Co-creative entrepreneurship

Abstract

Interest in applying the idea of co-creation to entrepreneurship is emerging through research on opportunity creation and entrepreneur heuristics. We place co-creation in the conceptual center of the entrepreneurship research discussion. Doing so requires relaxing the view of a central entrepreneur and adopting a view of stakeholders as peers in the venture, providing resources and deriving benefit. We formalize this insightinto a central proposition and derive implications of it for major themes ofentrepreneurship research, entrepreneurial outcomes, and three challenges unique to entrepreneurship. The sum of our work suggests moving the discussion in entrepreneurship research from the unit of analysis of the individual entrepreneur, venture, or opportunity to entrepreneurship as a collaborative process undertaken by aconstellation of stakeholders that come together to co-create novelty in the environment.