Entrepreneurship Theories

What is a Born Open Startup? A startup that is born open is one that rejects the notion of proprietary knowledge appropriation (e.g,. obtaining patents ). In fact, software patents are probably the born open crowd's worst abomination.   Instead, a born open startup views itself as a part of a ecosystem of firms that work cooperatively and competitively. They typically are autonomous but have some interconnected goals. Open source startups participate in the development of a community of firms with a shared governing policy to prevent the appropriation of the technology. According to Mekki MacAulay, " Open strategy involves the collective production of a shared good in an open fashion such that the resulting product is available to all, including competitors. In the case of open entrepreneurship, 'born-open' startups are entrepreneurial ventures whose business models are designed specifically based around a collective good. Such business models can be effectiv

Distinct from the popular medical/psychological definition of generativity, which defines the concept as a need to nurture and guide younger people and contribute to the next generation, the generativity theory in relation to entrepreneurship focuses on the development of technology stemming from the foundations set by previous innovations. According to Zittrain (2006, p. 1980) generativity refers to “technology’s overall capacity to produce unprompted change driven by large, varied, and uncoordinated audiences”. The keyword here being ‘unprompted’. Zittrain suggests that the innovations and outcomes are unintentional and occur without purposeful intent. He also notes that the outcomes of these activities in turn become the basis for future innovation. Yoo et al. (2010) expands on Zittrain’s definition and illustrates generativity as a layered model where innovation on one layer’s technology can have a cascading effect on other layers. An example of this is a camera using available

Another biological theory is the childhood adversity theory. While researchers have looked at resilience in adults, few have examined the how childhood adversity may affect entrepreneurial intentions.  Using a variant of the underdog theory, which looks at how negative experience shape an individual's resilience. Recent research has looked at samples of entrepreneurs from the Great Chinese Famine of 1959–1961 and war-torn Vietnam. Both studies find that individuals who endured childhood adversity are more likely to become entrepreneurs.  Both paper use the ‘underdog’ theory of entrepreneurship proposed by Miller and Le Breton-Miller (2017). The gist of the underdog theory is that "negative personal circumstances of an economic, sociocultural, cognitive, and physical/emotional nature may have a … powerful role to play in getting people to become effective entrepreneurs" (p. 3). The theory suggest that life challenges require the development of coping and adaptive skil

The architectural innovation theory of entrepreneurship focuses on changes in product architecture and their advantages/disadvantages for incumbents and new entrants ( Henderson and Clark, 1990 ). The bottom line of the theory for entrepreneurs is that a type of innovation called "architectural innovation", is a promising avenue for new entrant to pursue because it is difficult for incumbent to pursue. The theory starts with the basic idea that a product or service is made up of components that fit together according to some type of design called "product architecture" (Ulrich, 1995). For instance, a bus architecture uses a single point of contact for all the components to connect to. A slot architecture has a unique connector for each type of component. In a sectional architecture, components can be physically arranged in a number of different ways. Modular architectures are those which make it possible to isolate the development of components by standardizing thei