Rehn, Alf

English

Research Papers in Economics

 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
THE 
 
PINK MACHINE PAPERS 
 
 
#29 – N
o 2 / 2006 
Entrepreneurship as sampling – A theoretical note 
Alf Rehn  
 
 
 
#29 
N
o 2 / 2006 
 
 
 
Entrepreneurship as sampling 
-A theoretical note 
 
 
 
 
 
Alf Rehn 
Royal Institute of Technology, KTH 
Dept. of Industrial Management, INDEK 
Stockholm, Sweden 
alf.rehn@indek.kth.se 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
The Pink Machine Papers   
ISSN 1650 - 4062   
Stockholm, 2006       
The Pink Machine Papers #29 N
o 2/2006  Alf Rehn: Entrepreneurship as sampling  
 
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Entrepreneurship as sampling 
 
I.  
 
Entrepreneurship is  often understood as the  art of the new  – new  ventures, new 
companies, new products, innovations and so on. It would thus seem like a most un-
promising sphere for inquiring into sampling and reuse. I will argue that this is a fun-
damental fallacy, not only in lay thinking but in the very theory of entrepreneurship, 
and that there is much analytically to be gained from understanding it as a form of 
sampling. In fact, I will argue that such a perspective in fact corresponds well with 
the very start of entrepreneurship as a field of inquiry, as the definition of the entre-
preneur that started this interest does in fact paint him/her as a sampler:  
 
As it is the carrying out of new combinations that constitutes the en-
trepreneur, it is not necessary that he should be permanently connected 
with an individual firm[…]  
 
[W]hatever the type, everyone is an entrepreneur only when he actu-
ally “carries out new combinations,” and loses that character as soon as 
he has built up his business, when he settles down to running it as other 
people their business.  
Joseph Schumpeter (1934/1983), The Theory of Economic Develop-
ment, p. 75, 78 
 
In other words, Schumpeter, in defining the role of the entrepreneur, saw him (sic) as 
something of a DJ, a remix-artist that took the existing world, rearranged it, and out 
of this formed something new. Existing resources became beats, old infrastructures 
samples that could be recombined. Rather than a mythical being that created the 
new ex nihilo nihil, he found ways of making the old seem new again, like a perform-
ance artist who takes a hammer and a spray-can of paint and refashions the way in 
which we view our surroundings. Banksy the entrepreneur, or Schumpeter the beat-
master. 
 
 
II. 
 
One of the most iconic phenomena in entrepreneurship, particularly in the teaching, 
talking and theorizing thereof, is the business plan. This textual artefact, which is 
supposed both to guide, sell and manifest the entrepreneurial vision, is often seen as 
the  tangible  start  of  new  venturing,  and  accordingly  much  has  been  said/written        
The Pink Machine Papers #29 N
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about it. As it is supposed to be a map of a new venture, one would think that origi-
nality would be the hallmark of such a plan. This, however, is a dubious idea. In fact, 
business  plans  can  be  understood  as  a  form  of  collage  art,  remixed  and  sampled, 
which then stand as original texts. It is a queer form of writing this, that has to be 
simultaneously original and comfortingly unoriginal. The art to writing such lies in 
being able to take common forms of expression, well-known rhetorical tricks, and 
still somehow be able to suffuse this with a freshness.  
 
Putting together a business plans is thus a question of mixing. Just the right amount 
of recognizable samples to create a feeling of well-being and legitimacy, together with 
a fresh new stream of ideas. Books and software exist to help you along, providing 
you with a proverbial baseline, upon which you can riff your original and loopy ideas. 
These template collections (for only rarely are they anything but) obviously mimic 
sound banks, ready-packaged business plans modules that one can plug into the crea-
tion one tries to make. Their popularity stands as testament of the fact that no-one 
actually believes that entrepreneurship – for all the pretty things we say about it – is 
an entirely original act.  
 
Yet we often wish to ignore this. In order to be taken seriously, entrepreneurship has 
to be portrayed as an invocation against the mundane and unoriginal in the world, 
continuously recast as a truly novel act. Talking about things such as unoriginal en-
trepreneurship or sampling in conjunction with this is anathema to a society which 
valorizes both entrepreneurship and innovation, even though this could open up an 
interesting avenue of inquiry. Entrepreneurship, the idealized version, seems to be 
the very anti-thesis to sampling, and there is an ideological need to protect this fan-
tasy. 
 
 
III. 
 
Entrepreneurial  sampling  doesn’t  end  with  the  business  plan,  however.  Rather,  it 
shows us one of at least three ways in which sampling exist within the nexus of en-
trepreneurship. In the business plan, we can see a case of mimetic sampling, where 
reusing modes of argumentation and similar devices is done in order to mimic an ar-
chetypal idea of entrepreneurship. In other words, mimetic sampling is a question of 
trying to establish legitimacy, looking and sounding the part. Such sampling will be 
ongoing throughout the entrepreneurial career, and we can see things such as office 
design, business cards, the naming of companies (faux-Latin or science-y sounding) 
and similar things as variations of this device. This kind of sampling may seem like 
merely the manipulation of surface effects, and thus of no consequence for the “real” 
act of entrepreneurship. At the same time, the upkeep of a front is critical in the 
starting of a new venture, and looking at the emphasis placed on things such as mar-       
The Pink Machine Papers #29 N
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keting and business planning, we can still say that mimetic sampling plays a role in 
enterprising. But this is, as noted, only one of such modes. 
 
A more critical, and potentially less understood, mode is that of resource sampling. 
Part of the theory of entrepreneurship from the very beginning, the way in which an 
entrepreneur treats the world as a set of resources has been a dominant underlying 
and unspoken logic of how we’ve understood these matters – not entirely unlike the 
way in which Martin Heidegger conceptualized technology as that which transforms 
the world into a resource. Still, the very nature of this form of re-utilization of the 
already existing, that which is “always already”, has escaped overt theorizing. Much of 
entrepreneurship theory does, in fact, deal in things such as “opportunity recogni-
tion” and “optimization of possibilities”, but the fundamentally unoriginal aspect of 
entrepreneurship  doesn’t  really  fit  the  ideological  matrix  constructed  by  theory. 
What  does  an  entrepreneur  do?  Simply  put,  she  looks  around  in  the  world,  sees 
things that could be utilized more efficiently or combined in new and interesting 
ways. This, obviously, is something that works on a very abstract level – resources can 
be things such as talent, a distribution-channel, a supply of maple syrup, and so on. 
The entrepreneur sees things in the world that are already there, but can also see be-
yond them, into a land of new combinations and mixes. The fantasy is that one can, 
through the transformative magic of entrepreneurship, channel some form of essen-
tial  newness  which  one  then  brings  into  the  world,  which  would  place  the  re-
combination as merely the symptom of creating the new. This, however, builds on a 
rather suspect metaphysics, one which people such as Joseph Schumpeter and Frie-
drich Hayek seemingly had no problem cultivating.  
 
IV. 
 
The notion that an entrepreneur, seemingly through the sheer force of her personal-
ity, can conjure up something fundamentally novel and ontologically different into 
the world, may be politically expedient, but it is philosophically suspect. It builds on 
the fallacy of innovation being a break with history, and although e.g. the field of in-
novation management has flirted with the notion of innovation as processual and de-
velopmental, the ontological issue of novelty remains insufficiently explored and of-
ten conveniently ignored. Whereas the study of innovation has been inundated with 
epistemological frippery on historical linkages and the difficulty of stating when an 
innovation comes into being, the very problem of having a field that gets its legiti-
macy by assuming that one can talk about innovation in a sensible and ontologically 
grounded way has yet to be dealt with. Talking about innovation and entrepreneur-
ship as sampling might seem like both an answer and an attack on this. On one hand, 
by emphasizing that novelty does not necessarily spring from an metaphysical event 
beyond the ontology one commonly adheres to (the “I don’t really know where that 
comes from”-argument), but rather from a recasting of what is always already there,        
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such a move would de-dramatize the process of innovation. On the other hand, this 
would bring into question whether there is any point in talking about things such as 
“innovations”, as this so clearly then would point to an ideological recasting of the far 
less dramatic event of sampling. 
 
Even if we set aside this ontological quandary, there remains a theoretical problem. 
How are we to understand the way in which entrepreneurs engage with their sur-
roundings, effectively setting themselves as the nexus through which the world as a 
set of resource flows? Often this issue has merely been side-stepped by referring to 
an innate cleverness in entrepreneurs, a defining capacity to identify new opportuni-
ties. I would contend that this is insufficient. Instead, we need to rethink the rela-
tion, and view entrepreneurship as located as much in the existing world as in the 
mind of the entrepreneur. To some, this might sound almost like a pantheistic argu-
ment, one where there is a potentiality and an energy in all things, just waiting to be 
channeled by a sufficiently focused agent. And, in fact, there might be some truth to 
this. The resource-nature of resources is insufficiently understood, and this has led us 
to a view of entrepreneurship that over-emphasizes the individual and hypes innova-
tion. By viewing entrepreneurship as sampling, and the entrepreneur as a DJ of re-
sources, we could instead focus on the dialectical back and forth between the entre-
preneur and the world she inhabits, and through this create more realistic theories 
about how the entrepreneur creates value out of the existing (rather than seeking 
refuge in empty metaphysics).  
 
 
V. 
 
We could extend all this into the third mode of entrepreneurial mixing, namely iden-
tity sampling. Being an entrepreneur is to inhabit a specific iconography, and much 
of what has been described above could be understood as following directly from the 
archetypal idea  of  an  entrepreneurial identity.  The original  act  of entrepreneurial 
sampling, thus, might be the one the budding venturer engages in when she first dons 
the identity of “the entrepreneur”. This is not merely a question of renaming one’s 
identity, but mixing in things such as “successful player”, “Richard Branson”, “master 
of her own destiny”, “future leader” and “growth-creator” into one’s existing identity. 
Being an entrepreneur is not simply a question doing entrepreneurship, but rather a 
recasting of identity which enables entrepreneurial action. By sampling in the kind of 
identity-functions that society is rife with, which bolsters things such as risk-taking 
and opportunity-searching (i.e. drives resource-sampling), the aspiring entrepreneur 
recasts not only the world but herself, and thus creates entrepreneurship as a remix. 
 
        
The Pink Machine Papers #29 N
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The move I’ve tried to outline in this brief essay is primarily one of de-romanticizing 
entrepreneurship, and move this away from the trivial valorization of “innovation”. 
Although I (and quite a few others) believe that entrepreneurship can be an impor-
tant generator of value, the field that studies it has been rife with ideological over-
selling, and the phenomenon does in fact deserves a more realistic approach to the 
theorization thereof. By bringing in post-original moves such as sampling into the 
strive to understand it, we can both enrich the vocabulary we use to discuss entre-
preneurship, and also open up for new avenues for studying this.  
In this vein, discussing entrepreneurship as sampling is not a question of trying to 
belittle the field, but to enhance it. By trying to distance the field from metaphysical 
explanations, and instead bring in less affected modes of discussing entrepreneurship, 
we could stimulate a discussion that could build on empirical understandings and re-
alistic analysis of the actual acts through which the entrepreneurial enters into the 
world. The remix, rather than a mode of post-production, would in such an under-
standing be the very linchpin of value-creation. The entrepreneur as a sampler is still 
a creator, but this would no longer be an abstract notion, but a very direct and grasp-
able form of creation – the constant re-creation of the world. 
 Pink Machine is the name of a research project currently carried out at the Department of Industrial
Economics and Management at the Royal Institute of Technology, Stockholm. It aims to study the
often forgotten non-serious driving forces of technical and economical development. We live indeed
in the reality of the artificial, one in which technology has created, constructed and reshaped almost
everything that surrounds us. If we look around us in the modern world, we see that it consists of
things,  of artefacts.  Even  the  immaterial  is  formed  and  created  by  technology -  driven  by  the
imperative of the economic rationale.
As Lev Vygotsky and Susanne Langer have pointed out, all things around us, all these technological
wonders, have their first origin in someone’s  fantasies, dreams,  hallucinations and  visions. These
things, which through their demand govern local and global economical processes, have little to do
with what we usually regard as “basic human needs”. It is rather so, it could be argued, that the
economy  at large is governed by human’s unbounded thirst for jewellery, toys and entertainment. For
some reason - the inherent urge of science for being taken seriously, maybe - these aspects have been
recognised only in a very limited way within technological and economical research.
The seriousness of science is grey, Goethe said, whereas the colour of life glows green. We want to
bring forward yet another colour, that of frivolity, and it is pink.
The Pink Machine Papers is our attempt to widen the perspective a bit, to give science a streak of
pink. We would like to create a forum for half-finished scientific reports, of philosophical guesses and
drafts. We want thus to conduct a dialogue which is based on current research and which gives us the
opportunity to present our scientific ideas before we develop them into concluding and rigid - grey -
reports and theses.
Finally: the name “Pink Machine” comes from an interview carried out in connection with heavy
industrial constructions, where the buyer of a diesel power plant worth several hundred million dollars
confessed that he would have preferred his machines to be pink.
Claes Gustafsson
also available at
www.pinkmachine.com
indek kth / 10044 sthlm / sweden

Entrepreneurship as sampling - A theoretical note

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