Abstract
The article is based on a theoretical exploration and empirical analysis of formalized public initiated instruments - eight network entrepreneurs - intended to promote, intermediate and support innovation and entrepreneurship in firms and firm networks located in three different business areas in Mid-Norway: food value chain, experience industries, and renewable energy and environmental technology. The article intends to explore how the intermediation perspectives in innovation theory could be combined with the entrepreneuring perspective in entrepreneurship theory, to build an alternative analytic approach to understand and explain contextually and dynamically embedded organisation-creation, better than the innovation-intermediation and the entrepreneuring perspectives separately are capable of. By inventing a tertius typology representing six archetypes of organization-creative action and strategies inherent in all innovative and entrepreneurial firm development, intermediation and entrepreneuring are seen as interwoven processes constantly emerging, evolving and interacting in multilayered contexts and dynamics of organisation-creation. Embeddedness or contextuality factors of all kinds are at work in every process of becoming and in spacing of newness, the primary goal for entrepreneurship and innovation suis generis. Accordingly, the article explores the traditional conceptions of change, entrepreneurship and innovation by contrasting them with process and event philosophical perspectives of firm development.
Highlights
The main objective of this paper is to combine an innovation-intermediation (II) perspective from innovation theory with a process perspective on entrepreneurship from entrepreneurship theory, and to use this framework to analyse three separate contexts of entrepreneurial intermediation in innovation
Eight network entrepreneur2 (NE) were at work in three different business contexts and sectors (NE priority areas), following a 10-year regional R&D and innovation programme conducted in Mid-Norway
A coherent framework for the development of networking and networked businesses is presented and discussed, and we contribute to an exploration of how entrepreneuring and innovation-intermediation can be seen as complementary analytical perspectives in business development and research
Summary
The main objective of this paper is to combine an innovation-intermediation (II) perspective from innovation theory with a process perspective on entrepreneurship (entrepreneuring1) from entrepreneurship theory, and to use this framework to analyse three separate contexts of entrepreneurial intermediation in innovation. Such an approach represents a different and possibly promising theoretical contribution towards enhancing our ability to study and analyse contextually embedded business organisation-creation, which in turn contributes to making entrepreneurship research open and attentive to a more diverse set of business formation processes. We have applied the typology in the present study as part of the framework involving the merging and combination of innovation and entrepreneurship theory
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