Order creating processes in entrepreneurial practice

This paper sets out a theoretical perspective for understanding the emergence of innovations across multiple hierarchical levels, namely, the innovator, the organisation and the industry network. The perspective is emergentist, drawing on complexity theory, and considers innovation as the outcome of entrepreneurial activities resulting in new products and new business models. Such innovations emerge in response to entrepreneurial processes, where new ideas or inventions develop technological, market and organisational legitimacy as they become accepted and bound into surrounding social structures. Innovations are considered not as discrete entities, but as regularities, or repeating patterns of practice that emerge across the interlinked hierarchical levels, in turn reconstituting the levels over time. The theoretical development is grounded in the analysis of two case studies: firstly, the emergence of a new business model in an entrepreneurial enterprise, and secondly, the emergence of a new product through a start-up venture. Four general social interaction processes are identified that operate across the multiple hierarchical levels producing systemic foresight, that is, pre-regularity practice with the potential to produce sustained innovation.