Inducements for Resource Redeployment in Portfolio Entrepreneurship

Abstract

This paper investigates which factors serve as inducements to prompt portfolio entrepreneurs to redeploy their own time across ventures within their portfolios. While the corporate strategy literature assumes that portfolio managers take a rational approach to redeployment in attempt to maximize joint profits, we find that individual preferences and biases influence the redeployment decision when the unit of analysis is the individual entrepreneur. Through utilizing a descriptive phenomenological approach, we explore whether prior findings surrounding inducements to redeployment in corporate portfolios hold when studied in the context of portfolio entrepreneurship and discover several additional inducements that arise when the phenomenon is applied to the entrepreneurial context. We also shed light on the process through which time redeployment physically occurs and the requirements that must be in place in order for the entrepreneur to have the capacity to activate the option to redeploy when an inducement prompts the desire to do so.