Defense innovation systems (DIS) have become an important analytic concept in defense policy circles in recent years. DIS are networks of interacting agents involved in the generation, diffusion, and utilization of defense-related technologies supported by local institutional infrastructures. This notion can be a valuable addition to one’s arsenal of tools for understanding aspects of great power competition between the United States and China. The DIS construct draws attention to competition between the United States and China being fundamentally a contest between different innovation systems. This adds an important perspective to policy debates because it broadens the analysis of competition away from particular elements and toward the overall systems involved, including global technological systems, dual-use technologies, and civilian elements that are important components of nearly all innovation systems. Furthermore, while U.S. industrial policy may have historically hidden it, the DIS construct draws attention to the intensive management and networking activities by U.S. Department of Defense elements involved in organizing the generation, diffusion, and utilization of defense-related technologies. For China, the DIS construct helps shed a bright light on the civilian-military fusion that has been a bedrock of China’s international competitive strategy.

Despite the evident importance of imagination in both ethical decision-making and entrepreneurship, significant gaps remain in our understanding of its actual role in these processes. As a result, scholars have called for a deeper understanding of how imagination impacts value creation in society and how this critical human faculty might more profoundly connect our theories of ethics and business decision-making. In this paper, we attempt to fill one of these gaps by scrutinizing the underlying philosophical foundations of imagination and applying them to the challenges facing entrepreneurs attempting to create new value in an increasingly unpredictable and kaleidic world. Accordingly, we apply a view of imagination developed by the pragmatist philosopher John Dewey to the radically subjective economic philosophy of G.L.S Shackle. As a result, we develop a concept of imagination which we believe can be both significant and hopeful for research at the intersection of business ethics and new value creation.

We have assembled a panel of scholars who are currently pioneering empirical and theoretical research on entrepreneurial expertise. The intent of this panel symposium, then, is to describe ways that expert skill development scholarship has been applied to the study of entrepreneurs and to discuss ways that the methods and ideas from the study of expert skill development can be further utilized to study the behavior of entrepreneurs. The symposium will further discuss ways to use these insights from expertise research for enhancing entrepreneurship research and training based in entrepreneurial behavior.

Tucked in the back of Venkataraman’s 1997 work on the distinctive domain of entrepreneurship (DDE) lies a pointer to a question each individual must face when choosing to start a new venture; “is entrepreneurship worth it?” Inventorying costs associated with risk, uncertainty, and illiquidity against surpluses from financial and psychological factors unique to entrepreneurship, Venkataraman tempts readers to tally entrepreneurial returns. The authors summarize and integrate an academic study of these various cost and return components over the past 20 years using Venkataraman’s original framework. The authors find the answer to the question of “is entrepreneurship worth it?” varies with time. Researcher’s answer to the question has shifted from an early view that entrepreneurs sacrifice financial gain in exchange for soft psychological benefits to a more positive view that entrepreneurs are rewarded both financially and psychologically for the unique costs borne in the DDE. But the rewards are not immediate. In entrepreneur time, break-even emerges by gradually overcoming an initial deficit. As surpluses accrue, returns to entrepreneurs likely eventually exceed those of their wage-earning peers.

At the heart of entrepreneurial collaboration is a tension: Entrepreneurs need people to grow their ventures, but in bringing people on board, they fear loss of control of the ventures they are building. Add to that the behavioral assumption of opportunism, and the tension rises to the level of a paradox. The paradox is particularly salient in effectual entrepreneurship, which emphasizes stakeholder self-selection as the driver of cocreation. This chapter presents a model of effectual collaboration that builds on a different behavioral assumption, namely docility, defined as the human ability to be open to persuasion. Docility can involve taking and giving advice, changing one’s goals and even adopting those of others, and being able to take more than one’s own perspective into account. Being open to persuasion enables entrepreneurs to cocreate valuable new ventures. The chapter illustrates the model of effectual collaboration through a blueprint for an effectual incubator.

Within the growing literature on new market development, much work focuses on the industry, competition and firm units of analysis. In this paper we complement these understandings of how new markets unfold with research examining how individual decision-makers think about the task of building new markets. We replicate an entrepreneurship protocol analysis study so we can contrast entrepreneurs' results with a novel sample of experienced corporate executives. We find these groups (a) employ significantly different heuristics that (b) generate different prospective outcomes; (c) the different heuristics aggregate into substantively different processes and (d) the heuristics and processes offer clear implications for theory in entrepreneurship, strategy and innovation management. Our work contributes to the literature by providing prescriptions for new market creation processes based on the cognitive microfoundations revealed in our study.

Attempting to stimulate economic growth, governments have developed a host of entrepreneurial policy incentives. Yet such incentives have not been evaluated in terms of their attractiveness to high potential entrepreneurs facing the choice between wage employment and entrepreneurship. Using adaptive conjoint analysis and a sample of graduating MBA students from the United States, we empirically investigate the efficacy of various policy incentives by examining the trade-offs involved in the occupational choice between entrepreneurship and wage employment. In doing so, we provide a theoretical framework for entrepreneurship policy by connecting the literature on occupational choice with the literature on entrepreneurship policy incentives, and offer concrete data to policy makers seeking to influence the choice of entrepreneurship as a career option.

This paper introduces a method that was developed for analyzing the strategic foresight process of the Hungarian Ministry of Defense. In 2013-2014, experts of the Hungarian Ministry of Defense applied a strategic foresight method to identify potential threats and opportunities for 2015-2030 period. This work led them to anticipate the broad trends that lead to the European migration crisis and a more confrontative Russian foreign policy. However, in retrospect the methods used were not specific enough about the time frame of these potential outcomes, nor did the Hungarian analysts believe their findings strongly enough. These results generated a lively debate among Hungarian defense experts about how the foresight method could be improved. This paper contributes to this effort by introducing a three-step diagnostic method for foresight processes that applies different analytical frameworks developed in the foresight literature. The first step leverages Voros' foresight framework, the second step utilizes Rafael Popper's categories of analysis, and step three evaluates the root causes of problems experienced in the foresight study. The paper concludes that the Hungarian foresight process was a so-called "shallow" foresight exercise because the organizational mindset of the Hungarian Ministry of Defense oriented the analysts narrowly towards intelligence methods.

Even though war gaming and scenario planning are widely used in business contexts, there is little evidence that either practice is associated with superior performance. Why, then, spend the costs? In this paper we address this puzzle and suggest why the extant empirical findings have so far proven limited. We consider the development of these practices and find that they have a substantially entangled and overlapping history, particularly at the RAND Corporation in the 1950s. Despite shared historical roots, the treatment of war gaming and scenario planning in the scholarly literature branched out into different streams. This separation is unfortunate because it obscures a better understanding of the premises under which these practices are effective. We propose an analysis of the overlaps and contrasts of war gaming and scenario planning that sets out clear boundary conditions for their use and efficacy. We find that each practice is tailored to provide strategic guidance in a context where the organization is facing different forms of uncertainty. This suggests they may be effective, and thus improve organizational performance, where the relevant uncertainties are operative. Such benefits would be apparent over longer time scales, and only if the relevant boundary conditions are met. However, to the best of our knowledge, no longitudinal empirical test of either war gaming or scenario planning is available. We therefore conclude that more research is needed to ascertain the true relationship between these popular practices and their performance outcomes.

This paper reflects on the evolution of implicit and explicit behavioral ideas in the field of strategic management using Herbert Simon’s scholarship as a starting point, that is, his emphasis on empirically driven; interdisciplinary theorizing allowing and enabling two-way street learning. We argue that historically, there were plenty of behavioral ideas embedded in the field and, together with the recent movement towards explicit “behavioral strategy,” these provide several possible paths for future developments in strategic management research. In the spirit of broadening the tent for behavioral strategy in the future (Hambrick & Crossland, 2018), we suggest some topics and approaches for behavioral strategy in empirically driven, interdisciplinary directions which allows also for two-way street learning between concepts and real-world strategic phenomena.

This case is ideal for use in courses on innovation, entrepreneurship, corporate venturing, and strategy. It challenges students to think about the conditions necessary for creating a vibrant entrepreneurial culture and climate within a large firm as a newly appointed VP works to get a highly successful company to embrace entrepreneurship and innovation. The VP considers his central mission is creating a robust portfolio of new initiatives within the organization. After a year of such activities, all efforts have not shown good results. The case challenges students to think about the conditions necessary for creating a vibrant entrepreneurial culture and climate within a large firm. Ideal for use in courses on: Innovation, Entrepreneurship, Corporate Venturing, Strategy.

Energy policy research has highlighted systematic shortfalls in the adoption of new energy technologies owing to market failures and behavioral factors. However, less research has examined how organizational processes may block energy innovations. In this paper, we propose that a key organizational obstacle in the adoption of innovations may be the lack of a good justification for implementing a technology. In situations where there is no obviously correct answer regarding the adoption of an innovation, organizations put a premium on developing a justification that may be favorably received in the context of an organization’s energy culture. Absent a favorable justification an organization may abandon a new technology, or delay implementing it until a suitable justification becomes available. We draw our insights about the role of justifications in organizations from a study of the U.S. Navy’s decade-long attempt to justify LED lighting on its ships. LED lighting proponents in the Navy cycled through several justifications for the technology with little success. We conclude that a better appreciation of the organizational processes involved in justifying new energy investments is essential for the development of more effective energy policy.

Academy of Management ReviewVol. 41, No. 3 DialogueResponse to Arend, Sarooghi, and Burkemper (2015): Cocreating Effectual Entrepreneurship ResearchStuart Read, Saras D. Sarasvathy, Nicholas Dew and Robert WiltbankStuart ReadWillamette University, Saras D. SarasvathyUniversity of Virginia, Nicholas DewNaval Postgraduate School and Robert WiltbankWillamette UniversityPublished Online:30 Oct 2015https://doi.org/10.5465/amr.2015.0180AboutSectionsView articleView Full TextPDF/EPUB ToolsDownload CitationsAdd to favoritesTrack Citations ShareShare onFacebookTwitterLinkedInRedditEmail View articleREFERENCESAlvarez S., Barney J. 2007. Discovery and creation: Alternative theories of entrepreneurial action. Strategic Entrepreneurship Journal, 1: 11–26. Google ScholarAlvarez S. A., Young S. L., Woolley J. L. 2015. Opportunities and institutions: A co-creation story of the king crab industry. Journal of Business Venturing, 30: 95–112. Google ScholarAndriani P., Carignani G. 2014. 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We activate the concept of entrepreneurial opportunity, asking the critical question of ‘what do entrepreneurs do with opportunities?’ This fresh perspective takes the concept of opportunity into two important new directions of interaction and learning. We argue that one of the active roles of an entrepreneur is to objectify an opportunity, articulating it in concrete boundary object form to facilitate interaction with a range of stakeholders. Doing so starts a cycle of co-participative learning, by which entrepreneurs and stakeholders reflect on and transform boundary objects that embody an entrepreneurial opportunity. In the process, opportunity takes an actionable shape that advances the creation of a new venture, while simultaneously advancing the entrepreneur’s understanding of how new ventures come to be.

There is increasing interest in the study of exaptation as a key evolutionary force that generates novelty in economic systems. This article contributes to this growing literature by showing how entrepreneurial behavior may effectually construct new market niches enabled by exapted innovations. Put differently, new technologies—whatever their source—may not spontaneously create new market niches. Instead, exaptation and niche construction—two unconventional forces in evolutionary theorizing—challenge conventional conceptualizations of markets as independent selection mechanisms.