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Entrepreneurship research has grown in both quality and quantity over the past decade, as many theoretical innovations and important empirical research findings have been introduced to the field. However, theoretical approaches to understanding entrepreneurship remain fragmented, and empirical findings are unstable across different contexts. This chapter describes features of a multi-level process view of new venture emergence that adds coherence to the entrepreneurship theory jungle and brings order to idiosyncratic empirical results, by explaining how ideas become organized into new ventures. The centerpiece of this effort is enactment theory, a general process approach specifically developed to explain organizing processes. Enactment theory – and Campbellian evolutionary theorizing more generally – has a long history of use within and across multiple levels of analysis. Consequently, the description here illustrates how organizing unfolds across multiple levels of analysis and multiple phases of development. After describing the theorizing assumptions and multi-level process view of new venture organizing, the chapter explores implications of applying this perspective by suggesting new research directions and interpretations of prior work. The aim is to advocate process theorizing as a more productive approach to understanding new venture emergence.

The creation of a new venture is at the heart of entrepreneurship and shares parallels with project-based organizing: embedded in an institutional context, founders have to assemble a team that works on specified tasks within a strict time constraint, while the new venture undergoes various transitions. The purpose of this paper is to explore parallels between both streams of research and an increasing projectification of entrepreneurship.

The study is based upon a case study of the Berlin start-up ecosystem including the analysis of interviews (n=52), secondary documents, and field observations.

The paper reveals that – shaped by their institutional context – patterns of project-like organizing have become pertinent to the new venture creation process. It identifies a set of facets from the entrepreneurial ecosystems – more specifically different types of organizational actors, their occupational backgrounds, and epistemic communities – that enable and constrain the process of new venture creation in a way that is typical for project-based organizing.

This study thus elaborates on how institutional settings enforce what has been called “projectification” in the process of new venture creation and discuss implications for start-up ecosystems.

In this chapter, we examine two theorized approaches to entrepreneurial activity: experiential versus prediction based strategies. We empirically assess the comparative performance of several commonly recommended approaches – researching customer needs, researching the competitive landscape, writing a business plan, conceptually adapting the business plan or experimentally adapting the primary business activity. We found that the majority of nascent entrepreneurs began with a business plan, but only about a third adapted their plan in later stages. We also found that talking with customers and examining the competitive landscape were normative activities. Those who started a plan were more likely to create a venture, although the effects much stronger for those who changed their plan later on, as well as for those who researched customer needs.

Our results show that the selection of these activities is both ubiquitous and driven by pre-start-up experience and new venture characteristics. The activities themselves do not robustly link with successful new venture foundation. Hence, pre-start-up experiences, venture characteristics, and the institutional environment are more important in explaining successful performance than recommended activities. Implications for research, practice, and pedagogy are discussed.

Today, entrepreneurs are “predicting our future by inventing it”. This phenomenon is in response to the rapid economic growth and social change brought on by new technology and expanding world markets. Over the next fifty years, Americans may contemplate annual per capita income raising five to tenfold from the present $12,000 which our industrial society produces. The service economy will become more and more a knowledge or information economy. All institutions, public, private, for‐profit and not‐for‐profit, are changing or being changed. The economic value of knowledge is just being recognized. Libraries, as collections of books, are becoming value‐added information and knowledge centers. The present library world is confused by the apparent conflict between serving traditional scholastic and emerging business needs. There is great opportunity for service and profit to the imaginative library that organizes to provide the new forms of knowledge now available or being developed. Library systems need leaders with vision and the ability to negotiate major change — not administrators. Librarians as entrepreneurs must learn business. This includes venture management and finance. Available assistance includes: growing intrapreneurial understanding in large institutions; family and friends; ample private wealth seeking investment; new business incubators — many university sponsored; a maturing, amply funded venture capital industry; and rapidly spreading local ‘venture clubs’ organizing community resources for entrepreneurs.

Organizational learning continues to be an important issue for all types of firms. Managerial accounts of organizational learning are in high demand; for example, Senge’s The Fifth Discipline (Senge, 1990a) has sold over 500,000 copies in the U.S. Studies exploring the nature of knowledge creation, intellectual capital, and knowledge management have been on the rise, with recent papers being published for academics (McElroy, 2000; Nahapiet & Ghoshal, 1998; Nonaka, 1994), and practitioners (Brown & Duguid, 1998; Fryer, 1999). According to some experts, the ability to transform information into knowledge through organizational learning is a critical success factor for all businesses in the current knowledge-based economy (Davis & Botkin, 1994; Lei, Slocum & Pitts, 1999).

This chapter explores the issue of an outsider entering an existing business network in an interactive, interdependent and interconnected business world. Developing the new venture appears a ‘mission impossible’ as the new venture has no relationship in the relevant network or a tenuous one at best. The critical issue and major difficulty for the new company are to make established business actors perceive that there are good reasons to admit the new venture into the existing business network. The fate of the new venture, its acceptance by at least some other business actors, will largely depend on how the incumbents perceive the new company to affect their existing relational assets which result from past investments. In attempting to become a new node of a business relationship, the ‘management’ of the new venture has to address two issues. First, it has to find some actors interested in relating to the new venture and to engage them in developing the initial business relationships. Second, the new venture has to manage the networking that is combining the initial relationships with each other. The authors identify and discuss six spaces for action for new business ventures related to these two challenges.

The reality of organizing new growth ventures is that every place to locate them in the organization has pros and cons.

Using a set of seven archetypes, executives can figure out which location solution fits the initiative and the parent company best.

Organizations pursuing ventures have a choice of how much separation/distance to insert between ongoing operations and the new business.

The “right” place to locate a venture also depends on such factors as the situation of the parent organization, the level of innovation maturity the parent organization has and the form and functions of the venture.

One of the most critical decisions that executives need to make as they contemplate getting started with setting up an innovation/growth function within their organizations is where, organizationally, it belongs. Seven alternatives are analyzed.

The purpose of this paper is to obtain evidence concerning the basic dimensions included in cognitive prototypes pertaining to opportunity recognition and decision to launch a new venture; identifying the underlying dimensions of both prototypes – the cognitive frameworks current or nascent entrepreneurs employ in performing these important tasks.

The bi-dimensional models were tested in a sample of 284 founder entrepreneurs, using a 48-item questionnaire. It was used as structural equation confirmatory factor analysis to compare fit indices of uni-dimensional second-order and third-order bi-dimensional models of business opportunity and decision to launch a venture.

Results support the bi-dimensional models and offer support that both prototypes include two basic dimensions. For the business opportunity prototype these are viability and distinctiveness while for the decision to launch a new venture, the basic dimensions are feasibility and motivational aspects.

These results help to further clarify the nature of the cognitive frameworks individuals use to identify potential opportunities and reach an initial decision about whether to pursue their development. Uncovering the cognitive functioning of opportunity recognition and decision to exploit it, allow individuals to recognize opportunities easier and successfully; and to make more accurate and effective decisions.

Knowing the basic dimensions of opportunity and decision-making prototypes contributes to develop effective skills with respect to business opportunity recognition among students enrolled in entrepreneurship programs. These surveys can be used for self-assessment and also for investors, tutors, and entrepreneurship agents in order to help evaluate features of business opportunities and decision to launch a venture.

This study embraces a conceptual contribution, proposing a different model of the business opportunity and decision to exploit prototypes, and it extends Baron and Ensley (2006) previous work, to another important step in the entrepreneurial process – the decision to develop an identified opportunity through the launch of a new venture.

Organizational routines emerge in firms during the process of new venture creation. Typically, they are imprinted and sometimes replicated by the entrepreneurs creating the organization, reflecting individual and contextual characteristics. In particular cases, organizations are designed for replicating routines for new ventures. The authors investigate one such case from the IT industry using a dynamic routine perspective and focus on how routines originally created by an organization are replicated in several new ventures. In more detail, the authors focus on how routine replication counter-intuitively allows for innovating in new venture creation. The authors find that routine replication supports entrepreneurial innovation in three ways: (1) the replicator organization’s accelerating routines unburden the replicator organization’s innovating routines; (2) the replicator organization’s accelerating routines unburden the new venture’s innovating routines; and (3) the new venture’s accelerating routines unburden the new venture’s innovating routines. The authors contribute to the discussion about the replication dilemma by conceptualizing “unburdening” as a mechanism that allows both routinization and innovation benefits to be reaped.

Until recently, sponsoring new businesses has largely been the province of venture capital firms. Now, more and more companies are getting into the new venture business. In order to succeed at it, there are a number of lessons they must learn.