Emergence of entrepreneurial populations: a feature dimensionality approach

Abstract

This paper studies how increasing dimensionality in a market space feeds into the emergence of a sustainable entrepreneurial population-energy cooperatives in Germany. Our theoretical model conceptualizes the market as a multi-dimensional feature space and offers insights as to when and where new types of entrepreneurial activities emerge. We demonstrate that (1) the rise of a socio-cognitive dimension greenness created novel social demand and opened opportunities for sustainable entrepreneurship and (2) sustainable entrepreneurial organizations are more likely to be founded in communities with higher local demand for greenness. Our paper contributes to research on entrepreneurial population emergence and sustainable entrepreneurship.

Modelling the network economy: A population ecology perspective on network dynamics

“…For that reason, in this paper we re-specify the definitions of interacting populations in a larger community or eco-system. Consistent with community ecology theory (Boone and Van Witteloostuijn, 1995;Ruef, 2000;Audia et al, 2006;Zhang et al, 2009;Zhou and van Witteloostuijn, 2010;Çakmaklı et al, 2017;2020;Boone et al, 2018;García-Díaz et al, 2020;Liu and van Witteloostuijn, 2020), we furthermore emphasize a symbiosis and competition mechanism, and revise existing equations to capture adequately the current setting of the network economy. The symbiosis and competition mechanisms we propose in this paper can be used not only in the context of network platforms, but also in the context of organizational populations that interact in the same community.…”

“…The existing theory cannot therefore explain the industrial resurgence in mature industries (Box, 2017). Informed by recent writings on mutualistic and competitive mechanisms from community ecology theory (Zhou and van Witteloostuijn, 2010;Çakmaklı et al, 2017;2020;Boone et al, 2018;García-Díaz et al, 2020;Liu and van Witteloostuijn, 2020), we define the interacting populations in the community that affect an organizational population as a symbiotic organizational population and as a competitive organizational population. Network platforms benefit from related symbiotic industries because symbiotic populations contribute symbiotic energy and resources to platform-based organizational populations.…”

Organizational Ecology Theory: Review Past for Directing the Future Development

“…For example, Zhang (2009) proposed that intercommunity relationships have an inverted U-shaped relationship with the focal community's growth. However, few studies have explained the determinants for whether the interdependence relationship between communities is mutualism or competition (Liu and van Witteloostuijn 2020;Xu et al 2021).…”

“…Second, there has been no knowledge framework to date that exclusively covers the vast majority of research topics applying OET. As noted above, due to its rich but fragmented literature, many scholars have applied OET in their empirical research, combining conceptual lenses in a cross-disciplinary manner (Aksaray and Thompson 2018;Liu and van Witteloostuijn 2020), resulting in the lack of a unified knowledge framework for presenting and summarizing OET research. These gaps make it difficult for scholars who are interested in OET to quickly grasp and assess what is the state of the art in the OET literature.…”

The nascent ecology of social enterprise

“…In the UK, the community interest company (CIC), a legally constituted organizational form for SE, was established in 2005 to overcome the institutional ambiguity associated with organizations that pursue both commercial and social goals. New organizational forms foster economic diversity (Romanelli 1989), yet the emergence of new entrepreneurial populations is relatively neglected in entrepreneurship research (Liu and van Witteloostuijn 2020). While prior SE research has examined different levels of analysis, such as international (Lepoutre et al 2013), county (Andersson and Ford 2016;Chang et al 2011), and city level (Barron et al 1994;Bouchard and Rousselière 2016), the main focus of our study of CICs is to improve the understanding of the national contextual and institutional influences on SE population emergence.…”