New forms of organising innovation and entrepreneurship

In less than a decade, we have witnessed the global emergence of new forms of organising innovation and entrepreneurship. Some are designed to enable entrepreneurs to develop their venture ideas, such as co-working spaces while others focus on bringing together different stakeholders to facilitate innovation and entrepreneurship, such as crowdfunding platforms, social enterprises, and the sharing economy. Our research investigates a wide variety of new forms of organising, including academic entrepreneurship, corporate entrepreneurship, and digitally enabled organisations such as cryptocurrencies.

Sub-themes

Public science represents an important source of innovation for economies and societies. This research theme explores the various ways in which companies and other organisations link with universities and use public science to tackle technical challenges and develop new solutions. This includes, academic entrepreneurship (university spin-outs) and contract research, university-industry centres.

Entrepreneurial firms are widely seen as more flexible and agile than larger corporations. Increasingly, large organisations seek to learn from them and adopt practices more typically associated with entrepreneurial firms, such as lean experimentation. In our research we seek to understand what larger organisations can learn from their smaller counterparts and what challenges arise in adopting new practices.

Digital technology and digitalisation continue to transform our economy and society and have profound impact on how organisations work. In our research, we study how digital technologies enable new ways of organising. For example, our research explores how cryptocurrencies emerged and how technologies such as bitcoin have given way to new organisational forms, such as decentralised autonomous organisations.

It is increasingly common for entrepreneurial firms to pursue social objectives in addition to or instead of commercial ones. Meanwhile, large organisations increasingly see an important role for corporate social initiatives that may help contribute towards a better, fairer and more sustainable society. Our research investigates how firms – small or large – can effectively achieve social impact and the implications this may have for their employees and other stakeholders.