Henrik Berglund

@khberglund.bsky.social

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Professor of Entrepreneurship, Chalmers. Editor JBV Design. Program Director, Industrial Engineering & Management

This PDW examines the central role of artifacts in processes of development and change across fields and practices including entrepreneurship, innovation, project management, strategy, and future-making. In these and other areas, managerial work often amounts to artifact-centered processes in which final outcomes emerge via various “intermediate artifacts” such as conceptual models, material prototypes, digital simulations, and operational plans. Such artifacts serve diverse functions: as focusing devices that produce shared visions and guide concrete actions, as boundary objects that enable feedback and collaboration across domains, and as unfolding artifacts that are left intentionally incomplete to invite creative engagement. While scholars in different fields are theorizing and investigating artifact-centered practices, there is little discussion across fields. This PDW aims to encourage such dialogue.
Broadly speaking, the design perspective recognizes that whatever we choose call them, the things entrepreneurs design must be artificial, i.e. purposefully created and made to fit environmental circumstances (Berglund, Bousfiha, & Mansoori, 2020; Dimov, 2020; cf. Simon, 1996). Artifact is оf course a very inclusive concept that can include events and concepts as well as more concrete things like tools and machines, as long as they are intentionally made (Hilpinen, 1993; Reicher, 2022). Because of this, and given the conceptual confusion regarding the opportunity concept, we want to make sure our terminology is clear. We therefore distinguish between opportunities and ventures. Fundamentally, these are not different in the sense that neither exists naturally in the world but are human constructions and thus artificial. We will consequently use venture to describe the thing an entrepreneur actively designs, and reserve opportunity for the broader situation—as framed by an entrepreneur—within which this takes place. In the design perspective, an opportunity is thus an actively framed situation within which an entrepreneur sees the possibility to create a successful venture, whereas the actual entrepreneurial work is focused on designing such a venture.
The “dual nexus” framework of entrepreneurship is firmly grounded in economic theories of the entrepreneurial function (e.g. Hayek, 1945; Kirzner, 1973) and has inherited this tradition‘s basic conceptual elements, namely individuals (entrepreneurs) and opportunities, defined as environmental circumstances that can be exploited to lucrative ends (Ramoglou & Tsang, 2016; Shane & Venkataraman, 2000; Venkataraman, 1997, cf. Davidsson, 2015 for a review). While individuals have a clear role to play in a theory of entrepreneurship, the notion of opportunity has been stretched to its limits, assuming multiple, often conflicting, meanings that lead to conceptual confusion. The term has been variously used to designate objectively existing lucrative market conditions (Alvarez & Barney, 2007; Shane & Venkataraman, 2000), subjectively imagined outcomes (Klein, 2008) as well as the products, services and other artifacts created throughout the entrepreneurial process (Arikan, Arikan, & Koparan, 2020).
To enhance managerial relevance, entrepreneurship theory should be anchored in frameworks that are both practically useful and conceptually coherent. This essay develops a triadic design perspective on entrepreneurship that incorporates artifacts alongside individuals and environmental circumstances. Building on concepts of epistemic objects (Knorr Cetina), reflective design practice (Schön), and world-disclosing (Spinosa et al.), opportunities are conceptualized as actively framed situations, within which ventures are designed, through the use of more or less concrete entrepreneurial artifacts. This resulting account of entrepreneurship as an artifact-centered and potentially transformative process of design will hopefully offer a robust foundation for advancing entrepreneurship research and practice.