Essays on Complexity and Design Thinking in Entrepreneurship
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The New venture creation context is experiencing unprecedented change. Rapid shifts in technology, customer needs, and institutions have translated into a very complex, uncertain, and dynamic landscape, for those who want to embark on an entrepreneurial journey. Success in this turbulent environment requires entrepreneurs to be equipped with the mindsets, processes, and tools that help them to systematically overcome and diminish the inherent complexity of the entrepreneurship pathway. In the first essay of this dissertation, we formally incorporate the notion of complexity into the current debates on entrepreneurial opportunities. More specifically, we propose a new conceptualization of opportunity heterogeneity that attributes the variance in opportunities to complexity in three constituent components; problem, solution, and business model. Utilizing this complexity perspective, we revisit the impact of creativity, prior knowledge and social ties on the process of identifying entrepreneurial opportunities. In the second essay, through a systematic scale development process, we conceptualize and quantify design thinking as a complexity-reducing mindset that is activated in problem-solving situations. Particularly, we measure design thinking as a Reflective First-order, Formative Second-order construct through three facets; visual thinking, empathy, and experimentation. Subsequently, we assess the validity and reliability of our proposed design thinking construct. The insights from this dissertation have important implications for both theory and practice and facilitate future research inquiries in multiple scholarly domains.
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Executive summary - Heterogenity of entreprenurial opportunities: a complexity perspective -- Measuring design thinking -- Appendix: Institutional Review Board (IRB) approval
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Ph.D.