Entrepreneurial Imagination in Detroit: Ethnography of Nascent Entrepreneurship in the Post-industrial Economy.

Entrepreneurship;Detroit;Post-industrial economy;Business incubators;Ethnography;Management;Business and Economics;Business Administration

Kim, SuntaeMizruchi, Mark S. ;

University of Michigan

关键词: Entrepreneurship;    Detroit;    Post-industrial economy;    Business incubators;    Ethnography;    Management;    Business and Economics;    Business Administration;   

Others  :  https://deepblue.lib.umich.edu/bitstream/handle/2027.42/113525/suntaek_1.pdf?sequence=1&isAllowed=y

瑞士|英语

来源: The Illinois Digital Environment for Access to Learning and Scholarship

【 摘 要 】

This dissertation research presents an in-depth, qualitative investigation of the early-stage process of organizing a new business. This process marks the inception of organizing, where the private insights of an entrepreneur transform into a social reality manifest in the form of a substantial plan for a new business. I study this process based on the two-years of ethnographic engagement in two Detroit business incubators. I first introduce this dissertation’s methodology and specific methods for data collection and analysis, with a special focus on the original analytic method that captures the temporal evolution of the idea for a new business. The next chapter introduces the two incubator contexts, comparing in detail their organizational setting, history, composition, program structure, and principles underlying incubation approach. This is followed by the analysis of how one of the incubators (GREEN, a sustainable business incubator) organically developed its original incubation practice, in reaction to an increasingly dominant practice in the field (embodied by the other incubator – ACCEL, a business accelerator) and the unique local context of Detroit. The following chapter shifts focus to individual startup companies, and analyzes the idea development process of four nascent firms embedded in two incubators. This analysis suggests that the early-stage entrepreneurial process can be understood as a process of substantiating the entrepreneurial imagination, which is defined as an understanding of the present reality in relation to the desired future reality. I further describe how this entrepreneurial imagination is socially constructed through repeated interactions between entrepreneurs and incubator mentors, and further show how the temporal orientation of the incubator significantly affects the trajectory of substantiating the entrepreneurial imagination. Based on these findings, this dissertation research enriches the theoretical understanding of the early-stage entrepreneurial process, generates knowledge on how new practices emerge in the face of institutional pressure, and offers practical implications on how the local economies in the post-industrial cities can be revitalized through the means of entrepreneurship.