Sonali Shah

University of Washington Seattle | UW · Department of Management

Knowledge acquisition activities occurring after entry may be just as critical to firm survival as pre-existing knowledge and experience, because knowledge acquisition activities enable the augmentation of existing knowledge and the exploration and pursuit of new strategic directions. Drawing from organization theory and entrepreneurship theory, we...

We develop a model of how end-users, an understudied source of entrepreneurship, create, evaluate, share, and exploit their ideas. Our model explicitly examines the interactive processes that precede firm formation, and by doing so highlights the emergent nature of entrepreneurial activity. We emphasize the role of user innovation communities and c...

The knowledge context is the social, economic, and organizational setting within which an individual is situated. This paper ties together observations from three distinct empirical areas of the entrepreneurship literature--academic entrepreneurship, employee entrepreneurship, and user entrepreneurship--to build a cohesive framework for understandi...

The actions of collectives who primarily meet on-line have recently captured the attention of the media, general public, business executives, and academics. File-sharing, open-source, and computer viruses are all carried out by loosely bounded collectives, rather than by firms or other formal organizations. These collectives operate in concert to a...

Users of products and services often make product-related innovations that become taken-for-granted product features. Early research in this area found that while product users--be they firms or individuals--innovated, it was existing manufacturers who commercialized the innovation. Users benefited from using the innovation they created, while exis...