Hi everyone!
The inaugural issue of Journal of Business Venturing Design just went live. The editorial essay "Entrepreneurship as Design and Design Science", describes why it is "productive to consider entrepreneurship a form of design and entrepreneurship studies a design science".
The essay also summaries the It seven papers included the issue.
"Entrepreneurs as designers of problems worth solving"
Mattia Bianchi and Roberto Verganti fear that understanding design primarily as rigorous problem solving may blind us to the fact that problems themselves are often designed. Building on Schön as well as Dorst (2015) they show how meaningful problems can be designed by generating and making sense of novel interpretive frames.
"Designing legitimacy: Expanding the scope of cultural entrepreneurship"
Vern Glaser and Michael Lounsbury also use Schön's work to show how our understanding of cultural entrepreneurship can be enriched and made more prescriptive by treating entrepreneurs as 'designers of legitimacy' who artfully prototype and iterate stories in ongoing dialog with various audiences.
"A performative perspective on entrepreneurship as design"
Raghu Garud also sees stakeholder dialogue as central to entrepreneurship. Illustrated using Uber's entry into multiple markets, he proposes a performative perspective on entrepreneurial design, in which artifacts, as well as the worlds in which they may exist, are constituted through the sayings and doings of heterogeneous actors.
"Human action and human design: An Austrian approach to design science"
Mark Packard, Per Bylund and Peter Klein criticize what they take to be Herbert Simon's overly material and rational account of design and sketch a subjectivist Austrian theory of design claiming, somewhat provocatively, that "entrepreneurship theory is itself uniquely Austrian (there is no non-Austrian theory of entrepreneurship), and thus so must be its design-based origins."
"From "Opportunity" to Opportunity: The design space for entrepreneurial action"
Dimo Dimov uses insights from philosophy of mind and language to distinguish "opportunity" as the propositional content of an entrepreneurial intention, and opportunity as the agent-independent conditions of an intention's satisfaction. Based on this, he suggests several implications for how entrepreneurship may be conceptualized as well as researched, including as an instrumental design science."
Design science in entrepreneurship: Conceptual foundations and guiding principles
Christoph Seckler, René Mauer, and Jan vom Brocke seek to philosophically ground and provide practical guidance for design science research in the entrepreneurship field. Inspired by Mario Bunge's philosophy of technology (1996) and methodological contributions from the information systems field, they cover a broad range of issues to guide scholars aiming to produce knowledge that is both scientifically grounded and practically useful.
"Ask for it: A practice based theory of venturing design"
Saras Sarasvathy's paper in many ways exemplifies such grounded and useful design knowledge. Identifying 'the ask' as key to entrepreneurial expertise, she combines existing theory with unpublished studies to propose a typology of asks and several teachable principles that may be used to guide entrepreneurial action and, with deliberate practice, to develop entrepreneurial expertise.
Don't hesitate to reach out if you have questions about the journal and what we look for in manuscripts!
Best,
/Henrik
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Henrik Berglund | Professor of Entrepreneurship | Technology Management & Economics
Editor-in-Chief, Journal of Business Venturing Design
Chalmers University of Technology | www.henrikberglund.com | @khberglund | +46708128138
Recent Publications
Entrepreneurship as Design and Design Science (JBVD)
The Artifacts of Entrepreneurial Practice (Chapter)
Opportunities as Artifacts and Entrepreneurship as Design (AMR)
Opportunities, Time, and Mechanisms in Entrepreneurship: On the Practical Irrelevance of Propensities (AMR)
A Tale of Two Kirzners: Time, Uncertainty and the 'Nature' of Opportunities (ETP)
Between Cognition and Discourse: Phenomenology and the Study of Entrepreneurship (IJEBR)
Short popular piece
Entrepreneurship as Design-Developing theories and tools in the service of action (2021)
Interview
The Economics for Business Podcast, on Spotify (2022)
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Henrik Berglund
Chalmers Univ. of Technology
Goteborg
+46 708 128 138
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