Entrepreneurial Formulas. Business Plans and the Formation of New Ventures

• In Event: 511 - Section on Science, Knowledge, and Technology Paper Session. Topics in Science, Knowledge and Technology Studies

Abstract

This paper contributes to the understanding of what it means to generate new business entities, i.e. to populate markets and the economy with new ventures. It does so by empirically analyzing the constitutive roles of business plans, based on the telling cases of three French academic spin-offs. The way new firms are formulated within business plans – and eventually formed based on them – is studied. ‘Entrepreneurial formulas’ are defined as the results of the combination activity undertaken by the entrepreneur within the plan. They are ‘small forms’, which represent the proposed firm in a dense, synthetic way, thus making it conceivable as a bounded whole. Four different kinds of such formulas are identified: there is a literary formula (the statement of the business model), a chemical one (the compound of elementary resources), a financial one (the financial tables) and a magical formula (the transformation of the plan into binding contracts). The paper thus demonstrates that there is no new business without the simultaneous economizing, organizing, financializing and realizing of a sparse set of resources. This approach refreshes the study of entrepreneurship by focusing on entrepreneurial work, methods and tools. It also constitutes a careful development in the analysis of the constitutive power of accounting technologies. Finally, it reveals the multiple facets that must be combined to make up business entities, and to thus sustain economic life.

Authors

• Martin Giraudeau, London School of Economics and Political Science

• Liliana Doganova, Mines ParisTech