Articles - Innovation and Entrepreneurship
in Context
Article 1, week 36, lecture 1
Enterprising Identities: Female Entrepreneurs of Moroccan or Turkish
Origin in the Netherlands
Caroline Essers and Yvonne Benschop
Keywords: multiple identity, entrepreneurship, gender and ethnicity
This article is about 5 life stories of female entrepreneurs of Moroccan or
Turkish origin in the Netherlands.
Most entrepreneurs who feature in the mainstream literature are white
men. The writers believe there is a larger need for studies on female ethnic
minority entrepreneurs, a group that has been largely neglected.
The central question of this article is how female entrepreneurs of
Moroccan or Turkish origin construct their professional identities from two
cultural contexts in dialogue with relevant others. How do FEMTOs
construct their identities beyond the dichotomies and stereotypes such as
western-oriental, local-foreign and modern-traditional that are so often
used to pin them down? It is studied how the social categories of
entrepreneurship, gender and ethnicity are negotiated in the construction
of professional identities and how these identities are embedded in power
relations.
In the past the migration of Moroccan and Turkish people was called
creating a multicultural society. There used to be little room for criticism of
this multicultural ideal and the uttered critique was labelled as intolerant
and racist. However, this attitude changed dramatically because of political
and economic developments (assessing two prominent detractors of Islam
and an economic recession), which made it possible to publicly question
the desirability of immigration and Islamic culture.
Today ‘multicultural’ has been replaced by ‘integration’. White Dutch
people are represented as ‘autochtonen’, in opposition to ‘others’;
allochtonen. These developments have affected the position of Turks and
Moroccans in the Netherlands.
The idea of femininity highly depends on the ethnic identification.
Identities are socially negotiated and discursively produced in relation to
the tensions that exist between conceptions of gender and
entrepreneurship, and ethnicity and entrepreneurship. The authors discuss
how socialization, honor and shame, discrimination and the archetype of
the white male entrepreneur influence the construction of FEMTO’s
professional identities.
Methodology
Standpoint feminism and post-structuralist feminism
Exploratory study
- Literature study
- Internet search + contacted relevant networks
- Snowballing method was used
- 20 FEMTOs
- Stories of FEMTOs, they selected the stories of 5 narratives
,- Narratives were juxtaposed
- The researcher has influenced the stories of the FEMTOs
Participants needed to be woman of Turkish or Moroccan descent, own a
company without male involvement and be proficient in the Dutch
language.
Important question: what happens to professional identities when gender,
ethnicity and entrepreneurship come together?
Now the 5 stories of the narratives are told
1. Salima, 32 years old, Moroccan wedding planner
2. Melekka, 23 years old, veiled, Moroccan, sells clothes
3. Dürrin, 33 years old, Turkish, imports fashion clothes from Turkey
4. Gülin, 30 years old, Turkish hairdresser
5. Ayalya, 29 years old, Turkish and started a beauty center with her
sister
Dutch expect Moroccan woman to remain at home and to be subordinate
to their husbands. The FEMTOs express that their capabilities to run a
company are questioned and that they are not accepted by their ethnic
communities as reliant and capable persons because they are female.
The concept ‘honor and shame’ means that for example a Turkish
hairdresser is fine when cutting Dutch men or women. However, when a
Turkish man enters the salon it becomes difficult since in this culture men
and women are not supposed to interact in a public environment. The
hairdresser will not want to put a shame on her family and herself. So,
honor and shame influence the image the FEMTOs have of themselves as
female entrepreneurs.
The interviewed FEMTOs mentioned that doing business from 2 cultural
contexts has the advantage of being able to take the ‘best parts’ out of
both cultures and transform it into something new and useful. They
manoeuvre themselves and their businesses between the prejudices of the
Dutch and the restrictions of migrant communities.
3 different strategies
1. Staying within the gendered limits prescribed by ethnic
communities. working only with women, wearing a veil, etc.
2. To cross the lines for Turks and Moroccans, and for females to
identify with entrepreneurship
3. A development of hybrid ethnic identities and a reshaping of gender
identities that leads to a break with the ethnocentrically and
gendered entrepreneurship discourse when women claim honor.
Samenvattend:
Turkse en Marokkaanse vrouwen worden niet gezien als multicultureel
maar als integratie. Echter kunnen ze wel meer zichzelf zijn als vrouwelijke
ondernemer in Nederland dan ten opzichte van hun eigen cultuur.
Hitherto = tot nu toe
,Article 2, week 36
Entrepreneurial and innovative competences, are they the same?
Crisitna Santandreu-Mascarell and Dolores Garzon
This paper studies the differences between competencies of employees in
innovative companies and entrepreneurs.
Entrepreneurship: a process of creating new and valuable things
Entrepreneurial innovation: the willingness to support creativity and
experimentation in introducing new products/services and novelty, during
the process to bring inventions to market.
Why do certain organizations seem to be more successful than others in
innovation? the attitude of the entrepreneur determines these results.
It has been found that high complexity in the professional training of
employees in an organization and the high concentration of talent and
expertise often yields the most radical innovations.
There are a number of key personal entrepreneurial competences that
distinguish successful people from those that do not achieve success
easily. These 30 competences can be grouped into 10 PECs
1. Opportunity seeking and initiative
2. Risk taking
3. Demand for efficiency and quality
4. Persistence
5. Commitment to the work contract
6. Information seeking
7. Goal setting
8. Systematic planning and monitoring
9. Persuasion and networking
10.Independence and self-confidence
These competences are clustered into three main groups: achievement, planning
and power.
Methodology
- Grounded
theory
Figure 3 of the
article (figure
below) shows
that there are
overlapping
, characteristics as well as non-overlapping characteristics between innovative
organizations and entrepreneurs.
Article 1, week 37, lecture 2
Networking by Entrepreneurs: Patterns of Tie-Formation in Emerging
Organizations
Tom Elfring and Willem Hulsink
Keywords: start-up firms, networks, entrepreneurial processes, IT industry, spin-
off, incubator
Network ties enhance the ability of entrepreneurs in key entrepreneurial
processes, such as spotting opportunities, acquiring resources and gaining
legitimacy.
What drives entrepreneurs to establish and deepen some relationships and not
others, and how do they manage their mix of weak and strong ties?
Personal networks develop over time and in this article, they are interested to
see how these relationships change over time and for what reasons.
They distinguish the following categories:
1. independent start-ups. This category includes companies that are founded
by entrepreneurs who are relative outsiders to the industry.
2. (2) spin-offs. This category consists of start-ups that are based on ideas
and knowledge from insiders; the founders were employees in an
established firm or research institute within the industry.
3. (3) incubator-driven companies. This category is created, founded and
built within an incubator and consists of founders who are ‘indirect’
insiders in that they profit from the incubator’s network ties in the
industry.
Next, they distinguish radical and incremental innovations.
Radical innovations are associated with exploration and competence destruction.
Incremental innovations are far less disruptive and have to do with exploitation
and competence-enhancing measures.
Results
in Context
Article 1, week 36, lecture 1
Enterprising Identities: Female Entrepreneurs of Moroccan or Turkish
Origin in the Netherlands
Caroline Essers and Yvonne Benschop
Keywords: multiple identity, entrepreneurship, gender and ethnicity
This article is about 5 life stories of female entrepreneurs of Moroccan or
Turkish origin in the Netherlands.
Most entrepreneurs who feature in the mainstream literature are white
men. The writers believe there is a larger need for studies on female ethnic
minority entrepreneurs, a group that has been largely neglected.
The central question of this article is how female entrepreneurs of
Moroccan or Turkish origin construct their professional identities from two
cultural contexts in dialogue with relevant others. How do FEMTOs
construct their identities beyond the dichotomies and stereotypes such as
western-oriental, local-foreign and modern-traditional that are so often
used to pin them down? It is studied how the social categories of
entrepreneurship, gender and ethnicity are negotiated in the construction
of professional identities and how these identities are embedded in power
relations.
In the past the migration of Moroccan and Turkish people was called
creating a multicultural society. There used to be little room for criticism of
this multicultural ideal and the uttered critique was labelled as intolerant
and racist. However, this attitude changed dramatically because of political
and economic developments (assessing two prominent detractors of Islam
and an economic recession), which made it possible to publicly question
the desirability of immigration and Islamic culture.
Today ‘multicultural’ has been replaced by ‘integration’. White Dutch
people are represented as ‘autochtonen’, in opposition to ‘others’;
allochtonen. These developments have affected the position of Turks and
Moroccans in the Netherlands.
The idea of femininity highly depends on the ethnic identification.
Identities are socially negotiated and discursively produced in relation to
the tensions that exist between conceptions of gender and
entrepreneurship, and ethnicity and entrepreneurship. The authors discuss
how socialization, honor and shame, discrimination and the archetype of
the white male entrepreneur influence the construction of FEMTO’s
professional identities.
Methodology
Standpoint feminism and post-structuralist feminism
Exploratory study
- Literature study
- Internet search + contacted relevant networks
- Snowballing method was used
- 20 FEMTOs
- Stories of FEMTOs, they selected the stories of 5 narratives
,- Narratives were juxtaposed
- The researcher has influenced the stories of the FEMTOs
Participants needed to be woman of Turkish or Moroccan descent, own a
company without male involvement and be proficient in the Dutch
language.
Important question: what happens to professional identities when gender,
ethnicity and entrepreneurship come together?
Now the 5 stories of the narratives are told
1. Salima, 32 years old, Moroccan wedding planner
2. Melekka, 23 years old, veiled, Moroccan, sells clothes
3. Dürrin, 33 years old, Turkish, imports fashion clothes from Turkey
4. Gülin, 30 years old, Turkish hairdresser
5. Ayalya, 29 years old, Turkish and started a beauty center with her
sister
Dutch expect Moroccan woman to remain at home and to be subordinate
to their husbands. The FEMTOs express that their capabilities to run a
company are questioned and that they are not accepted by their ethnic
communities as reliant and capable persons because they are female.
The concept ‘honor and shame’ means that for example a Turkish
hairdresser is fine when cutting Dutch men or women. However, when a
Turkish man enters the salon it becomes difficult since in this culture men
and women are not supposed to interact in a public environment. The
hairdresser will not want to put a shame on her family and herself. So,
honor and shame influence the image the FEMTOs have of themselves as
female entrepreneurs.
The interviewed FEMTOs mentioned that doing business from 2 cultural
contexts has the advantage of being able to take the ‘best parts’ out of
both cultures and transform it into something new and useful. They
manoeuvre themselves and their businesses between the prejudices of the
Dutch and the restrictions of migrant communities.
3 different strategies
1. Staying within the gendered limits prescribed by ethnic
communities. working only with women, wearing a veil, etc.
2. To cross the lines for Turks and Moroccans, and for females to
identify with entrepreneurship
3. A development of hybrid ethnic identities and a reshaping of gender
identities that leads to a break with the ethnocentrically and
gendered entrepreneurship discourse when women claim honor.
Samenvattend:
Turkse en Marokkaanse vrouwen worden niet gezien als multicultureel
maar als integratie. Echter kunnen ze wel meer zichzelf zijn als vrouwelijke
ondernemer in Nederland dan ten opzichte van hun eigen cultuur.
Hitherto = tot nu toe
,Article 2, week 36
Entrepreneurial and innovative competences, are they the same?
Crisitna Santandreu-Mascarell and Dolores Garzon
This paper studies the differences between competencies of employees in
innovative companies and entrepreneurs.
Entrepreneurship: a process of creating new and valuable things
Entrepreneurial innovation: the willingness to support creativity and
experimentation in introducing new products/services and novelty, during
the process to bring inventions to market.
Why do certain organizations seem to be more successful than others in
innovation? the attitude of the entrepreneur determines these results.
It has been found that high complexity in the professional training of
employees in an organization and the high concentration of talent and
expertise often yields the most radical innovations.
There are a number of key personal entrepreneurial competences that
distinguish successful people from those that do not achieve success
easily. These 30 competences can be grouped into 10 PECs
1. Opportunity seeking and initiative
2. Risk taking
3. Demand for efficiency and quality
4. Persistence
5. Commitment to the work contract
6. Information seeking
7. Goal setting
8. Systematic planning and monitoring
9. Persuasion and networking
10.Independence and self-confidence
These competences are clustered into three main groups: achievement, planning
and power.
Methodology
- Grounded
theory
Figure 3 of the
article (figure
below) shows
that there are
overlapping
, characteristics as well as non-overlapping characteristics between innovative
organizations and entrepreneurs.
Article 1, week 37, lecture 2
Networking by Entrepreneurs: Patterns of Tie-Formation in Emerging
Organizations
Tom Elfring and Willem Hulsink
Keywords: start-up firms, networks, entrepreneurial processes, IT industry, spin-
off, incubator
Network ties enhance the ability of entrepreneurs in key entrepreneurial
processes, such as spotting opportunities, acquiring resources and gaining
legitimacy.
What drives entrepreneurs to establish and deepen some relationships and not
others, and how do they manage their mix of weak and strong ties?
Personal networks develop over time and in this article, they are interested to
see how these relationships change over time and for what reasons.
They distinguish the following categories:
1. independent start-ups. This category includes companies that are founded
by entrepreneurs who are relative outsiders to the industry.
2. (2) spin-offs. This category consists of start-ups that are based on ideas
and knowledge from insiders; the founders were employees in an
established firm or research institute within the industry.
3. (3) incubator-driven companies. This category is created, founded and
built within an incubator and consists of founders who are ‘indirect’
insiders in that they profit from the incubator’s network ties in the
industry.
Next, they distinguish radical and incremental innovations.
Radical innovations are associated with exploration and competence destruction.
Incremental innovations are far less disruptive and have to do with exploitation
and competence-enhancing measures.
Results
