Entrepreneurship as a Conversational Accomplishment: An Inductive Analysis of the Verbal Sensemaking Behaviors of Early-stage Innovative Entrepreneurial Teams

Abstract

Within the stream of research on entrepreneurial opportunity there is a school of thought that affords entrepreneurs an agentic role in the creation of opportunities – with opportunities understood as a combination of both product and market innovation. Recently scholars working from this Creative Model have associated the opportunity shaping work of entrepreneurs with sensemaking – a social process in which teams gather information, ascribe meaning, and take action in the face of the uncertainties, which some have said define the context of entrepreneurship. Few, if any, scholars have studied the naturally occurring conversations between entrepreneurial team members as they discuss the information, meaning, and action relevant to their innovation efforts. This dissertation makes a contribution to current understanding of entrepreneurship by capturing the naturally occurring conversations of innovative entrepreneurial teams in action, analyzing these recorded conversations for use of sensemaking language, and comparing the language patterns between teams that achieve different levels of performance.