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Indigenous entrepreneurship and hybrid venture creation represents a significant opportunity for Indigenous peoples to build vibrant Indigenous-led economies that support sustainable economic development and well-being. It is a means by which they can assert their rights to design, develop and maintain Indigenous-centric political, economic and social systems and institutions. In order to develop an integrated and comprehensive understanding of the intersection between Indigenous entrepreneurship and hybrid ventures, this chapter adopts a case study approach to examining Indigenous entrepreneurship and the underlying global trends that have influenced the design, structure and mission of Indigenous hybrid ventures. The cases present how Indigenous entrepreneurial ventures are, first and foremost, hybrid ventures that are responsive to community needs, values, cultures and traditions. They demonstrate that Indigenous entrepreneurship and hybrid ventures are more successful when the rights of Indigenous peoples are addressed and when these initiatives are led by or engage Indigenous communities. The chapter concludes with a conceptual model that can be applied to generate insights into the complex interrelationships and interdependencies that influence the formation of Indigenous hybrid ventures and value creation strategies according to three dimensions: (i) the overarching dimension of indigeneity and Indigenous rights; (ii) indigenous community orientations and (iii) indigenous hybrid venture creation considerations.

Social entrepreneurs who use market mechanisms to solve wicked problems (Rittel & Webber, 1973) may benefit from practices based on design thinking. Design thinking offers approaches to work iteratively on both problem and solution spaces collaboratively with multiple diverse stakeholders, which is characteristic of innovating for social change. This research conceptualizes designing as a construct formed by three practices: making improvements, generating creative leaps, and problem-solving. Using Boland and Collopy’s (2004) conception of a sense-making manager, it proposes “how” nascent social entrepreneurs take actions and also proposes “what” specific activities they undertake for the development of the venture. A conceptual model proposing “what” it is that social entrepreneurs do and “how” they go about their activities affecting new venture development is tested using structural equation modeling. Preliminary support for the predictive capability of the model is encouraging, suggesting that practices based on design thinking may be further developed in order to advance theoretical understanding of the application of design thinking for social entrepreneurship.

Access to equity capital is critical for business success, especially for young companies which lack the cash flows necessary for debt repayment. The creation and growth of such companies is a means to economic opportunity and wealth for ethnic-minority entrepreneurs. Unfortunately, the traditional venture capital industry is extremely limited in its investments.¹ It also is significantly less likely to invest in businesses owned by ethnic-minority entrepreneurs than those owned by white entrepreneurs (Bates & Bradford, 1992).²

Business plan writing seems the panacea to gain stakeholder legitimacy and financial backing. Our chapter explores the contributions and disconnections between business plan writing and the start-up process for incubated technology entrepreneurs. The study is set in the South East Enterprise Platform Programme (SEEPP), an incubator programme for technology graduate entrepreneurs in the South East of Ireland. Using a purposive sample of technology entrepreneurs in start-up mode, we took a qualitative approach consisting of content analysis of 40 business plans and in-depth interviews with 25 technology entrepreneurs. Our research found that writing a detailed business plan constrains the technology entrepreneur’s natural penchant for action, compelling them to focus on business plan writing rather than enactment. Technology entrepreneurs favour a market-led rather than funding-led operational level document to plan, and learn from, near-term activities using milestones.

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.

It is well known that entrepreneurship is a complex phenomenon, which takes place under great uncertainty. Much of the existing research that explores the venture creation process has assumed a linear, unitary process. The proposal presented in this chapter involves the venture creation process viewed as an iterative, non-linear, feedback-driven system called the Startup Path – a framework that brings together the entrepreneur as an individual, with its journey on the venture creation process.

Research on strategy in new ventures has increasingly drawn upon resource-based theory, and thus has emphasized intangible factors that confer sustainable competitive advantage. These include dynamic and combinative capabilities, networks, routines, and knowledge as resources of new ventures. Yet antecedent to every one of these intangible resources is the management of the venture. But research has seldom considered management and the human resources of new ventures as a critical dimension of strategy content. This paper develops such an argument, and explores the performance contribution of human resources as strategy content in a longitudinal study of technology new ventures.

Literature has recognised entrepreneurship education as the main conduit through which entrepreneurial behaviours, attitudes and actions can be built, enacted and delivered. Since the founding of new ventures is largely a resourceful founder-driven enterprise, entrepreneurship education has largely centred on galvanising and shifting the mindsets and cognition of the entrepreneur. Yet, despite over 60 years of delivering entrepreneurship education programmes, hard evidence of the generation of high-growth-oriented and sustainable ventures has been scarce as student entrepreneurship intentions do not always translate into successful venture creation. This is largely because of the complexities of the practicality of entrepreneurial education particularly, the dissonance between acquired education in business schools and the knowledge and competencies needed in the entrepreneurial field. Such dissonance can be attributed to the lack of clarity on the pedagogical approach that most resonates with entrepreneurial action, the diversity in assessment methods and the scholarly illusion pertaining to how pedagogical approaches can be channelled to the generation of growth-oriented ventures. Drawing on Girox's concepts of transformative critical pedagogy (including pedagogy of repression), Socratic dialogue, Hegelian dialectic and Yrjö Engeström's transformative expansive agency, I demonstrate how a flipped transformative critical pedagogy can be harnessed in digitally enhanced learning environments to create new entrepreneurial possibilities for facilitating critical inquiry, complex problem-solving, innovation for the market and fostering tolerance for failure in ambiguous entrepreneurial contexts.

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.