Co-creative entrepreneurship
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.