Project III: 

Organizing Cultural Entrepreneurship on Frontiers and in Pockets of No Man’s Land in the Global Business World

Jesper Döpping, 

This project seeks to develop process theories and models for the creation of innovative entrepreneurial assemblages and possibilities in the interstices between existing fields of evolving practices. Schumpeter (1942) pointed out that entrepreneurship primarily is based on imagined futures and the creation of  new frontiers and opportunities in trade and business. The majority of research has focused on finding and exploiting arbitrage opportunities through exploitation and production at frontiers rather than creating new assemblages for value creation. The cultural entrepreneurship approach inside business studies focuses on the organizing of innovative entrepreneurial processes and the possible creation of opportunities in an uncertain future and novel space. Lounsbury & Glynn (2019) argue that innovative cultural entrepreneuring is a specific focus point:

“Possibilities for entrepreneurial action exist at the interstices of distinct identity positions in around institutional fields where novel entrepreneurial identities and practices may be constructed” 

The project in particular seeks to conceptualize how the cultural innovative entrepreneuring create frontiers from the periphery of the global centers. In this project ‘frontiers’ are conceptualized as “edge[s] of space and time: a zone of not yet – not yet mapped, not yet regulated. It is a zone of unmapping: even in its planning, a frontier is imagined as unplanned.... Their wildness is made of visions and vines and violence: it is both material and imaginative” (Tsing 2003: 5100). The empirical data will be focused on a comparative study of an AI/drone company in Bangkok, the production of high end bird nests and avocados in the periphery, and the re-creation business that are focused on new lifestyles.