they are involved in creating a high tech venture, solving a social problem, transforming a corporation or public agency, or contributing to some other socio-economic process.

This chapter explores the ways in which a large-scale accounting system, known as Marijuana Enforcement Tracking Reporting and Compliance, contributes to the construction and organization of a new market for recreational cannabis in the US state of Colorado. Mobilizing the theoretical lenses provided by the literature on market devices, on the one hand, and infrastructure, on the other hand, the authors identify and unpack a changing relationship between accounting and state control through which accounting and markets unfold. The authors describe this movement in terms of a distinction between knowing devices and thinking infrastructures. In the former, the authors show that regulators and other authorities perform the market by making it legible for the purpose of intervention, taxation and control. In the latter, thinking infrastructures, an ecology of interacting devices is made and remade by a variety of intermediaries, disclosing the boundaries and possibilities of the market, and constituting both opportunities for innovation and domination through “protocol.”

This chapter uses reflexive praxis to advance a framework for developing creative virtuosities for entrepreneurs based on four interrelated aspects: finding their own voice and passion at work; unleashing creativity and imagination at work; working collaboratively toward innovation; and handling complexity and integrative thinking. These four creative virtuosities emerged from observations and exploratory interviews with training program participants on five different occasions in Turkey, the UK, and Canada. They are illustrated through four arts-based metaphors: poetry; theater; orchestra; and jazz. The core premise of this chapter is that these four virtuosities can provide entrepreneurs with a sound basis and a wealth of knowledge on developing creative solutions to new socioeconomic challenges of prospective radical technological and economic changes.