Entrepreneurial Remixing: Bricolage and Postmodern Resources

Abstract

The innovation of organizations has been likened to the improvisation capacity of musicians playing jazz – a modernist form of music that emphasizes improvisation within the boundaries of a particular genre. But recent bricolage research suggests that this metaphor is incomplete when applied to entrepreneurs. The innovation of entrepreneurs lies not only in the improvisational combining of resources, but also in the eclectic selection of resources and the embedding of these innovative combinations into novel contexts. This makes entrepreneurs less like jazz musicians and more like hip-hop DJs – a postmodern form of music that emphasizes sampling and remixing of musical fragments from diverse genres. This paper places entrepreneurial bricolage into a larger postmodern context and thereby identifies other unexplored implications for entrepreneurial value creation. By drawing from postmodern theorists, it explicates broader design principles that are latent only in the current narrow bricolage perspectives. A model is developed for how entrepreneurs enact postmodern resources and markets through hyperdifferentiation, how they develop novel pastiches using techniques such as bricolage, and how they embed these pastiches into novel contexts that create value from three distinct sources. Specific propositions and implications for entrepreneurs and researchers are developed.