Situated Entrepreneurial Cognition in Corporate Incubators and Accelerators: The Business Model as a Boundary Object

Abstract

The cognitive perspective in entrepreneurship research has predominantly evolved around the static conceptions of cognition at the level of individual reasoning. Recently, the emerging stream of situated entrepreneurial cognition asserts that the environment substantially influences the inherent knowledge structures of entrepreneurial reasoning. It claims that the context indoctrinates the perceptions and beliefs underlying decision making, thus authoring entrepreneurial cognition to derive from the recursive interaction between the mind and the respective environment. Drawing on this perspective, this article follows a narrative approach investigating the unfolding dynamics between the entrepreneurial cognition and contextual factors in a business model design. Using textual accounts from 34 episodic interviews with entrepreneurs from corporate entrepreneurship initiatives, we applied a constant comparative method identifying main themes in the data. Our findings show that entrepreneurial cognition is embedded, grounded, and distributed. We provide evidence that the situated entrepreneurial cognition results from the recursive interplay of material objects, bodily interactions, and agents spanning a social system. Our findings suggest that the unilateral consideration of authored cognitive systems falls short in capturing the holistic nature of entrepreneurial cognition. Thus, our findings further empirically ground situated entrepreneurial cognition by placing the entrepreneur at the nexus of individual and context. Finally, this article reveals the business model as a central boundary object connecting and focalizing a variety of influences on the situated entrepreneurial cognition in its social context.