Entrepreneurship & Regional Development

My research focuses on enabling, accelerating, and funding the entrepreneurial journey, from initial idea to viable venture, in independent, corporate, and social settings. An evolving entrepreneurial opportunity is central in this process: obvious in retrospect, but uncertain, nebulous, and ambiguous in prospect. I am interested in how potential entrepreneurs and investors think, act, and interact...

This paper explores how a future – as something that can only be imagined but can inspire entrepreneurial action – can attract economic capital. We integrate Dor’s (2015) model of language as a communication technology for the instruction of imagination with Bourdieu’s theory of practice to account for how an entrepreneur’s words can hold sway...

Entrepreneurship is an elusive phenomenon and its meaning has been vigorously debated. This study seeks to contribute to critical perspectives on entrepreneurship by investigating how entrepreneuring participates and intervenes in the dominant discourse, and thus, in the practices that constitute meaning. To explore this crucial question, I use the framework of entrepreneuring as a mode...

Mark Freel is the Royal Bank of Canada Professor for the Commercialisation of Innovations at the Telfer School of Management, University of Ottawa. He also holds an appointment as a professor of innovation and entrepreneurship at Lancaster University Management School, UK, and is a research fellow at the Lazaridis Institute, Wilfrid Laurier University. Before moving...

We apply the sociological lens of linked lives to show how household contexts channel transitions to self-employment in ways strongly differentiated by gender. We investigate the impact of demographic transitions to marriage, cohabitation and having children on the transition to self-employment using fixed-effects models on 10 waves of the UK’s nationally representative survey, Understanding Society....

In the field of international entrepreneurship, there are increasing calls for the study of cognition in its social context. In this regard, this article draws on social representations theory to explore and better understand the cognition of entrepreneurs. The objective of the present study is to explore the social representation of legitimacy among different social...

Entrepreneurship is often about the individual drive for innovation and the exploitation of opportunities; however, in an increasingly connected world, entrepreneurial ecosystems have gained considerable research interest. In many developed countries, entrepreneurial ecosystems emerge from organic collaborations between businesses and investors, with little political involvement. However, in a post-communist country like Kazakhstan, different stakeholders have...

Using a phenomenological approach, we analyse the voices of entrepreneurs living in the peripheral ecosystems of Newcastle Upon Tyne (UK), Palermo (Italy) and Perth (Australia). These ecosystems are defined by the considerable physical distance between their geographical location and the location of a larger, more established ‘core’ ecosystem in their nation. The purpose of our...

Entrepreneurs usually have several means at their disposal to deal with and overcome adverse circumstances, ranging from simple non-resourceful coping strategies to more elaborate resourceful behaviours. However, entrepreneurs who find themselves in conditions of prolonged adversity and disadvantage have few effective possibilities to withstand sudden adversity such as crises and income shocks. Based on these...

The aim of this research is to undertake explorative research and present propositions that would identify the drivers of regional emergency networks, i.e. regional technological collaborative agreements under extreme conditions. Based on previous studies on emergency management, we empirically evaluate how 49 organizations built 53 technological cooperative agreements within the context of COVID-19. We consider...