Title: Entrepreneurial resource acquiring as a relational scripted engagement: An ethnography at a corporate accelerator program
Speakers: Qian Li
Date: Tuesday, 13 October 2020
Time: 12:00-13:30
Abstract:
The study began with a puzzle of how entrepreneurs experience resource acquiring processes when engaging the same resource landscape. Guided by the notion of scripts as a pattern of practice, we intend to build a theory of entrepreneurial resource acquiring as relational scripted engagement, addressing how entrepreneurs enact their resource landscape idiosyncratically. Based on a 21-week ethnography, we found three patterns of acquiring entrepreneurial resources from corporate accelerator programs: configuring script, reconfiguring script, and disorienting script. Our research suggests that to acquire entrepreneurial resources, entrepreneurs need to understand their accelerator’s resource availability, rules, and purposes and perform script-triggered practices that their counterparts are familiar with and react upon. We find that entrepreneurs may preserve their script even if it is inconsistent with their personal experience when their focus is on what counterpart is supposed to do rather than what they are able to do in the resource acquiring process. We seek to contribute to the extant literature in entrepreneurial resource acquisition, accelerator, and entrepreneurial script.
Bio:
Qian Li is a Lecturer in Strategy at University of Dundee. She recently completed her PhD at Cass Business School, City, University of London. Her research focuses on the challenges that technology ventures are often facing at the starting-up and scaling-up phase, such as identity formation, strategy making, and resource acquisition, through a strategizing lens. Recently, she has been studying early-stage FinTech firms, corporate accelerator programs, and angel investor networks ethnographically, and exploring emerging strategy, entrepreneurial script, and discursive practices in these contexts.
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