Entreprenörskapets Vidunderliga Resa - Remneland, Björn

manufacture heroic, role-modeling entrepreneurs and fuel dreams of glory
for many men and woman wishing to take on the conquest of the seemingly
endless Internet opportunities. The tales are easily sold and their audiences
are increasing daily. Finding the golden key for entrepreneurial success is
highly treasured, which is why it is understandable that both academic literature
and popular culture often wish to give guidance in how entrepreneurship
should or must be carried out.
The aim of the dissertation
Therefore, if web-based platforms for knowledge exchange are increasingly
used for building relationships between companies as well as individuals,
then how do they come to life? The analysis about formation and application
of these collaborative ventures often takes a retrospective approach, meaning
that established examples are being evaluated after their success has already
been accomplished. When seduced by this alluring temptation, neat historical
accounts can be produced with comprehensible maps of major turning
points and aggregated common “success factors”. But do stories like these
really tell what actually happens, or do they rather bring forward an idealizing
myth of the process? This dissertation will present the development of
two separate web platforms which were closely followed over a period of
almost three years. The study starts at a time when ideas are still vague and
unstructured, before they have been stabilized and materialized, and joins
their journey toward the – hopefully prosperous – future.
The research question is; How do entrepreneurial processes emerge from
ideas to realization?
Longitudinal studies have the ability to mediate between the past and the
future (Pettigrew, 1990) and perhaps reduce the mystic surrounding the innovation
process. The wish is to describe what, how and why entrepreneurs
act as they do and what the resulting consequences are for their actions, by
following them over a long period of time through ongoing interviews. The
aim is also to contribute to the emerging perspective which views entrepreneurship
as a process of “becoming” rather than “being”, putting language
at the center of attention for describing and understanding everyday entrepreneurial
practice over time. Bruno Latour argues for studying science and
technology “through the back door of science in the making, not through the
more grandiose entrance of ready made science” (Latour, 1987:4). Bijker
and Law put it thus; “They might have been otherwise: this is the key to our
interest and concern with technologies” (Bijker & Law, 1992:3). If one
looses sight of this then not only does the risk of hindsight bias become ap-
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