Henrik Berglund

• Professor
• Chalmers University of Technology

This paper discusses the influence of Israel Kirzner on the field of entrepreneurship research. We review Kirzner's work and argue that it contains two distinct approaches to entrepreneurship, termed Kirzner Mark I and Kirzner Mark II. Mark I with its focus on alertness and opportunity discovery has exerted a strong influence on entrepreneurship re...

Purpose – The purpose of this paper is to describe phenomenological approaches to studying entrepreneurs and their behaviors. The goal is to illustrate how phenomenology can provide a complement especially to the cognitive and discursive approaches that are common in the field today. Design/methodology/approach – Conceptual review. Findings – Cogni...

We conclude by suggesting that entrepreneurship scholars pay attention to Ramoglou and Tsang’s critique of naïve positivism and their emphasis on mechanisms and causal explanations. However, we see no value in using critical realism as a meta-theoretical crutch to save the realness and independence of entrepreneurial opportunities, and more general...

We combine Herbert Simon's view of design with the common distinction between reality as discovered or created to develop experimentation and transformation as ideal types of entrepreneurial design. Building on the design tradition's view of artifacts, we describe how opportunities-as-artifacts iteratively develop at the interface between organized...

In this chapter we set out to complement the entrepreneurship as practice perspective by proposing a conceptualization of its central artifacts, such as business models, pitches, and prototypes. Having defined as entrepreneurial those artifacts that serve to instantiate an abstract opportunity in a way that supports its further development, we disc...

To enhance managerial relevance, entrepreneurship theory should be anchored in frameworks that are both practically useful and conceptually coherent. This essay develops a triadic design perspective on entrepreneurship that incorporates artifacts alongside individuals and environmental circumstances. Building on concepts of epistemic objects (Knorr...

In a recent effort to develop the individual-opportunity nexus, Ramoglou and McMullen (2022) argue that extant conceptualizations of opportunities fail because they reify opportunities by engaging in "thing-talk". Their proposed alternative ignores concrete things by reinterpreting the nexus in terms of confident entrepreneurs (who imagine world-st...

This Professional Development Workshop (PDW) on 'Design Science in Entrepreneurship and Innovation' gives scholars and practitioners an opportunity to learn how to conduct design science in entrepreneurship and innovation. Building on the successful PDW last year, this year's PDW aims at digging deeper into methodical aspects of the design science...

The Journal of Business Venturing Design is premised on the idea that it is productive to consider entrepreneurship a form of design and entrepreneurship studies a design science. This introductory essay will attempt to clarify and relate these concepts. But before doing so, a few words about design and artifacts in general.

Scholars interested in topics of entrepreneurship and innovation are increasingly embracing the design science research (DSR) approach. DSR is rooted in Herbert Simon's The Sciences of the Artificial (1996) and aims at developing instrumental knowledge, that is scientific knowledge guiding action. While entrepreneurship and innovation scholars acro...

The purpose of this special issue is to outline a distinct third body of knowledge in the form of pragmatically oriented entrepreneurial design principles, to discuss whether it deserves a position on par with theory and practice, and to explore its interfaces with both the causal mechanisms of entrepreneurship theory and the complex realities of e...

The literature on disruptive innovation has convincingly explained why many established firms encounter problems under conditions of discontinuous change. Incumbents fail to invest in new technologies that are not demanded by their existing customers. This argument is grounded in resource dependency theory and the associated assumption that existin...

There is an emerging consensus that business models are systemic and transcend firm boundaries. Yet, existing research on Business Model Innovation (BMI) challenges focus almost exclusively on intra-firm factors such as capabilities, cognition and leadership. We explore challenges related to BMI by instead drawing on an open systems perspective on...

While venture capital has become a global phenomenon, our knowledge about regional differences in venture capitalist (VC) behavior is quite poor. Most cross-regional comparisons have been quantitative replications of US based studies, which has made it difficult to discern qualitative differences. To help remedy this situation, we conducted semi-st...

Entrepreneurship researcher’s growing interest in Austrian economics has not been matched by systematic efforts to tease out and incorporate this tradition's basic ideas. To remedy this situation, this paper introduces the Austrian market-process tradition and also compares it to the equilibrium-focused neoclassical tradition. Taking this contrast...

Purpose The purpose of this paper is to use social cognitive theory to investigate entrepreneurial intent among participants in graduate entrepreneurship programs. Specifically, the authors test whether students' creative potential is related to their intention to engage in entrepreneurship. Design/methodology/approach Theoretically derived hypoth...

Risk is central to innovation, but in order to be theoretically interesting and of practical use, the relation between risk and innovation needs to be investigated in more specific situations. This paper explores the risk conceptions of innovators in two large corporations and identifies three themes that illuminate the relationship between risk an...

The notion of opportunities is fast becoming a central theme in the field of entrepreneurship research. As part of this growing interest, the ontological status of opportunities has been scrutinized with researchers tending to view them as either objectively existing or socially created. In the present treatment, this ontological debate is partly a...

This paper develops a model of entrepreneurial learning in order to explain how VCs support the process of entrepreneurial learning and thereby add value to their ventures. We draw on two generic approaches to learning, termed the hypothesis-testing mode and the hermeneutic mode, which turn out to be closely interrelated in such learning processes....

This chapter takes a closer look at how social networks can affect the early development of new ventures. The dynamic role of social networks is discussed and exemplified by two longitudinal cases that illustrate the radically different ways in which social networks can influence venture development. These differences relate to social or individual...

As creativity is increasingly recognised as a vital component of entrepreneurship, researchers and educators struggle to reform enterprise pedagogy. To help in this effort, we use a personality test and open-ended interviews to explore creativity between two groups of entrepreneurship masters' students: one at a business school and one at an engine...

This thesis sets out to develop a model of entrepreneurial action that takes its point of departure in entrepreneurs' experiences of risktaking, opportunity identification and the role of self. By focusing on what entrepreneurs experience as relevant aspects of their life worlds the goal is to attain a better understanding of the drivers and motiva...

This paper explores the relevance of the concept of self in the process of independent technological innovation. In-depth interviews were conducted with technological innovators from start-up firms in IT, biotech and advanced services concerning the subjective and social forms of engagement in the innovation process. Emerging factors in the intervi...

The present study aims at investigating the role of risk in the activity of independent technological venturing. Altogether 12 deep-interviews were conducted with technological entrepreneurs, who had taken part in the inventive, developmental and the commercialisation phases of a technology- based innovation process. The interviews revealed a numbe...

Summary This paper sets out to analyze the modes of 'venture learning', which is defined as the process whereby knowledge is acquired on how to identify, develop and exploit business opportunities and the associated ventures. The context of learning discussed here is that of high technology ventures, and the ways in which certain types of venture r...