Co-creative entrepreneurship

https://doi.org/10.1016/j.jbusvent.2021.106125Get rights and content

Highlights

  • A collaborative constellation of stakeholders enacts the co-creative entrepreneurial process.

  • A co-creative entrepreneur is a peer with all other stakeholders, facilitating interaction.

  • All stakeholders contribute resources and derive benefit from co-creation.

  • Offering, opportunity and value (and more) may be artefacts of the co-creative process.

  • Co-creative entrepreneurship resolves uncertainty and resource constraints.

Abstract

Interest in applying the idea of co-creation to entrepreneurship is emerging through research on opportunity creation and entrepreneur heuristics. We place co-creation in the conceptual center of the entrepreneurship research discussion. Doing so requires relaxing the view of a central entrepreneur and adopting a view of stakeholders as peers in the venture, providing resources and deriving benefit. We formalize this insightinto a central proposition and derive implications of it for major themes ofentrepreneurship research, entrepreneurial outcomes, and three challenges unique to entrepreneurship. The sum of our work suggests moving the discussion in entrepreneurship research from the unit of analysis of the individual entrepreneur, venture, or opportunity to entrepreneurship as a collaborative process undertaken by aconstellation of stakeholders that come together to co-create novelty in the environment.

Section snippets

Executive summary

Interest around the topic of co-creation is emerging in the entrepreneurship literature. Work on entrepreneurial opportunity creation as well as effectuation makes reference to co-creative collaborations enabling entrepreneurial activity. Encouraged by these efforts, we bring the idea of co-creation to the front and center of the entrepreneurship discussion. The result of our investigation offers three payoffs for researchers and entrepreneurs alike.

First, we determine what co-creation means in

Co-creative entrepreneurship

From an academic literature perspective, the title of our article is deceptively simple. Positioning “Co-Creative Entrepreneurship” within the marketing and entrepreneurship discussions requires careful treatment along three dimensions of assumptions regarding the environment, actors/stakeholders, and artefacts, all of which vary according to stream of literature. We begin with a brief discussion of co-creation in the marketing literature and creation in the entrepreneurship literature, proceed

Review of literature on co-creative entrepreneurship

Seeking to build our understanding of work at the intersection of co-creation and entrepreneurship, we review the literature. We exploit our dataset to examine the observations in our conceptual introduction regarding the role of the entrepreneur and the view of others in co-creative entrepreneurship.

Central premise

The fulcrum for describing co-creative entrepreneurship is the co-creative view of the entrepreneur and the others involved in the effort. We construct a central premise to set this fulcrum so we can draw implications from it. We begin with theory from marketing on the topic of where value is co-created. Grönroos and Voima (2013) clearly articulate a “joint sphere” of interactivity at the intersection of a customer sphere of activity and producer sphere of activity, where the joint sphere

Implications for the co-creative entrepreneurship process

Our work in this section applies the central premise to threads of entrepreneurship research discussion, developing formal and theoretically grounded principles of co-creative entrepreneurship. Reframing topics from action to resources around the premise that the entrepreneur is not the central actor, but a member of a cast of co-creative stakeholders, both demonstrates applications of our central premise, and offers a novel view on important research topics. To add color to our narrative, we

Implications for co-creative entrepreneurship artefacts

In our review of the literature, we identified at least three artefacts of co-creative entrepreneurship, and in recognizing how stakeholder constellations can co-create new institutions (above), we add a fourth. In this section, we discuss common aspects of co-creative entrepreneurship offerings, opportunities and value, with the hope these aspects may generalize to any of a wide range of possible co-created artefact. Because while each artefact of offering, opportunities and value is unique,

Discussion of entrepreneurship challenges from a co-creative view

The co-creative process sets stakeholders and ventures on a significantly different trajectory from ventures in which the entrepreneur assumes a central role. We devote our discussion to a co-creative view of three central challenges in entrepreneurship. We connect with the entrepreneurship literature treating uncertainty, constraints and errors, and continue with applications to our hypothetical ventures.

Conclusion: entrepreneurship as a social process

Our work argues for a social view of entrepreneurship (Vargo and Lusch, 2016). Process, commitments and stakeholder constellation become focal units of analysis. Any stakeholder can play the role of entrepreneur and artefacts represent a function of the interaction. The entrepreneur is not the central actor, but a collaborator, facilitator or enabler. Action does not take place at the individual level but in a complex system of interactions (Grönroos, 2006; Vargo and Lusch, 2008). We can draw

CRediT authorship contribution statement

Both authors contributed equally to all aspects of this work.

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    Both authors contributed equally to all aspects of this work.

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