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The process of new venture creation is characterized by the need to decide and take action in the face of uncertainty. Especially in the context of technology-based ventures uncertainty is substantial, posing difficulties for strategic decision-making based on prediction and planning. and how entrepreneurs' emphasis on these logics shifts and re-shifts over time. From our data, we induce a dynamic model which extends the literature on strategic decision-making in venture creation, illustrating how external and venture conditions -including not only uncertainty but also resource position and stakeholder pressure -lead to changes in venture scope, and thereby to shifts in the use of decision-making logics.

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Research summary: Opportunity creation, effectuation, and bricolage are three concepts that describe value creation and the central role of entrepreneurial action in that process. Although research often conceptualizes these concepts as interrelated, precisely how they relate to and complement one another and where they diverge remains unclear. This article examines the roots of each of these concepts and their underlying assumptions, organizing them within a unifying conceptual frame. Our analysis reveals a set of entailing implications that can guide future conceptual and empirical work in entrepreneurship, and it advances our understanding of value creation and capture in strategy, organization theory, management, and related fields. Managerial summary: What are entrepreneurs doing? At the highest level of abstraction, entrepreneurs are identifying and exploiting opportunities. Recently, several lines of research have examined how certain types of entrepreneurial action can result in forming, rather than merely encountering, opportunities. Scholars engaged in this work have used both deductive and observational approaches, which have been rarely examined jointly or integrated into a comprehensive framework. This article focuses on the literature on opportunity creation, effectuation, and bricolage, examining each of the approaches and their underlying assumptions, and it organizes them within a unifying conceptual frame. Doing so reveals avenues for future work, in particular the development of new theories of opportunity formation, and implications for research in related fields such as strategic management, organization theory, and economics.

Corporate entrepreneurship (CE) is highly important for small and medium-sized enterprises (SMEs) to remain competitive. It is diffi cult for these organizations, however, to choose relevant SME management practices to induce CE. The goal of this study is to determine which human resource management (HRM) practices promote CE in SMEs. We examined the interrelationships between specifi c HRM practices (staff selection, staff development and training, staff rewards, specialist assignments) and CE dimensions (innovativeness, risk propensity, proactiveness, new business venturing, and self-renewal). To that end, we analyzed empirical data from a cross-sectional dataset of 214 knowledge-intensive German SMEs. The results provided empirical evidence for the strong impact of staff selection, staff development, and training as well as staff rewards on CE. We contribute to current CE/HRM research, which is generally rather qualitative, by identifying specifi c productive approaches that SMEs can use to increase entrepreneurial activity through HRM practices and by discussing the positive impacts that such activity can produce.