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.

This study provides an analysis of the entry strategies of third-party data centers in the United States, an industry with assets worth hundreds of billions of dollars. We examine the market in 2018 and 2019, and compare with the physical entry of private data centers for services on demand, including those known as cloud services. We find evidence that providers of third-party data centers trade off the tensions between buyer distaste for distance, which creates localized demand, and costs of supply, which vary with density. We find considerable evidence that localized demand and economies of scale shape entry decisions. We conclude that data centers display tendencies towards urban-biased technical change, and cloud services mildly work to ameliorate such biases. We see little evidence to suggest data centers will spread to any but a small number of low density locations.