A Proposal for a Standard With Innovation Management System

Carolyn Downs Lambros Lazuras and Panayiotis Ketikidis
3.1 ELIE taxonomy of international entrepreneurship
There is a significant body of literature that has worked on identifying common features of
entrepreneurship. In aiming to develop materials that support entrepreneurship and international
entrepreneurship in particular a means of collating the extensive material provided by our participating
entrepreneurs was essential. It was therefore logical to look at existing taxonomies of
entrepreneurship and to attempt to apply these to our findings.
Taxonomies for entrepreneurship are a feature of work by Scheinberg and MacMillan (1988) Dubini
(1988) Blais and Toulouse (1990) Birley and Westhead (1994) Manimala (1996) amongst others.
However, there were some difficulties in applying existing taxonomies to the ELIE project.
Taxonomies concerned with motivations for business start up tended to have a minimum of seven
characteristics (see for example Scheinberg and MacMillan, 1988 and Birley and Westhead, 1994),
many of which were not evidenced as discrete motivations in our qualitative findings amongst a
relatively large sample of 198 interviews. Intentions for entrepreneurship are in integral part of models
of entrepreneurial behaviour (Linan and Chen, 2009) and provide the background to taxonomies of
entrepreneurship, as well as often being used as a useful indicator of likelihood of success for
initiatives to encourage enterprise.
In general the development of entrepreneurial intentions is seen as a two-stage process wherein
social norms and values encourage an individual onto a career path, followed by personal experience
inclining an individual to believe they can be successful and apply their skills in alternative settings.
The intention model of entrepreneurship supported by the work of Peterman and Kennedy, (2003)
Zhao et al. 2005 and others focuses on the desire to become an entrepreneur and belief that they can
succeed as an entrepreneur, also known as self-efficacy. This model of entrepreneurship is clearly
important and is based upon many studies (e.g., Wilson, Kickul, and Marlino, 2007; Zhao et al., 2005),
but for the ELIE project it was critical that our learning materials reflected the lived experience of our
target groups and this required a model that acknowledged complex, diverse and multi-faceted
motivations for enterprise, and reflected on the impact motivations might have on the way in which an
enterprise was then structured and developed. In many respects though, several of the categories
proposed by other academics (such as Scheinberg and MacMillan’s “Need for Independence,” “Need
for Personal Development,” and “Welfare Considerations,”) are subsumed within the work-life balance
route that we have used as one of our categories.
There were similar problems with existing taxonomies of entrepreneurial type. One interesting
example is the excellent work of Manimala (1996). He divided entrepreneurs into two groups; high
and low innovation with a total of thirteen sub-types between groups; concluding that the over-arching
similarity between all subtypes and groups was that all entrepreneurs were innovators; albeit with
some innovating considerably more than others. The sub-types identified by Manimala are useful in
thinking about all entrepreneurs and could have formed the basis for an analysis of the international
entrepreneurs within the ELIE project but it was felt that the thrust of Manimala’s taxonomy was too
generic for some of the patterns of entrepreneurship that were found to be common across the four
countries of ELIE and also that many of the ELIE entrepreneurs would fall into the ‘non-pioneer nicheholder’
category and that this would not do justice to their diversity and difference of experience.
Furthermore, the existing taxonomies of entrepreneurship did not take account of how motivations
impacted on the ways in which entrepreneurs then managed and developed their businesses or of
how adaptation to the role of entrepreneur could impact on style of entrepreneurship, or how support
or encouragement from formal or informal sources could help the new entrepreneur develop their
attitudes and understandings of enterprise in the context of their business.
The findings of the ELIE project concur with the observation of Lafuente and Salas (1989) that;
‘Personal characteristics of entrepreneurs, and especially their motivations and work experiences, are
therefore relevant factors in the study of entrepreneurship’ (Lafuente and Salas 1989: 18). The
personal and life experiences of the ELIE entrepreneurs were a significant feature in how their
intentions for entrepreneurship were initiated and developed, were translated into action and were
established. The ways in which entrepreneurship tended to develop amongst the ELIE interviewees
were not well served by the majority of categories of entrepreneurship developed in more general
settings and with smaller qualitative samples or solely using quantitative data. The interviewing stage
of the ELIE project uncovered clear trends in the entrepreneurial life-courses of participants that have
enabled five routes into entrepreneurship and distinct categories of international entrepreneurship to
be developed. Some of these categories are also clearly applicable across entrepreneurship more
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