Unternehmerische Kreativität ermöglichen: Die Rolle von Ideations- und Unterstützungspraktiken
Zusammenfassung der Projektergebnisse
Adopting theories in creativity and entrepreneurship research, we developed the argument that successfully starting up a business cannot be fully explained with theories that conceive founders solely as independent heroes, ingeniously seizing and emphasizing ready-made opportunities, or focusing on creating these opportunities. In the last decade or so, we have witnessed the emergence of an unprecedentedly large support infrastructure for start-ups, not only in Silicon Valley, but also in European cities like Berlin: university incubators, (corporate) venture capital firms or company builders are increasingly offering support in terms of funding, legal consulting, or product design, for instance. The journey from venture idea generation to implementation should hence be conceived as a highly vulnerable process that is nurtured not only by the founder/s (and their teams), but also by the context setting. The research project paid particular attention to the role of turning vulnerable ideas into compelling opportunities thanks to the help of support practices offered by organizations in such contexts. Towards this end, we conducted longitudinal research in Berlin’s entrepreneurial ecosystem, one of Europe’s leading startup ecologies, with a particular focus on start-up entrepreneurs and their support structures. We adopted a qualitative, longitudinal research design that fits exploratory research, in order to investigate how an entrepreneurial idea develops in an entrepreneurial ecosystem conceived as an issue field with its more or less unique practices and structures. To identify support practices and their initiators, as well as the actors who enact them, we drew not only on secondary data, but also on semi-structured interviews with entrepreneurs, corporate and non-corporate accelerators, university incubators, Venture Capitalists (VCs), business angels, government agencies, and regional cluster associations that aim to support startups, albeit with differing intentions. In order to investigate in greater depth how support practices have an impact on the idea journey of entrepreneurs, and to understand how exactly the context contributes to this process, we followed the idea journey phases presented by Perry-Smith and Manucci (2017), i.e., the generating, elaborating, championing and implementing of novel ideas, and used them as an analytical framework. Following that phase model, we adopted an in-depth multiple-case study approach and selected six software-as-a-service (SaaS) startups from the ecosystem, in order to observe their idea journeys for two and half years. In a panel-like study, five waves of interviews were conducted at 6-monthly intervals with the founders and co-founders, as well as with the important customers and suppliers of the selected case. Websites, including those of the startups, were monitored bi-monthly from when the first interviews were arranged. In total, 54 interviews were conducted, 37 of which were with startup practitioners in five waves, and the remaining 17 with different actors in Berlin’s ecosystems, i.e., university incubators, corporate and non-corporate accelerators, company builders, VCs, investors and business angels, in order to explore the micro-foundations of this ecosystem.
Projektbezogene Publikationen (Auswahl)
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Entrepreneurial creativity from a practice-based perspective: Idea journeys in an entrepreneurial ecosystem. Presented to the OMT Division - AOM 2022, Seattle, USA (virtual)
Samimi, E. & Sydow, J.
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Innovating across organizational boundaries: How the collaborative relation-ships of startups drive ideation processes. Presented in Sub-theme 46: Opportunities for Path Creation: Practices and Processes of Interorganizational Collaboration, convened by Kristina Lauche, Hans Berends and Paul R. Carlile - EGOS 2022, Vienna, Austria
Samimi, E. & Sydow, J.
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Entrepreneuring across organizational boundaries: Collaborative relationships of startups and their idea journeys. Presented in Sub-theme 33: Entrepreneurship in and around Organizations, convened by Ha Hoang, Markus Perkmann, Dean Shepherd - EGOS 2023, Cagliari, Italy
Samimi, E. & Sydow, J.
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Inside the box: Idea journeys in an entrepreneurial ecosystem - EURAM 2023, Dublin, Ireland
Samimi, E. & Sydow, J.
