Applying Method To The Madness: A Multidimensional Approach to Entrepreneurial Action

Abstract

Entrepreneurship can be viewed as a chain of intertwined events that unfold over time. By nature, these activities are continuous, episodic, and creative, and occur under conditions of uncertainty. However, scholars have been unable to agree on which activities are essential to the entrepreneurial process and/or whether patterns of these activities even exist, concluding that the process itself is intractably complex and inherently unpredictable. Across a harmonized dataset (N = 2,044), we apply an advanced mixed methods approach in order to map the dimensionality of the entrepreneurial process and subsequent configurations of activity sets. We discover that entrepreneurial action exists in a limited number of distinct and recognizable configurations that span two distinct underlying dimensions – a temporal dimension and a reasoning dimension. Based on the patterns of venture creation activities identified in our research, we contribute empirical evidence to three separate theories of entrepreneurial action. Our research indicates that action may be far less uncertain than the literature currently suggests, as it exists within a feedback loop that illuminates the dynamic properties of both time and reasoning. We contend that path dependencies and variations among configurations of venture creation activities offer promising implications for both theory and practice.