Nurturing entrepreneurial creativity: The role of ideation and support practices

• Applicant: Professor Dr. Jörg Sydow, since 7/2019
• Subject Area: Accounting and Finance
• Term: from 2018 to 2023
• Project identifier: Deutsche Forschungsgemeinschaft (DFG) - Project number 397239959

Three key objectives, which build on each other, are pursued within the proposed research project. First, I want to develop a practice-based framework for understanding entrepreneurship as a venture idea's journey (work already in progress). Currently, research on entrepreneurial opportunities is struggling to differentiate between explanantia and explananda, or more specifically between the content and the favorability of an opportunity (Davidsson, 2015). Therefore, instead of explaining entrepreneurial success with inherently favorable opportunities that need to be discovered or created by individuals, I will conceive venture ideas as inherently vulnerable and precious in the beginning, developing - under certain circumstances - into viable opportunities, but on this journey relying on ideation and support practices throughout their entire journey. For conceptualizing the venture idea's journey, I will draw on Perry-Smith's & Manucci's (2017) four phases - generation, elaboration, championing, implementation - and study the venture idea's journey in longitudinal-qualitative design to avoid post-rationalization. Second, I want to explore the role of networked contexts for the venture idea's journey by drawing on a constitutive (Garud et al., 2014), or more specifically structurationist view (Chiasson & Saunders, 2005; Giddens, 1984; Sarason et al., 2006). According to this view, agency cannot enfold without structure and vice versa. Translated to the venture idea's journey, this leads to the insight that - because organizational structure does not exist in the beginning - founders have to draw on practices from other contexts. These practices, including the respective rules and resources agents can draw on, are often provided by close or distant network partners (Elfring & Hulsink, 2007; Sydow & Windeler, 1998). In order to better analyze the role of this context to ideation and support practices throughout the venture idea's journey, I will study ventures in strong-tie networks (e.g., incubator settings) and in weak-tie networks (e.g., independent start-ups).Third, and based upon these two objectives, I will develop a theory of organized creativity that is applicable to new venture creation processes that rely on ideation and support practices from founder/s, from the context and later from the emerging organization.

• DFG Programme: Research Grants
• Ehemaliger Antragsteller: Dr. Thomas Schmidt, until 6/2019