The Role of Operations Management Across the Entrepreneurial Value Chain

Abstract

This special issue contains articles that exemplify the role of operations management across the entrepreneurial value chain. This value chain encompasses all stages of the entrepreneurial phenomenon, including technology commercialization, where discovery, commitment, organization, and growth must take place. We report on a literature search that identifies research questions categorized with respect to topics crucial to operations management scholars and classify these questions under each stage of this value chain. The search guides the development of an evolutionary path for the use of resources, routines, and reputation (3Rs), often lacking in this process, and enables us to propose modeling and topical gaps in the literature. We offer a framework to set up exemplars for operational tradeoffs uniquely associated with the entrepreneurial value chain. We also articulate how five contributed articles in this issue tackle some of these tradeoffs, prior to introducing four perspective pieces. We hope this discussion motivates follow-on work and triggers a significant increase in the flow of articles that make it to both entrepreneurship and operations management top-tier academic and practitioner publications.