Theresa K. Lant

Entrepreneurial Storytelling, Future Expectations, and the Paradox of Legitimacy

Prior research highlights storytelling as a means for entrepreneurs to establish venture legitimacy and gain stakeholder support. We extend this line of research by examining the role that projective stories play in setting expectations and the dynamics that ensue. Such attention highlights a paradox-the very expectations that are set through projective stories to gain venture legitimacy can also serve as the source of future disappointments. Because of inherent uncertainties that projective stories mask, ventures will likely deviate from their early projections, thereby disappointing stakeholders. This, in turn, can result in a loss of legitimacy. Recognizing that entrepreneurship is an ongoing process, we examine the constraints and possibilities of maintaining or regaining legitimacy through revised storytelling. We conclude the paper with implications for research on entrepreneurial storytelling as an ongoing process.

Facilitating Innovation in Diverse Science Teams Through Integrative Capacity

Knowledge integration in diverse teams depends on their integrative capacity—the social and cognitive processes, along with emergent states, that shape a team’s ability to combine diverse knowledge. We argue that integrative capacity represents the potential that a team has to overcome various compositional, team, and contextual barriers to generating integrated and novel knowledge. This article focuses specifically on the unique challenges facing diverse science teams that have the goal of generating novel knowledge at the intersection of disciplinary, practice, and organizational boundaries. The integrative capacity of a science team is argued to help facilitate the social and cognitive integration processes necessary for effective team processes that enhance the likelihood of innovative team outcomes. Implications of our theoretical framework for practice and research on fostering innovation in diverse science teams are discussed.

To join or not to join: an investigation of individual facilitators and inhibitors of medical faculty participation in interdisciplinary research teams.

Interdisciplinary research (IDR) teams are an important mechanism for facilitating medical breakthroughs. This study investigates the role of individual-level predictors of the choice to join a new IDR team at a major medical institution. We collected survey data from a sample of 233 faculty members who were given the opportunity to participate in IDR teams that had recently formed around a wide range of medical topic areas. Our results suggest that even under supportive organizational conditions, some medical experts were more likely to participate than others. Specifically, basic and translational researchers, associate professors, and faculty with distinctive topic area expertise and with more experience collaborating across departmental boundaries participated at a greater rate than their peers. Our findings have implications for research, practice, and policy focused on overcoming the challenges of drawing together diverse medical experts into IDR teams with the potential to advance knowledge to prevent, cure, and treat complex medical conditions.

Generative imitation, strategic distancing and optimal distinctiveness during the growth, decline and stabilization of Silicon Alley

Abstract We embrace a cultural perspective on entrepreneurship to examine the performative relationship between entrepreneurial narratives and the field discourse that unfolded during the emergence of the ‘new media’ field in New York city that came to be known as ‘Silicon Alley’. During growth, the accumulation of projective entrepreneurial narratives generated a field discourse from which entrepreneurs drew. However, because of the hype generated and the implementation challenges encountered by the ventures, the expectations set by the entrepreneurs remained unrealized, thereby leading to failures. The loss of legitimacy that accrued to these ventures spread to others through the cultural symbols shared by the ventures, which led to the collapse of the field. Opportunities based on cultural symbols considered valuable during early stages now became worthless. The Silicon Alley field eventually stabilized as entrepreneurs offered revised narratives to generate renewed growth. Based on these dynamics, we introduce generative imitation and strategic distancing as narrative-discursive possibilities to complement the notion of optimal distinctiveness. We propose that optimal distinctiveness best describes narrative-discursive possibilities and efforts when fields have stabilized, whereas generative imitation and strategic distancing better describe possibilities and efforts during growth and decline periods respectively.