Social Entrepreneurs by Chance: How environmentalists provide a favorable context for social entrepreneurial action.

How, why, and under what conditions can social movements contribute to the development of social entrepreneurial process developed by embedded actors? Social entrepreneurship scholars are increasingly adopting social movement theories to explain how individual entrepreneurs develop their social ventures. Despite the synergies achieved when combining social movement with social entrepreneurship literature, social entrepreneurial outcomes are still mostly explained by the efforts of atomistic actors. In this paper we offer an embedded perspective on social entrepreneurship and social movement, which enables us to examine their complementary features in a sustainable development project in a Dutch region. While contentious activity did not produce the desired effect in our case, we found that the various stages of social entrepreneurship processes (opportunity identification, evaluation, formalization, and exploitation) through which embedded actors develop their ventures were especially enhanced by joint knowledge creation between movements and embedded actors, the construction of producer identities, and direct business support. This study contributes to the social movement literature by showing how movements can bring about change by providing embedded actors with producers’ identities and hands-on support. The literature on social entrepreneurship is also complemented, as we show how motives and behaviors to engage in social entrepreneurship are shaped by social movements, in combination with changes in the degree of embeddedness

Startups networking: how and when to act?

Networking can be defined as the conscious process through which organizations act to achieve their objectives in interaction with partners. Ritter and Ford (2004) argue that organizations network by either conforming or confronting towards partners in existing relationships; either consolidating its network position or creating new relationships; and either coercing or conceding the behavior of its partners. Lui and Ngo (2005) and Tjemkes and Furrer (2010) developed other typologies of actions in the interaction process that include acquiescing, compromising, creating, avoiding, defying and manipulative network actions. The latter typologies have been used to study networking by startups (e.g. Thorgren, Wincent, & Boter, 2012). These previous studies showed that despite of their liabilities of newness and smallness, which make it more difficult to know how and when to act, startups still have room for taking actions. In these studies a single type of action at the time was investigated, for example acquiescing. This limits our understanding of startups’ use of alternative actions. Moreover, existing research into established firms showed that the decision to act in a particular way is influenced by both the willingness and ability to act. The rational underlying a particular action is expected to be different for startups than for established firms because of their fundamentally different characteristics, such as a lack of experience and resources. Therefore, the questions addressed in this paper are: what is the range of actions from which a startup chooses and when does it choose a particular action? These questions are addressed by comparing the network action typologies of Ritter and Ford (2004), Lui and Ngo (2005) and Tjemkes and Furrer (2010) to develop a comprehensive research model. This research model goes beyond their typologies by including the rational underlying the particular actions. Then, this research model is tested by investigating the interactions between a Dutch startup, which develops a new medical device, and its partners. In this way, this study is able to create more in-depth insight compared to existing research that takes a quantitative, cross-sectional approach. The initial findings show that (a) the startup is not always willing to conform to partners even when it is highly dependent on them and (b) the startup’s surrounding network influences its ability to act in a relationship

When is a network a nexus for innovation? A study of public nanotechnology R&D projects in the Netherlands

Most empirical studies that test the influence of R&D collaboration on innovation performance either focus on the diversity of partners that enhances innovation or focus on social embeddedness of partners that enhances or inhibits innovation. We combine these two factors to explain innovation. By using the business interaction model (Håkansson et al., 2009) we test the effect of resource heterogeneity, value chain complementarity, user interaction, and structural stability of partnership portfolios on application and value creation performance of public nanotechnology R&D projects. We used an enriched database on utilization of technology research projects from the Dutch Technology Foundation STW. To test our hypotheses we selected from the database 206 nanotechnology research projects, which started in a five year period from 2000 to 2004. Project performance was measured five years after completion of the project. Support is found for an inverted U shaped effect of the interaction between stability of the relationship structure and technological heterogeneity, industry heterogeneity, value chain complementarity and user interaction in the R&D partnership portfolios on both application and value creation performance. The framework introduced in this study allows an evaluation of the effects of participant portfolios on Public R&D projects performance