Turning Lead into Gold: How Do Entrepreneurs Mobilize Resources to Exploit Opportunities?

David R. Clough; Tommy Pan Fang; Balagopal  Vissa; Andy  Wu

Article | Academy of Management Annals | 2019

Turning Lead into Gold: How Do Entrepreneurs Mobilize Resources to Exploit Opportunities?

by David R. Clough, Tommy Pan Fang, Balagopal Vissa and Andy Wu

Abstract

The mobilization of resources is a central and defining feature of entrepreneurship. As the body of empirical research on entrepreneurial resource mobilization has grown, the literature has become increasingly fragmented. We review the literature on entrepreneurs’ mobilization of resources, spanning human, social, financial, and other forms of capital. We identify five critical issues that hold back progress in resource mobilization research. We then propose a path ahead for future research guided by two overarching goals. First, we advocate for a process perspective, focusing attention on how an individual actor’s disposition and situation shape her responses, how these responses interact with those of other actors, and how these individual and collective responses unfold over time to generate outcomes. Second, we call for stronger unification of theory within the entrepreneurial resource mobilization literature and across contiguous conversations in strategy and organization theory. Theoretical consilience will enable the accumulation of empirical research into a cohesive body of knowledge on entrepreneurial resource mobilization.

Keywords: resource mobilization; Entrepreneurship; Organizations; Theory; Research; Strategy; Opportunities;

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Citation:

Clough, David R., Tommy Pan Fang, Balagopal Vissa, and Andy Wu. "Turning Lead into Gold: How Do Entrepreneurs Mobilize Resources to Exploit Opportunities?" Academy of Management Annals 13, no. 1 (2019): 240–271.

Working Paper | HBS Working Paper Series | 2020

Iterative Coordination and Innovation

Sourobh Ghosh and Andy Wu

Agile management practices from the software industry continue to transform the way organizations innovate across industries, yet they remain understudied in the organizations literature. We investigate the widespread Agile practice of iterative coordination: frequent meetings to coordinate individuals on innovation-oriented organizational goals. While the assumed purpose of iterative coordination is to generate innovation, there is limited empirical evidence as to whether this practice actually makes organizations more innovative. With the leading technology firm Google, we embed a field experiment within a hackathon software development competition to identify the effect of iterative coordination on innovation. We find that iterative coordination’s influence on innovation is mixed: while iteratively coordinating firms develop more valuable products, these products are simultaneously less novel. This counterintuitive result highlights a paradox at the heart of iterative coordination—whereas it intends to promote innovation, applying it yields less novelty, a necessary component of innovation. Furthermore, by tracking software code, we find that iteratively coordinating firms favor integration at the cost of specialization to create new knowledge. A follow-on laboratory study documents that increasing the frequency and goal orientation of iterative coordination meetings reinforces value and integration, while reducing novelty and specialization. This article makes three key contributions: refining theoretical understanding of the relationship between goal coordination and innovation; introducing empirical methodology for generating data with hackathons and software code version-tracking; and responding to calls from the literature to study new methods of organizing and whether they offer new insights on organizational innovation.

Keywords: innovation; goals; specialization; coordination; field experiment; software development; Organizations; Collaborative Innovation and Invention; Goals and Objectives; Integration; Software;

Citation:

Ghosh, Sourobh, and Andy Wu. "Iterative Coordination and Innovation." Harvard Business School Working Paper, No. 20-121, January 2020. View Details

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Turning Lead into Gold: How Do Entrepreneurs Mobilize Resources to Exploit Opportunities?

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