Collective Entrepreneurship: Towards a Process Model

Abstract

Collective entrepreneurship (CE) is increasingly utilized as a concept as scholars have realized that entrepreneurship is often a multi-individual phenomenon and occurs in a variety of organizational settings. However, the concept CE is yet used loose of an in-depth elaboration on collectiveness in the entrepreneurial opportunity emergence and exploitation context. Integrating literature on group development and shared mental models with the entrepreneurial opportunity setting, we suggest a contingency-based process model of CE that distinguishes CE from individual entrepreneurship (IE) while embracing variability from the individual to the group-level. We believe that CE emerges to different degrees according to the conditions of collective opportunity emergence and exploitation through entrepreneurial action in which a shared understanding among group members develops. We see that the collective quality of the relationships between the members transit the group into a collective entrepreneur. We propose that CE reinforces or degenerates through shared entrepreneurial action mechanisms along time in a variety of multi-actor contexts. Our model not only offers a clearer delineation of CE but also develops the construct as dynamic and malleable which advances future theory building and empirical work, and improves its utility for entrepreneurship education and practice.