451Firms engage in entrepreneurship to increase performance through both strategic renewal and the creation of new venture opportunities. Organizational learning (OL) has become an effective avenue for strategic renewal. But what of creating venture opportunities-can OL enhance the process of recognizing and pursuing new ventures? This article argues that OL can strengthen a firm's ability to recognize opportunities and help equip them to effectively pursue new ventures. First, we identify three approaches to OL-behavioral, cognitive, and action. Then, we introduce a creativity-based model of opportunity recognition (OpR) that includes two phases-discovery and formation. Next, we show how each of the three types of learning is linked to the two phases of OpR. We suggest propositions that support our claim that OL enhances OpR and offer examples of firms that have used these organizational-learning approaches to more effectively recognize and pursue venture opportunities. These insights have important implications for entrepreneurial firms seeking to advance the venture-creation process.

Stages of growth models were the most frequent theoretical approach to understanding entrepreneurial business growth from 1962 to 2006; they built on the growth imperative and developmental models of that time. An analysis of the universe of such models (n = 104) published in the management literature showed no consensus on basic constructs of the approach, and no empirical confirmation of stages theory. However, by changing two propositions of stages theory, a new dynamic states approach was derived. The dynamic states approach has far greater explanatory power than its precursor, and is compatible with leading edge research in entrepreneurship.

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Inter-organizational projects (IOPs), in which multiple organizations work jointly on a shared activity for a limited period of time, are increasingly used to coordinate complex products/services in uncertain and competitive environments. For some time, project management researchers have examined the structures and processes within intra-organizational projects that lead to their success, and recently some outlines of a ‘theory’ of organizational projects have been offered. This article begins by defining IOPs. It then describes how temporal embeddedness and social embeddedness provide specific mechanisms for managing uncertainty associated with these projects, and facilitating collaboration amongst project actors. Next, it illustrates the insights by combining these two dimensions and exploring them across four contexts within which IOPs are the dominant form of coordination among organizations, including film, architecture, crisis response, and large-scale engineering infrastructure. Finally, it offers suggestions for future research and conclusions.