The Morning Dew of Entrepreneurship: New Venture Gestation

In everyday terms, new venture gestation is a communication-driven effort, marked by sketchy and probing articulations used to express early try-outs, thoughts, conversations, and perspectives on potential novelty at both an individual or organizational level (e.g., new firms, opportunities, combination of elements) and societal level (e.g., new fields, phenomena, futures).

Metaphorically, new venture gestation is the morning dew perceptible before the dawn of a new day. Relative to any new day, the morning dew is simultaneously a constant (a natural phenomenon occurring regularly) and a variation (never occurring in exactly the same way). In the interplay between constants and variations, new venture gestation emerges and unfolds.

Scientifically, new venture gestation is a discursive formation and a multimodal form of communication and storytelling where individuals and organizations externalize their positions, intersubjectively align with one another, make sense and create meaning around the content exchanged, and formulate drafts of early outcomes.

New venture gestation is important because the content discussed, narrated, visualized, and communicated aims to articulate interesting suggestions, build understanding around them, create attraction for them, generate commitment to them, and – ideally and ultimately – create hope and belief in the “stories about futures yet to come” (O’Connor, 2004) that these suggestions represent.

New venture gestation is a formative process aimed at generating “concrete intangibles” such as understanding, commitment, attraction, hope, and belief — all before conventional organizational processes are activated (e.g., role assigning, rational planning, systematic analysis, resource allocation) and before linear categories (e.g., stages, steps, phases) are applied to divide the continued formative process into measurable slices that yield tangible outcomes.

Despite this importance, new venture gestation is often treated as a vague pre-category (conception, gestation) assumed to happen before all the measurable aspects in the succeeding stages, steps, and phases become detectable. Major empirical and longitudinal scientific studies such as Panel Study on Entrepreneurial Dynamics (PSED) and Global Entrepreneurship Monitor (GEM) focus on these measurable aspects. As a result, few coherent conceptual frameworks or methodological toolboxes exist to support practitioners navigating new venture gestation as a formative process. 

Insightful and useful conceptual and theoretical work was done mainly in the 2000s to remedy this, e.g. the suggested “science of the imagination” as outcome of efforts to blend theories and methods in narrative approaches with entrepreneurship as a phenomenon (for a good overview of this, see Gartner, 2007). As brilliant as this work is conceptually and theoretically, as minimal is its implications on practice, so far. Re-activating these roots is a natural starting point for the research program here outlined.  

Near Lying Concepts and Distinctions

Because new venture gestation is complex and prone to failure, related concepts must be precise to provide clarity. Therefore, besides being defined (above), new venture gestation also needs to be delimited relative to near lying concepts: 

• Nascent entrepreneur refers to an individual in the process of starting a new business. This concept is closely tied to business formation, making it difficult to extend to broader processes such as market formation, the creation of new knowledge domains, or the exploration of preferable futures.
• Entrepreneurial Orientation (EO) precedes new venture gestation by assessing individual or organizational inclination towards Entrepreneurial Behavior (EB). These constructs are useful as they provide probabilities on who, why, how, and where it is more likely that new venture gestation will occur and prosper. EO and EB are delimited from new venture gestation in being indicative and probabilistic but not formative, predictive, or deterministic.
• New venture creation succeeds new venture gestation. According to Davidsson & Gordon (2011:857), it refers to “cases at a pre-operational (but beyond ‘mere idea’) stage”, where owners can be identified and contacted and where it is possible to get “comprehensive information about the venture and its founders”.
• Venture emergence also succeeds new venture gestation and overlaps with venture creation, but with a more specific focus. The interest lies in capturing evidence that the venture is gradually taking form, for instance, the first sale or the establishment of operations (Reynolds & Miller, 1992; Dimov, 2010). The four criteria for when a new venture is perceived to formally exist proposed by Katz & Gartner (1988) —“intentionality, resources, boundaries, and exchange”— still holds up (Giones, Fox & Miralles, 2019:3).
• Venture (and venturing) is historically rooted in management science and economics. This is logical since new venture formation and its outcomes are fundamental for reforming, replacing, and renewing the composition of firms in any given market and in the economy at large. Yet it is also limiting, as such reshaping processes takes place in all societal sectors, and as the connection between risk and venture is usually linked only to financial risk. In reality, there are several forms of capital – financial, social, cultural, relational, personal — and risks exist in all of them. The concepts of venture and venturing should therefore be broadened to include efforts in all societal sectors and across sectors and the combinatory capacity to connect them, aiming at potential novelty on societal level.

Serial New Venture Gestation

Over four decades, I have engaged in new venture gestation in all societal sectors and across sectors. There are probably few people engaging in new venture gestation on a serial basis – that is, only or mainly engaging in this very early formative process and then leaving when the venture is formed. The main reason might be that it makes little sense economically or reputationally to invest time, energy, and passion into a formation process and then leave before harvesting any major material or social benefits. 

Another reason is that it is personally demanding to constantly move on, learn new areas, logics and vocabularies, and repeatedly face the personal risks and social costs of being a broker in concrete intangibles within the home terrain of established specialists. I have theorized elsewhere about constantly being the other within (Lundberg & Ramírez-Pasillas, 2020).

Anyhow, this pathway can be understood as shaped by a mix of impatience, limited tolerance for tedious rational processes, infinite curiosity, and a sense of awe when facing new potential acts of creation that spark a desire to join in. Along with endless work, recurring difficulties, and considerable challenges, this has given me immense joy and generated deep insights, significant experiential knowledge, and other enduring contributions.
 

References

• Davidsson, P. & Gordon, S. R. (2012). "Panel Studies of New Venture Creation: A Methods-Focused Review and Suggestions for Future Research". Small Business Economics 39(4), 853–876. https://doi.org/10.1007/s11187-011-9325-8 
• Gartner, W. B. (2007). "Entrepreneurial narrative and a science of the imagination". Journal of Business Venturing 22(5) 613– 627. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.jbusvent.2006.10.003 
• Giones, F., Fox, P. & Miralles, F. (2019). Measuring Venture Emergence in Entrepreneurship Research. SSRN, 1–22 http://dx.doi.org/10.2139/ssrn.3422741
• Katz, J. & Gartner, W. B. (1988). "Properties of Emerging Organizations". Academy of Management Review, 13(3), 429–441.
• Lundberg, H. & Ramírez-Pasillas, M. (2020). "The Other Within as Entrepreneurial Agency for Subsistence Entrepreneurs". In Ratten, V. (Ed.), Entrepreneurship and the Community. A Multidisciplinary Perspective on Creativity, Social Challenges, and Business, 7–27. Cham, Switzerland: Springer. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-23604-5_2 
• O’Connor, E. (2004). "Storytelling to be real: Narrative, legitimacy building and venturing". In Hjorth, D., & Steyaert, C. (Eds.), Narrative and Discursive Approaches in Entrepreneurship, 105–124. Cheltenham, UK: Edward Elgar. https://doi.org/10.4337/9781845421472.00011
• Reynolds, P.D. & Miller, B. (1992). "New firm gestation: Conception, birth, and implications for research". Journal of Business Venturing, 7(5), 405–417. https://doi.org/10.1016/0883-9026(92)90016-K