Creating New Ventures in Organisational Contexts: Emergence, Divergence and Acceptance

This paper investigates the social process through which venture creation takes place in existing organisations by exploring aspects of sensemaking, relationships and experience in a longitudinal case study of a novel new venture within a multinational corporation. Prior studies in corporate entrepreneurship emphasise the cognitive development of the individual without considering wider context. In corporate ventures, context has a particularly important role on the entrepreneurial process. To support this investigation a new approach is developed through an integrated theoretical framework of organizational sensemaking and structuration theory to examine how shared interpretations and explanations of novel organisational forms emerge in tandem with stakeholders who may hold different perspectives. Building on Gartner et al’s (1992) and Taylor and Van Every’s (2000) concepts of organisational emergence, it is argued that an individual’s experience of organisational emergence takes place through critical events and event clustering as an element of the lived-experience of venture development in an ongoing processual-reality. As a result, ventures are seen to emerge from actors’ relationships in social contexts just as the creation of new ventures is explained to others by actors in social contexts, reciprocally shaping the emergent organisation through a politicised joint process. A novel corporate innovation project, Sigma, was identified within a multinational corporation and field research conducted over a 2 year period as the project went through its development as a potential new independent small firm. As part of this approach, the identification of critical events was facilitated through a series of unstructured critical incident technique interviews, during the two years of research, which allowed for the explanation of context, strategy and outcome over a 10 year period from his perspective. This was then further supported by wider contextualisation and triangulation through the analysis of interviews with multiple key stakeholder participants, field notes and 10 years of documentation at multiple geographic sites, mapped across time over the period of study. Results of the study illustrate how Sigma emerged as a novel new organisational form through a series of events in which individuals shaped the interpretations of what Sigma was, through reference to different contextual forms of norms, meaning and authority. While official published documents heralded the development of Sigma as a key innovation for the corporate firm and sustainable research project, analysis of participants explanations and associated data suggested that Sigma’s development was equivocal and its development never clear-cut. Results show how critical events illustrate wider institutional struggles through which Sigma was identified either as technical research project, innovative corporate product line or potential independent new venture. This combination of events, itself taking place during the merger of the parent organisation with another corporate firm, suggested that the emergence of Sigma was dependent on individual interpretations and practices through relationships, in their shifting socially-situated contexts. In this sense, Sigma was socially constructed through the participation and relationships of a range of individuals involved in its emergence. Through the analysis of Sigma as a novel contested organisational form, the developed conceptual framework provides insight into the processes through which individual and venture development reciprocally influence each other as part of an ongoing processual reality. It further illustrates how different relationship-contexts shape and influence the development of new business models, while simultaneously shaping individual social roles and organisational forms.