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The decision of whether or not to start a new business is a question pondered by many people and something that about .004% of the U.S. population decides to do every month (Kauffman Foundation, 2005). This decision becomes more complicated with the involvement of family members. One would be hard pressed to find any business enterprise without some sort of family influence and involvement at some point in the start-up or ongoing operations of the business. While most entrepreneurship research points to legal, environmental, regulatory, technological, or demographic changes as triggers that spur individuals into action, the role of family influence in new business founding is often overshadowed or not addressed at all (Aldrich & Cliff, 2003).

This research subscribes to the on-going process school of construction project briefing. Stakeholders underrepresented in the literature are engaged with by focussing on Formula 1 motor racing circuits. Attention is given to the rationales through which stakeholders define construction projects at such venues. The aim of this paper is to understand the realities experienced by stakeholders and how these resonate with the rhetoric of briefing literatures.

A single case-based research approach, encouraged for studying informality and emergence, was used to study a heritage oriented construction project at Silverstone Formula 1 Circuit, UK. Data included field-notes, interviews and strategy documents. Stakeholder interests cannot be directly accessed; however, language used when defining projects can be. Analysis focussed on how project rationales drawn directly from data could be grouped into interpretative repertoires. These repertoires are linguistic resources, drawn upon by stakeholders, formed partly from sets of rationales oriented around a common interest.

The priorities given to competing rationales are found to fluctuate through time and depending on audience. Project advocates mobilise these conflicting rationales, from different repertoires, to different audiences simultaneously when strategically defining the heritage project. Discursive definitions emerged during analysis through studying both formal and informal briefing practices.

Conflict among stakeholders with competing agendas during briefing is widely recognised however references to discursivity are currently scant.

Coping with discursivity during briefing poses significant challenges for construction professionals.

By interpreting strategic briefing as an on-going and discursive process of project definition, researchers and practitioners can better empathise with realities experienced by stakeholders.

To examine the governance network in Northamptonshire, an area awarded the status of the most enterprising place in Britain in 2012.

A combination of original interviews and documentary analysis to track the development of governance across two place-based initiatives.

Governance and leadership efforts were hindered by three factors prior to 2010; geographical, issues of legitimacy and a lack of stimulus for action in a successful economy. Changes since the General Election have enabled the Local Enterprise Partnership (LEP) to overcome the first of these but work on the other two is ongoing.

The research has been conducted in the early stages of the LEP’s work and more time is needed to see if the progress made to date translates into a meaningful role.

Place-based strategies need to be based around pre-agreed territorial boundaries. In addition development agencies need to be able to demonstrate competency in order to be seen as legitimate actors.

The chapter offers an insight into establishing governance and leadership in an already successful economy. Most papers in this area either examine deprived areas or areas where governance is key to the success.

Innovation is an increasingly distributed process, involving networks of geographically dispersed players with a variety of possible, and dynamic, value chain configurations (Fraser, Minshall, & Probert, 2005). ‘Open innovation’ is one term that has emerged to describe ‘[…] the use of purposive inflows and outflows of knowledge to accelerate internal innovation, and expand the markets for external use of innovation, respectively’ (Chesbrough, Vanhaverbeke, & West, 2006). This is contrasted with the ‘closed’ model of innovation where firms typically generate their own ideas which they then develop, produce, market, distribute and support.

This chapter compares two protected natural parks as specific experiential contexts providing two different experiences for visitors: extraordinary and memorable versus ordinary and mundane (Carù & Cova, 2006, 2007). Each experiential context enables the distinction of actual visitors’ experiences (Pine & Gilmore, 1999) inside each park. A qualitative study collected information to differentiate each protected natural park based on three dimensions: the geophysical environment, the recreational practices, and product and service offer management. A quantitative study analyzed the effect of a specific experiential context through a comparison of actual visitors’ experiences on four dimensions (esthetics, escapism, education, and entertainment) in both countries (500 in each country). Results of the qualitative study show that the Taiwanese park provides an experiential context with more extraordinary and memorable experiences while the French park provides an experiential context with more ordinary and mundane experiences. The results of the quantitative study show the distinction of actual visitors’ experiences inside each park: more immersion through esthetics and escapism in Taiwan and more absorption through education and entertainment in France. Each park manager has to build one’s own positioning and should offer a unique experiential context based on the three dimensions to provide more extraordinary and memorable or more ordinary and mundane experiences. this study highlights the interest of an analysis framework of experiences adapted from Carù and Cova (2006, 2007) and Pine and Gilmore (1999) underlining the link between experiential context and actual experiences.