The emergent process of entrepreneurial innovation: evidence from Fabrication Spaces

Abstract

This thesis contributes to sharpening process theories of organisational emergence. It studies the co-evolution of new product development (NPD) and new venture creation (NVC) activities for nascent entrepreneurs in the process of commercialising their idea. The empirical context selected for studying this process is that of entrepreneurs in Fabrication Spaces, open design and fabrication workshops. This thesis unpacks and analyses the process of entrepreneurial innovation in its defining components, providing empirical evidence for its challenges and associated key resources from the perspective of entrepreneurs. By focusing on the very initial stages of such process, I identify some of the key antecedents of entrepreneurial innovation behaviour and how they are harvested through Fabrication Spaces as example of entrepreneurial support systems. The outcome of the study is the introduction of a revised view on the contemporary process, resources and context of entrepreneurial innovation, a phenomenon that is gaining particular relevance in digital, crowd-sourced, and collaborative economies. First the exploratory research draws upon a review of the literature on the venture creation process for nascent entrepreneurs. This review highlights one major knowledge gap, concerning how the development of technical products and production capabilities in a new venture intertwine with the development and launch of the business. To address this gap, an initial theoretical model is outlined and used to structure the analysis of data captured from 19 in-depth and cross-sectional case studies. Then, the social and technical resources employed by entrepreneurs to navigate the entrepreneurial innovation journey are mapped onto the corresponding stages and events of the process described by the theoretical model. This mapping uncovers new contextual influences for the process of entrepreneurial innovation, in particular for what concerns the role of acquired psychological and technical capital in the early stages of the process. Acquiring such capital through community embeddedness and resource sharing in Fabrication Spaces allowed nascent entrepreneurs to refine and perfect their venture ideas through rapid cycles of learning in line with the lean entrepreneurship approach and create venture prototypes through dispersed entrepreneurial agency. To strengthen these results, I run a cluster analysis of the current landscape of Fabrication Spaces available in the UK and confirm that, despite not addressing entrepreneurship directly in their agenda, these spaces are adapting their offering to increasingly accommodate entrepreneurial needs. The theoretical contributions help to sharpen and expand entrepreneurship process theories and suggest how Fabrication Spaces can complement the current available landscape of support systems available to start-ups by increasing the robustness of entrepreneurs’ propositions very early on and improving their chances to be later appreciated by entrepreneurship programmes and investors.