Microfoundations of Collaboration in Entrepreneurship

Abstract

This chapter illustrates a multilevel framework to understand the microfoundations of collaboration in entrepreneurship. Early scholars saw the identification and exploitation of entrepreneurial opportunities as an individual endeavor. More recently, researchers started to examine entrepreneurial action as resulting from the collaboration among individuals within a collective such as a nation, an industry, an entrepreneurial ecosystem, a family, a new venture, or an existing company. In this movement toward the identification of higher levels of analysis, the power of macro-level factors tended to prevail in explaining entrepreneurial phenomena. As a result, important details of how individual entrepreneurs and their interactions with other agents shape the emergence of entrepreneurial phenomena are lost. To redress this imbalance, three multilevel mechanisms are introduced to explain the microfoundations of the role collaboration plays in the development of entrepreneurial opportunities. The role of collaboration in each of these mechanisms is illustrated by providing a review of existing studies and detailed directions for future research.