Musings on Entrepreneurship and Innovation
Thursday, February 12, 2004Dynamic Entrepreneurial Networks: Beyond Stone Soup
The research of Erik Pages and others have underscored the compelling link between the presence of effective expertise networks and a community’s entrepreneurial success. In fact, the Lowe Foundation has made the design and support of entrepreneurial roundtables the focus of their efforts. Indeed, the facilitation of peer learning has been a big part of my work over the last couple of years. There is little doubt in my mind that one of the best thing that entrepreneurial support organizations (ESOs) can do to raise the general level of entrepreneurial knowledge in their communities is to facilitate effective experience exchanges in order to catalyze vicarious learning through purposeful conversation.
However, the creation of mentoring programs and peer forums shouldn’t be a fire-and-forget proposition. My experience with both technology-facilitated and face-to-face forums is that the needs of entrepreneurs evolve, so the design of entrepreneurial networks must be similarly dynamic. Furthermore, there can be a tendency for networks to “lock in.” That is, once reasonably good local resources – measured along the dimensions of geographic proximity and occupational similarity – are identified, we tend to keep going back to those folks for advice. Although efficient, it’s not optimal. After all, even our smartest colleagues don’t know everything about a topic as complex as entrepreneurial business.
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Geography, Technology, and Entrepreneurial Learning
Our social networks may, indeed, be searchable in the sense that we are connected by a relatively small number of social links. Nevertheless, the acts of identifying and engaging peers and other sources of entrepreneurial expertise in conversations that translate into learning depend upon one’s recognition of a knowledge gap, the perceived value of that knowledge, and the prospective respondent's incentives. Notwithstanding advances in communications and information technologies, social search strategies and response has a lot to do with perceived social distance and that, it seems, is still largely a function of geographic proximity and occupational affinity. Information technology offers underutilized potential, but for now its primary value seems to lie in facilitating conversations among people who already know each other and, to a lesser degree, longer range searches for sources of highly valued expertise.
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