Towards a construct of entrepreneurial strategising: the case of private equity

Abstract

The obvious relevance of entrepreneurship in value creation has set off an intense debate in academia over how strategic management and entrepreneurship relate to each other culminating in the concept of 'strategic entrepreneurship'. As a result, the term 'strategic entrepreneurship', albeit widely used and defined, remains a theoretical concept indicating little more than a potential relationship between the two fields. Such debate, therefore, although fruitful for and typical of dynamic research fields in the process of transformation, may not be as useful for theoretical advancement as practice–informed approaches to theoretical model construction. We thus adopt such an approach by choosing as a starting point a setting in which strategic and entrepreneurial forces meet: the management of private equity funded firms. At the heart of our contribution lies the development of a new theoretical construct, entrepreneurial strategising, which is embedded in the relevant streams of both the strategy and entrepreneurship literature and, to a lesser extent, of behaviourist economics and the statistical notion of uncertainty. Specifically, entrepreneurial strategising refers to the dynamic capability of an organisation to employ discrete strategic and entrepreneurial mindsets; that is, mental models used by decision–takers situationally and, in some instances, simultaneously.