The Design and Implementation of an Entrepreneurship Management System. Capturing Activity System Data from Entrepreneurship Support Programmes

Abstract

Entrepreneurs are an important source of innovation for transformation of the industrial landscape and thus future sustainable economic growth. The relevance for top policy makers is the great effort and large investments used to build entrepreneurship support programmes (ESPs) supporting entrepreneurship projects (EPs). The ESPs consist of education, grants, mentoring, incubation, and investments. There is a lack of empirical evidence on the activities in EPs and on how the ESPs impact EPs in a positive way. For traditional economic ventures, a major source of such empirical evidence comes from analysing the data gathered in companies' management information systems (MIS). This is, however, rarely an option for entrepreneurial ventures, as these usually do not have the resources to have a MIS. The main scientific contribution of this PhD is to offer a way to gather such empirical data on the activities in EPs and on the effect of ESPs on EPs. The way in which this will be achieved is to combine a selection of entrepreneurship theory with practical experience to develop an entrepreneurship activity system (EAS), which again is used to build a specialised entrepreneurship management system (EMS). The EMS is then made available to as many ESPs and EPs as possible. The data from the entrepreneurship management system will then be loaded into an analytics database for hybrid (quantitative and qualitative) analysis. The data will be used for a set of empirical papers casting light on different entrepreneurial sub¬processes. These data will again be used to improve the EAS, the EMS and the selection of theories in a circle of iterative plan-do-check-act cycles. The thesis is built around two research questions: (RQ1) Flow does the EMS need to be designed to secure adaptation by both EPs and ESPs and allow for effective analysis of their activity data?; and (RQ2) To what degree does the EMS data provide observation of EP activity and the impact of the ESPs? Furthermore, the thesis has four research objectives: (RO1) design an entrepreneurship management system (EMS) for describing and capturing activities within EPs and between EPs and ESPs in their whole granularity; (RO2) populate that system with a significant sample size of real entrepreneurial activity, ranging over a significant number of ESPs; (RO3) identify potential research methods and strategies deployable using this data; and (RO4) make a proof of concept for the individual methods. Since the fall of 2013,1 have been the main force behind developing such an EMS, including an activity system containing seven steps and 28 elements. I have also been principally involved in optimizing the EMS data for research purposes. Since its introduction, different developmental versions of the EMS have been introduced to more than 17.000 EPs. There has been collaboration with more than 30 incubators, universities, banks, venture capitalists, and other ESPs in distributing the EMS. Based on the experiences and data gathered, the nine papers (C1-C9) that are the bases for this PhD were written. Eight of them has been published while the last (C2) is currently pending review. The main conclusions of the thesis are that an EMS can be built in such a way that it provides value to EPs and ESPs and thus will be used by them. To be valuable without the support of an ESP, the EMS should contain a massive online open course (MOOC) covering both the tutorial on how to use the EMS and the entrepreneurial theory supporting it. Another conclusion is that an EMS can provide observation on EP activity and the impact of ESPs. The final contribution will be the distribution of the production version of the EMS starting 2020. The main effort in utilising the EMS has yet to come, as it will be made generally available for research purposes.