Stakeholder theory and entrepreneurship
A stakeholder approach to entrepreneurship has roots in a debate that had occurred between professors Ron Mitchell and S. Venkataraman in 2002, over the connections between stakeholder theory (Freeman, 1984) and entrepreneurship. Stakeholder theory had largely been born out of studies of large corporations managing their stakeholders to improve incumbent firm performance, and had not been fully applied to the entrepreneurship area to explain entrepreneurial behaviours, processes, or outcomes. Entrepreneurship and strategy research tends to be about how new wealth is created, whereas stakeholder theory is more about how that wealth should be distributed. For some, the value creation and distribution issues are separate problems, complementary perhaps, but requiring different logics. A stakeholder theory of entrepreneurship seeks to integrate the wealth creation and redistribution problem. In particular, developed economies feature some degree of competition among incumbents of for