Technology entrepreneurship is more than one might think

Abstract

Technology entrepreneurship, by which we mean entrepreneurship on behalf of a new technology and its organizational and social acquisition, is more than one might think, given present use of the term, which focuses on technology as device. Here, taking the perspective of technology as routine capability, we reframe the concept to incorporate not only distributed agency involved around devices, but also distributed agency concerned with use through associated routines. We argue that technology acquisition in the form of capabilities concerns use and that technology entrepreneurship typically entails substantial institutional work in the promotion of adoption and use. We illustrate this in the case of the long and painful history of the acquisition of electronic health records (EHR). Our reframing leads to new insights. Among these is the identification of what we term path convergence and its importance in the social acquisition of a technology. We argue that technology entrepreneurs must attend to this path convergence, or the technology may not be widely taken up.