Situated entrepreneurial cognition in corporate incubators and accelerators

What is it about?

------------------------ Research Focus ------------------------ The cognitive perspective in entrepreneurship research has predominantly evolved around static conceptions of cognition at the level of individual reasoning. Recently, the emerging stream of situated entrepreneurial cognition asserts that the environment substantially influences the inherent knowledge structures of entrepreneurial reasoning. It claims that context indoctrinates perceptions and beliefs underlying decision making, thus authoring entrepreneurial cognition to derive from the recursive interaction between mind and respective environment. Drawing on this perspective, our inductive study follows a narrative approach to investigating the unfolding dynamics between entrepreneurial cognition and contextual factors in business model design. Using textual accounts from 34 episodic interviews with entrepreneurs from corporate entrepreneurship initiatives, we applied a constant comparative method to identify the data's main themes.

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Photo by bruce mars on Unsplash

Photo by bruce mars on Unsplash

Why is it important?

------------------------------------------------------- Contribution to Academic Scholarship ------------------------------------------------------- Our findings show that entrepreneurial cognition is embedded, grounded, and distributed. We provide evidence that situated entrepreneurial cognition results from the recursive interplay of material objects, bodily interactions, and agents spanning the social system. Our findings suggest that the unilateral consideration of authored cognitive systems falls short in capturing the holistic nature of entrepreneurial cognition. Thus, our results further empirically ground situated entrepreneurial cognition by placing the entrepreneur at the nexus of individual and context. Finally, our study reveals the business model as a central boundary object connecting and focalizing various influences on situated entrepreneurial cognition in its social context. We make three primary contributions to the literature. First, complementing the scholarly interpretation of situated entrepreneurial cognition, we put the situatedness perspective of entrepreneurs forward by demonstrating how three theses of situated entrepreneurial cognition—the embedding thesis, the embodiment thesis, and the extended mind thesis—unfold in the respective research setting. We highlight the role of material objects, bodily interactions, and social agents in guiding entrepreneurial reasoning in business model design. Second, we advance the research framework authored by Dew et al. by arguing that an isolated consideration of entrepreneurial cognition as deriving from material objects, bodily interactions, or social agents fails to capture the holistic nature of entrepreneurial cognition. Specifically, our study emphasizes the interrelatedness o material objects, bodily interactions, and agents spanning a social system. We also accentuate the role of the individual level in situated entrepreneurial cognition, yielding significant implications to theory. Third, we add to constitutive approaches emphasizing how entrepreneurs contextualize business models through narratives. Specifically, we support the prevailing view authored by Doganova and Eyquem-Renault that business models inherit narrative as well as calculative elements that enable its circulation across heterogeneous parties, thus building the business model network that it represents. Contradicting the work of George and Bock [ who suggest the language of narratives and legitimization do not constitute a critical element in the business model construct per se, we further strengthen the endemic perspective of Wallnöfer and Hacklin by attaching importance to business mod as a marketing device toward potential stakeholders. As interactions among different stakeholders create central stimuli for entrepreneurial cognition, the use of narrative is suggested to act as a practical resource lever in legitimising new business model designs. Given this and the integration of contextual factors, business model design is further augmented as an embedded process, thereby underlining the role of the business model as a boundary object mediating between material objects, bodily interactions, and social agents. ------------------------------------------------------- Contribution to Management Practice ------------------------------------------------------- The narrative perspective in our study has enabled us to inquire how entrepreneurs think about value-related resources and activities for their ventures in the setting of corporate incubators and accelerators. In this view, business models can be understood as mental representations that contain entrepreneurial knowledge structures and beliefs about value proposition, value creation and capture. In our study, we paid particular attention to cognitive processes that entrepreneurs employed to cope with novelty in value and contextual dimensions, thereby ideating and designing new business models. As the notion of situated entrepreneurial cognition considers individuals to be embedded in social systems, our framework has several implications for practitioners. Specifically, entrepreneurs need to be attentive to how a variety of contextual factors influences reasoning about new business model designs. As corporate entrepreneurship initiatives represent contexts accounting for manifold dynamic interactions, entrepreneurs should be mindful in instantaneous interactions to nurture sensitivity in understanding the influence of material objects and other stakeholders on reasoning. Contextual factors can constrain or enhance entrepreneurial reasoning about business model configurations. Therefore, cognizant stakeholder management assists in channeling different perceptions and normative beliefs in the collective creation of the business model as a boundary object.

Perspectives