Speaker: Dr Anne ter Wal (Imperial College Business School)
Hosted by: University of Liverpool Management School's Strategy, International Business and Entrepreneurship Group
Open to: Management School PhD students and academic staff, with no sign up needed
Date: Wednesday 26 June 2024
Time: 12 - 1:30pm
Place: Management School - Seminar Room 4
Abstract
It is well established that entrepreneurs’ social connections can be a critical differentiator in growing their venture, gaining commercial traction, attracting venture capital, and achieving a competitive edge.
We also know that knowledge about the entrepreneurial process circulates in community-type settings that facilitate interactions with experienced founders or mentors.
Yet, when starting out, many entrepreneurs will find themselves outside of the circles that matter. Despite having accumulated network connections over previous work and life experiences, it is common for entrepreneurs to find themselves in unfamiliar networking environments where they lack initial connections to give them a head start for building their network and becoming part of an entrepreneurial community.
Entrepreneurs who find themselves in unfamiliar networking environments often need to build their networks largely from scratch. Even with prior experience, their existing connections may not be all that relevant, for example because they moved to a different country, changed industry, or generally lack inroads into the world of entrepreneurship.
We call such entrepreneurs “unembedded”. Although research on entrepreneurial networking has advanced our understanding of how entrepreneurs can actively shape their approach to tie formation through thoughtful agency, current work implicitly assumes that entrepreneurs are familiar with their networking environment and know which connections to target.
Meanwhile, research on referral-based networking strategies assumes entrepreneurs have initial connections that may provide a suitable entry point for building further relations.
While referrals can be highly effective in broadening the network of entrepreneurs with pre-existing network connections, we lack insights into how unembedded entrepreneurs gain initial referral opportunities when they enter vast and unfamiliar networking environments.
How then do entrepreneurs unembedded in a networking environment find their way toward becoming embedded? In this study, we unpack the process of entrepreneurial networking to uncover what entrepreneurs do to navigate the unfamiliarity and sheer vastness of a networking environment.
We use a “work” lens to examine entrepreneurial networking as a process of social-symbolic work that entrepreneurs engage in to navigate the challenges they encounter upon entering an unfamiliar networking environment.
Entrepreneurial networking at its core entails work on the part of entrepreneurs to construct social relations that matter in environments that are a microcosm of wider social structures.
Specifically, in this qualitative, inductive study we examine the networking journeys of 43 technology entrepreneurs in London and Paris who entered unfamiliar networking environments.
We also observed entrepreneurial networking more generally at networking events, co-working spaces, accelerators, and other types of start-up communities in the entrepreneurial hubs of London and Paris.
Speaker
Anne ter Wal is Associate Professor of Technology and Innovation Management in the Department of Management and Entrepreneurship at Imperial College London.
His research, often in collaboration with leading multinational companies as well as start-ups, focuses on the role of networks in innovation and entrepreneurship.
Specifically, Anne studies how individuals access new knowledge and ideas through networks within and between organizations and the challenges they face when seeking to apply these ideas to the creation of novel products and services.
He leads a large-scale EU-funded research project titled "Networking for Innovation", studying how networking enables entrepreneurs and innovators to build valuable networks that help them achieve business and innovation success.
He also has an interest in the management of creativity, in particular in the role of bootlegging and other deviant forms of creativity in driving innovative outcomes.
His work has been published in leading journals in geography, innovation studies and management, including Administrative Science Quarterly, Organization Science, Research Policy, Journal of Economic Geography, Economic Geography, Regional Studies and Industry & Innovation.
Anne currently is an Associate Editor at the Academy of Management Journal. He also serves on the editorial review board of the Administrative Science Quarterly and Research Policy.
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