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A growing body of research is drawing attention to the material practices that support verbal exchanges and cognitive processes in collective sensemaking. In this study, building on an ethnographic study of a design consulting firm, we develop a process model that accounts for the interplay between conversational and material practices in the transition from individual to group-level sensemaking, and we begin to unpack how the "materialization" of cognitive work supports the collective construction of new shared understandings. Sensemaking is commonly understood as a process in which individuals or groups attempt to interpret novel and ambiguous situations (Weick, 1995). The process begins when people confront events or tasks they cannot readily interpret using available mental structures (Kiesler & Sproull, 1982). Collective sensemaking occurs as individuals exchange provisional understandings and try to agree on consensual interpretations and a course of action (Weick, Sutcliffe, & Obstfeld, 2005). Scholars generally agree that individual and group-level sensemaking processes are related, in This cirticle is the result of a thoroughly collaborative coauthoring process. We thank all managers and employees at Continuum, and in particular Gianfranco Zaccai, president and chief design officer. We gratefully acknowledge the continuous and encouraging support and insightful feedback of Kimberly D. Elsbach. We gratefully acknowledge the helpful comments of Daved Berry,

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for very helpful comments and discussions on previous versions of this paper. We also benefited from presenting previous versions at the 2014 annual meeting of the Academy of Management and at a 2015 OTREG meeting. We also thank the European Commission for research funding (EC Marie Skłodowska-Curie Actions European Fellowship scheme).

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This is the accepted version of the paper.This version of the publication may differ from the final published version. Permanent repository link AbstractIn this paper, we report findings from a comparative study of factors that influence the learning process that underlies entrepreneurial innovation, as entrepreneurs move from an initial intuition to a well-developed new product or service. Evidence from our comparative study highlights the self-reinforcing effect of prior related knowledge, perceived incentives and the degree of control on the allocation of entrepreneurs' limited time, attention and resources. Combining theory and evidence from our study, we propose an interpretative model that suggests that innovation in entrepreneurial ventures rests on self-reinforcing learning cycles that lead entrepreneurs to dedicate increasing resources to the exploration of some opportunities at the expense of others, following a sensemaking process affected by their previous knowledge and their degree of involvement in the projects. Executive SummaryMost literature on entrepreneurship emphasizes the discovery of opportunities and the decision to exploit them as the essence of entrepreneurial action. Entrepreneurs are usually depicted as sagacious pursuer of opportunities and bold risk takers. This representation, however, neglects a fundamental learning process, which takes place as entrepreneurs develop an initial intuition into a successful new product or service. Successful entrepreneurial innovation, in fact, requires more than the capacity to discern an opportunity for entrepreneurial profit and the willingness to accept the associated risk. Entrepreneurs often deal with new and ill-defined product concepts, whose context of use is still poorly understood and whose commercial applications are not fully explored yet. Many business opportunities appear in very rough intuitive form, and require a search for additional information before their feasibility and profitability can be reasonably assessed. Between the recognition of an opportunity and its successful exploitation, lies a critical, albeit often underestimated, learning process that takes place as entrepreneurs gradually manage to make sense of the connections between the different technologies, product functions, customers' preferences, market structure, etc.While learning is intrinsic to any type of innovation, learning in entrepreneurial ventures usually takes place in particularly adverse conditions. First, entrepreneurs tend to face a high degree of ambiguity, as they search for solutions for problems that are still imperfectly defined, as they explore applications of new technologies that are not fully developed, and as they take guesses about which opportunities are worth pursuing. Second, the development of entrepreneurial ideas requires contributions of a different nature from a range of actors, whose knowledge and skills are complementary to the entrepreneurs'. Typically, entrepreneurs possess a good knowledge of the market and the customers, and of...

This is the accepted version of the paper.This version of the publication may differ from the final published version. A central insight that has emerged from this research is that: individuals' cultural repertoires enable them to conceive diverse strategies of actions to address different situations. Thus, although in a pathdependent and identity-constrained manner, culture provides individuals with a toolkit from which they can select resources to take strategic actions and effect change. This view of culture as a toolkit holds considerable promise for understanding strategic action and change at the organizational level of analysis. A different stream of organizational research has investigated the consequences of the use of cultural resources from outside an organization's industry register. This research emphasizes that the use of such resources is difficult, and potentially detrimental to organizations. Oakes, Townley, and Cooper (1998), for instance, document the tensions arising from the forced introduction of business concepts in the provincial museums and heritage sites of Alberta. Similarly, arts organizations that try to incorporate business concepts into their repertoire to become more commercially focused have been found to experience internal tensions (Fine 1992;Glynn 2000) due to the conflict between commercial considerations and the expressive function of arts (Eikhof and Haunschild 2007;Hirsch 1972). This research similarly suggests that organizations tend to use primarily cultural resources from their industry registers, and that doing otherwise is difficult and costly. Permanent repository link1 Concepts are culturally situated, extra-subjective frames for understanding social reality (Munir and Phillips 2005) that organize knowledge in a particular domain and provide relatively shared schemas guiding actions in a collectivity. 5As a result, whether and how organizations can expand their cultural repertoires with new cultural resources from outside their industry registers and the resulting consequences for their strategies remains poorly understood.To address these questions, we undertook a study of the evolution of the cultural repertoire of Alessi, RESEARCH METHOD Research SettingStrategic change at Alessi. Our study is an inductive inquiry (Glaser and Strauss 1967) carried out through an in-depth, longitudinal analysis of a revelatory case (Yin 1994) that provided an excellent research setting as it engaged in a clearly demarcated strategic change process. In the late 1960s, Alessi was the technological and market leader in the tableware segment of the Italian metal household industry, due to its advanced skills in cold-pressed steel production. In 1970, Alberto Alessi, the founder's grandson, joined the organization and, despite its positive economic performance, he steered it in a radically different directionusing industrial production methods to make art objects in steel. The first attempt in that direction failed, but 6 in the following years, Alessi developed innovative practices i...

This is the accepted version of the paper.This version of the publication may differ from the final published version. Permanent repository link AbstractTo understand how organizations combine conflicting institutional logics strategically to create and pursue new market opportunities, we conducted an in-depth longitudinal study of the multiple efforts of the Italian manufacturer of household goods Alessi to combine the logics of industrial manufacturing and cultural production. Over three decades, Alessi developed three different strategies to combine normative elements of the two logics, using each strategy to envision and pursue different market opportunities. By combining the logics of industrial manufacturing and cultural production, Alessi was able to envision new possibilities for value creation and to enact them through innovation in product design. The three strategies triggered a common set of mechanisms through which the purposeful combining of logics enabled the pursuit of opportunity, while each strategy structured the process differently. We develop a theoretical model linking the development of recombinant strategies to the dynamic restructuring of organizational agency and the related capacity to create and pursue new market opportunities. Our findings and theoretical insights advance understanding of the processes through which organizations challenge taken-forgranted beliefs and practices to create new market opportunities, use logics as resources to enable embedded agency, and design hybrid organizational arrangements.Keywords: institutional complexity, multiple institutional logics, hybrid organizations, opportunity creation, design innovation, cultural production. 3Research on institutional complexity has revealed the tensions that some organizations experience as they become exposed to conflicting prescriptions from different institutional logics, reflected in the expectations of multiple constituents (e.g., Binder, 2007;Purdy and Gray, 2009;Reay and Hinings, 2009) and/or understandings of organizational members (Glynn, 2000; Zilber, 2002). This research has related institutional complexity to intra-organizational conflicts (e.g., Glynn, 2000), internal resistance to change (e.g., Townley, 2002), and loss of audience support (D'Aunno, Sutton, and Price, 1991).Institutional logics are socially constructed, coherent, and integrated sets of "assumptions, values, beliefs and rules" (Thornton and Ocasio, 1999: 804) that give actors "organizing principles" prescribing legitimate ends and "the means by which those ends are achieved" (Friedland and Alford, 1991: 248). Researchers have increasingly shown that multiple logics coexist, and often compete, in governing a particular domain of activity (Thornton and Ocasio, 1999;Lounsbury, 2002Thornton, 2002;Marquis and Lounsbury, 2007;Smets et al., 2015), and scholarly attention has turned to the study of institutional complexity defined as the simultaneous operation of different logics that impose contradictory demands on an organization (Greenwoo...