Entreprenörskapsresan genom beslutsprocesser i team, en elektronisk dagboksstudie i realtid

Sammanfattning: A theoretical framework based on the process of how founders and members of a team make decisions during the establishment stage of their respective new ventures, is a relatively unexplored area in the entrepreneurship research field. I develop upon Sarasvathy’s (2001) framework, which is based upon the existence of two decision making processes; causation and effectuation, during the establishment phase of a new venture. I show that the founders and the members of each respective team do not stringently follow either the causation process or the effectuation process: Instead their focus varies between the causation and effectuation processes during the course of the venture establishment phase. I have found four critical factors, which affect the direction towards the use of causation or effectuation; the prototype, new business opportunities, parallel processes and the team. My theoretical development is: that the focus of the founders and the team members varies between causation and effectuation, they also apply causation and effectuation in a parallel manner, and that diverging goals affect the direction towards effectuation. I follow eight new ventures in their establishment stage, by means of electronic diaries, in the “Venture Lab” incubator at Lund University. An electronic diary routine was developed during the study; this was a particularly useful method in attaining information on how the teams were making their decisions in real time. It was apparent however that in diary based research, our knowledge on how to use electronic systems and how to make these systems user-friendly is still limited. In this respect the electronic diary routine was developed together with three groups of new venture founders in the incubator. I received evaluations and experiences of user-friendliness in the use of the electronic diaries from these groups. And conclude that these experiences create conditions for a user-friendly diary, with reliable answers and can be reached through; personal meetings with the users throughout the study, the development of the diary questions with the users and treating the diaries confidentially.