Purpose
The purpose of this paper is to integrate research on entrepreneurship and projects by applying process perspectives on these two fields with the ambition to shed light on how this kind of alternative perspectives can be used to further the fields in research and practice.
Design/methodology/approach
This conceptual paper is based on previous research efforts in the two fields and on how they have been treated in the past. Business process research is introduced to enrich notions on how the two areas can be combined.
Findings
By rearranging thinking about projects, entrepreneurship and processes, and through introducing the notion of “chunks”, the authors illustrate how different types of business processes in different types of project contexts can be coordinated through orchestration and/or choreography.
Research limitations/implications
The research made for this conceptual paper has been thorough. However, the literature is huge, so the reservation must be made that the authors might have missed some important trends. Anyway, there are implications for how research and analyses of data can be used with the thinking described.
Originality/value
Combining various lines of research is not common as illustrated by the lack of studies combining entrepreneurship and projects; therefore, by adding process notions and “chunk” reasoning, this paper opens up for innovation and renewal in research. To the authors’ knowledge this approach is new.
Competence frameworks are increasingly used in several practice fields and have been an object of research. A typical development trend has been encapsulation into a particular field, not considering the developments in related fields. Similarly, in research, learning from neighbouring disciplines has been rare. Yet, during the past decade, there have been several attempts at linking essentially related disciplines in practice, such as entrepreneurship and project management. This is a reaction to the trends in the labour market – a growing demand for people with diverse competences. In this context, converging different fields via competences deserves more attention. This paper compares the competences required for project managers and entrepreneurs; in addition, it explores the possibilities for mutual enrichment, contributing to further linking of project management and entrepreneurship conceptually. The cross-examination of competences for entrepreneurs (The Entrepreneurship Competence Framework or EntreComp) and for project managers (International Project Management Association's Individual Competence Baseline [IPMA-ICB]) reveals some quite significant, but also weak, correlations. The linguistic approach used has natural limitations, as different terms have been used to convey the same concepts. Thus, a relational linguistic analysis and conceptual analysis have also been applied. The main implication is the recommendation to integrate core project management competences into competence models for entrepreneurs. A natural progression of this work is to build a common competence model for entrepreneurs and project managers.
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