Patterns of Project-Based Organizing in New Venture Creation : Projectification of an Entrepreneurial Ecosystem

The creation of a new venture is at the heart of entrepreneurship and shares parallels with project-based organizing: embedded in an institutional context, founders have to assemble a team that works on specified tasks within a strict time-constraint, while the new venture undergoes various transitions. Based upon a case study of the Berlin start-up ecosystem, we reveal that – shaped by their institutional context – patterns of project-like organizing have become pertinent to the new venture creation process. We identify a set of facets from the entrepreneurial ecosystems – more specifically different types of organizational actors, their occupational backgrounds and epistemic communities – that enable and constrain the process of new venture creation in a way that is typical for project-based organizing. We thus elaborate on how institutional settings enforce what has been called ‘projectification' in the process of new venture creation and discuss implications for start-up ecosystems