ABOUT THE CONFERENCE
Entrepreneuring and Knowing From the Inside: A dialogue between entrepreneurship processes and practices
The traditional aims of Entrepreneurship as Practice Conferences are to advance our understanding of entrepreneurship-as-practice, foster network ties, facilitate collaborative writing relationships, and build a strong community of practice scholars.
Building on this tradition, our theme for the eleventh edition of this conference will be “Entrepreneuring and Knowing From the Inside: A dialogue between entrepreneurship processes and practices”. Entrepreneurs develop new ventures that fulfil customer needs and spur economic growth by recognizing, creating, evaluating, and exploiting opportunities. Yet, despite progress, our scholarly understanding of how entrepreneurs achieve these objectives remains incomplete. A key challenge within current entrepreneurship research is that “most entrepreneurship scholarship consists of conversations between academics about entrepreneurs but excludes the perspectives of the entrepreneurs being discussed” (Dimov, et al., 2021, p. 1177). This leads to the establishment of two distinct scholarly points of view, which we call, knowing from the outside and knowing from the inside.
Knowing from the outside entails “an external observer committed to objective, stable points of reference” (Dimov, et al., 2021, p. 1177) undertaking ‘rational inquiry’ to generate ‘knowledge’ uncontaminated by contact with the lived experience of entrepreneuring. Knowing from the inside, by contrast, “comes from thinking with, from and through beings and things, not just about them” (Ingold, 2022, p. xi) and involves “an engaged dialogist committed to the shared interests of entrepreneurs coping with the vicissitudes of the world” (Dimov, et al., 2021, p. 1177). Entrepreneurship process research that studies entrepreneurship as “a journey that explicitly transpires over time” as opposed to “an act” (McMullen & Dimov, 2013, p. 1482) and EAP scholarship, that “conceives of the process of entrepreneuring as the enactment and entanglement of multiple practices” (Thompson, et al., 2020), are therefore uniquely well placed to develop knowing from the inside that matters to practicing entrepreneurs. Scholars have even suggested that process research and practice theory may enrich each other (Burgelman, et al., 2018). However, to date, we lack deeper theorizing and empirical evidence to further advance this valuable discourse for the benefit of entrepreneurship studies. Few scholars have prioritized a practitioner perspective and thus have not considered the challenges that knowing from the inside (henceforth KFI) entails (Thompson & Byrne, 2022).
KFI requires theoretical explanations for how and why some venture ideas evolve into venture opportunities while others don’t (Vogel, 2017). This makes drawing boundaries between the entrepreneurship process and EAP subfields unduly limiting for KFI. KFI, therefore, requires closer theoretical integration or dialogues between process perspectives that regard entrepreneurship as organizational creation (Hjorth, et al., 2015; Steyaert, 2007) and practice perspectives that focus on the “performance of various, real practices through which practitioners develop new meaning, transform practical knowledge, or develop new associations between actual practices” (Champenois, et al., 2020, p. 284) within entrepreneurship studies. The overall aim of this conference is to explore and re-examine the relation between practices of inquiry in entrepreneurship studies and the forms of knowledge to which they give rise. In line with the theme for this year’s conference - “Entrepreneuring and Knowing From the Inside: Dialogue between entrepreneurship processes and practices” - we seek both conceptually rigorous and empirically relevant contributions that advance entrepreneurship theory and practice. The following questions illustrate potential areas of interest, but they offer only a starting point; we welcome creativity in topic, theory and method:
-
How does opportunity exploitation emerge and what practices underpin the stages, forms, or activities that this emergence takes?
-
What practices are involved in decisions to initiate, proceed, or terminate an entrepreneurial project and how are such decisions made?
-
What are the practices that underpin entrepreneurial pivots and how do such pivots reframe entrepreneurial opportunities?
-
What forms do business relationships between the entrepreneur and his or her investors take and how are such relationships negotiated, monitored, and enforced?
-
What practices underpin the actions and cognition that lead to entrepreneurial learning and how does this evolve during new venture creation?
High-quality abstracts offering novel insights and contributions in both, early and later stages of development, are, therefore, warmly invited. We also welcome all submissions that address entrepreneurship process and practice research more broadly, in addition to those targeting the conference theme of knowing from the inside.
Keynote Speakers
Professor Jeffery S. McMullen from Imperial Business School whose research on entrepreneurial action offers opportunities for rethinking entrepreneurship in a changing world
Professor Raghu Garud from PennState University who has pioneered the use of 'process-research' within innovation and entrepreneurship.
Professor Boukje Cnossen from Leuphana University Luneburg whose research on organizing practices in the arts and other creative settings opens new ways of thinking about the role of space and materiality in bringing new social collectives into being.
Albert Read who is the current Non Exec Chairman of The Standard and Former Managing Director of Conde Nast UK. He is also author of the bestseller "The Imagination Muscle"