Books
Brad Feld, Start-Up Boards: Reinventing the Board of Directors to Better Support the Entrepreneur (2013).
Abstract (adapted from publisher): Founders and entrepreneurs have a lot on their plate—getting to the minimum viable product, developing customer interaction, hiring team members, and managing the accounts/books. Sooner or later, you have a board of directors, three to five (or even seven) Type A personalities who seek your attention and at times will tell you what to do. While you might be hesitant to form a board, establishing an objective outside group is essential for startups, especially to keep you on track, call you out when you flail, and in some cases, save you from yourself. In Startup Boards, Brad Feld—a Boulder, Colorado-based entrepreneur turned-venture capitalist—shares his experience in this area by talking about the importance of having the right board members on your team and how to manage them well. Along the way, he shares valuable insights on various aspects of the board, including how they can support you, help
Nicolai J. Foss et al., Entrepreneurship and the Economics of the Firm in Handbook of Organizational Entrepreneurship (Daniel Hjorth ed., 2011), available at http://ssrn.com/abstract=1747710.
Abstract (from author): The study of entrepreneurship and the study of economic organizing lack contact. In fact, the modern theory of the firm virtually ignores entrepreneurship, while the literature on entrepreneurship often sees little value in the economic theory of the firm. In contrast, the authors argue in this chapter that entrepreneurship theory and the theory of the firm can be usefully integrated, and that doing so would improve both bodies of theory. Adding the entrepreneur to the theory of the firm provides a dynamic view that the overly static analysis of firm organizing cannot support. Moreover, adding the firm to the study of the entrepreneur provides important clues to how one can understand entrepreneurship.
Nicolai J. Foss & Peter G. Klein, Organizing Entrepreneurial Judgment: A New Approach to the Firm (2012).
Abstract (adapted from publisher): Entrepreneurship, long neglected by economists and management scholars, has made a dramatic comeback in the last two decades, not only among academic economists and management scholars, but also among policymakers, educators and practitioners. Likewise, the economic theory of the firm, building on Ronald Coase's (1937) seminal analysis, has become an increasingly important field in economics and management. Despite this resurgence, there is still little connection between the entrepreneurship literature and the literature on the firm, both in academia and in management practice. This book fills this gap by proposing and developing an entrepreneurial theory of the firm that focuses on the connections between entrepreneurship and management. Drawing on insights from Austrian economics, it describes entrepreneurship as judgmental decision made under uncertainty, showing how judgment is the driving force of the market economy and the key to understanding firm performance and organization.
Gerard George & Adam J Bock, Models of Opportunity: How Entrepreneurs Design Firms to Achieve the Unexpected (2012).
Abstract (adapted from publisher): Entrepreneurship is changing. Technology and social networks create a smaller world, but widen the opportunity horizon. Today's entrepreneurs build organisations and create value in entirely new ways and with entirely new tools. Rather than just exploit new ideas, innovative entrepreneurs design organisations to make sense of unlikely opportunities. The time has come to overhaul what is known about entrepreneurship and business models. Models of Opportunity links scholarly research on business models and organisational design to the reality of building entrepreneurial firms. It provides actionable advice based on a deeper understanding of how business models function and change. The six insights extend corporate strategy and entrepreneurship in a completely new direction. Case studies of innovative companies across industries demonstrate how visionary entrepreneurs achieve unexpected results. The insights, tools and cases, provide a fresh perspective on emerging trends in entrepreneurship, organisational change and high-growth firms.
Robert Hisrich, Michael Peters & Dean Sheperd, Entrepreneurship (9th ed. 2012)
Abstract (from publisher): The 9th Edition of Entrepreneurship, by Robert Hisrich, Michael Peters and Dean Shepherd has been designed to clearly instruct students on the process of formulating, planning, and implementing a new venture. Students are exposed to detailed descriptions of ‘how to’ embark on a new venture in a logical manner. Comprehensive cases at the end of the text have been hand-picked by the authors to go hand-in-hand with chapter concepts.
The superb author team of Hisrich, Peters, and Shepherd draw from their distinct backgrounds to create a book that addresses the dynamics of today’s entrepreneurial challenges. From Bob Hisrich’s expertise in global entrepreneurship to Mike Peter’s background as a both a real-life entrepreneur and academic to Dean Shepherd’s current research on cognition and entrepreneurial mindset, this book balances the crucial line between modern theory and practice.
Daniel Hjorth, ENTREPRENEURSHIP AND ORGANIZATION: POLITICS, PASSION, AND CREATION (2010).
Product Description (from Amazon): Working from a unique standpoint and challenging the orthodoxy on entrepreneurship this book explores the possibilities of entrepreneurship in organizations and entrepreneurship in organization creation whilst re-anchoring entrepreneurship within a broader disciplinary approach.
Daniel Hjorth, Rewriting Entrepreneurship: For a New Perspective on Organisational Creativity (2003).
Abstract (from Amazon Product Description): During the 1990s in particular entrepreneurship emerged as a hot topic. Entrepreneurship has now become more central, natural and, not the least, managerially correct and legitimised. Daniel Hjorth argues that the entrepreneurial qualities of entrepreneurship do not survive the managerialisation that takes place in enterprise discourse. Hjorth shows us that entrepreneurship is reserved a specific place predominantly by management thinking, and that management has come to exhaust the official imagination of what entrepreneurship can be. A rewriting is suggested. Opening up to influences from philosophy, literature and cultural studies, Hjorth takes us to an alternative way of thinking and thus practicing entrepreneurship. Through this rewriting our engagement with entrepreneurship is intensified as entrepreneurship becomes entrepreneurial.
Ivan Pongracic, Jr., EMPLOYEES AND ENTREPRENEURSHIP: CO-ORDINATION AND SPONTANEITY IN NON-HIERARCHAL BUSINESS ORGANIZATIONS (2009).
Product Description (from Amazon): Over the last few decades, there has been a great deal of management literature recommending the removal of firms' hierarchies and the empowerment of employees. The decentralization of decision-making and flattening of managerial hierarchies within business firms can best be understood as a response to situations where employees hold knowledge that is superior to that held by firms' owners and managers. Decentralizing decision-making in those circumstances allows firms to utilize their employees' superior personal knowledge, often by encouraging them to act in creative, entrepreneurial ways, while requiring some reliance on intra-firm spontaneous order processes to co-ordinate the activities of the employees.
Ivan Pongracic, Jr., Entrepreneurship and Flattening of Hierarchical Structures Within Business Organizations (2004).
Abstract (from author): This resource examines the implications of the intra-firm Hayekian knowledge problem to the firms' internal administrative and managerial structures. My thesis is that decentralization of decision-making within firms is a response to the situation where employees hold economic knowledge superior to that held by the managers. Allowing employees to make their own decisions on how to use the resources of the firm by removing much of the hierarchical managerial structure gives the employees scope for entrepreneurial action and enables firms to utilize their employees' personal knowledge. This intra-firm decentralization and hierarchical flattening can work when employees are not motivated strictly by pecuniary interests. The more complex motivations can reduce the moral hazard problem in firms emphasized by much of New Institutional Economics. In addition, firms with decentralized decision-making rely on some form of intra-firm spontaneous order to coordinate the activities of their employees. The employees' mutual orientation is made possible by the firms' adoption of rules that facilitate an emergence of an organizational culture consisting of a shared set of intersubjective meanings. These elements of decentralized firms exist to a more limited extent in even the most hierarchical of firms, and therefore my analysis adds an important and heretofore overlooked component to the general theory of the firm.