The History

While working on what became Davidsson (2015), Per thought the concept of “New Venture Ideas” was going to be his main preoccupation in the coming years. Instead, Frederik von Briel—who was then a post doc in Information Systems—approached him mid-2015 about a potential collaboration on a paper about the surge in IT hardware start-ups that he was working on with his then supervisor, Jan Recker. Frederik had just audited Per’s doctoral class on contemporary entrepreneurship research and there learnt about the EE construct, which he thought might help beef up the conference paper version they had produced so far. This was the start of a very fruitful and enjoyable collaboration during which we have time and again surprised ourselves with finding an ever-greater application domain and theory-building capacity for the EE concept than any of us had realized from start. So far, it has yielded von Briel, Davidsson and Recker (2018) and Davidsson, Recker and von Briel (2020; 2021; 2022) as well as a non-EE paper (von Briel, Recker & Davidsson, 2018) and more EE work underway.
The IT hardware paper (von Briel, Davidsson & Recker, 2018) developed EE scholarship in three important ways. First, it addresses combinations of enablers (six digital technologies). Second, it addresses spacing of enablement over time by detailing how these technologies variously facilitated all three stages (prospecting, developing, exploiting; see Bakker & Shepherd, 2017) of the venture creation process. It thereby yielded both functional and temporal insights into the limited capacity of a single change to provide sufficient enablement. Third, it introduced the notion of EE mechanisms to specify the benefits some ventures can derive from an EE, thereby contributing the first, important component of what was to become the EE framework (EEF). The focus on mechanisms arose out of Per’s inability of getting his head around the notions of ‘operand’ vs. ‘operant’ resources (see Nambisan, 2013) in the early conference paper. So, in an email he suggested some more direct approach to capturing cost savings, resource infusions, etc. Back from the co-authors came a neat package with six labelled and defined supply-side mechanisms anchored in Malone et al.’s (1999) notions of preserving, modifying, and creating: compression, conservation, (resource) expansion, (resource) substitution, generation, and combination, where the latter two sprung out of Frederik’s and Jan’s knowledge of technology and innovation with associated literatures. Analyzing how different technologies and different development stages related to enabling mechanisms turned out to be very fruitful way of deepening insights into the phenomenon we were theorizing.
The process and outcome of the IT hardware paper provided strong inspiration to elaborate ideas and reach an audience beyond what we could fit and expect from a special issue on “Industry-specific Determinants, Processes and Outcomes of Entrepreneurial Phenomena.”3 Titles (and contents) of early drafts show that this started as an offshoot closely linked to Davidsson (2015) and von Briel et al. (2018): “A Re-Conceptualization of Discovery Theory: From Opportunities to Enabling Mechanisms” and “A Re-Conceptualization of the Discovery Perspective in Entrepreneurship”. Eventually, this draft split into a sole-authored paper by Per aiming for the upcoming 2017 AoM Symposium on the alleged ‘opportunity wars’ in entrepreneurship and a broader, collaborative paper developing the EEF. Many of the components of the latter work—eventually published as Davidsson, Recker and von Briel, 2020—grew out of a short, creative spurt in late 2016 and/or early 2017 followed by very considerable massaging. Figure 1 provides a few glimpses into this process.
Lists of types of environmental change are commonplace, from Dutton et al.’s (1989) "External issues” to practitioner frameworks like SWOT and PESTLE to Shane’s (2012, p. 15) assertion that “I do not know of any entrepreneurship scholar who would argue that scientific advance, political and regulatory changes, and demographic and social shifts do not make it possible to introduce new and potential profitable resource combinations”. However, these listings of important types of change are not followed-up with detailed conceptualizations of their characteristics and processes of influence. To contribute something new we developed our EE characteristics. There was no direct, external influence feeding into this process. Instead, we developed the notions of EE scope and EE onset by pondering on “What type of strategically relevant variance applies to business-environmental changes ranging across the broad spectrum from new technology to regulatory, demographic and sociocultural shifts to changes of the natural environment?”

Clearly, the magnitude of changes must be strategically relevant. This led us to the notion of EE scope. Once we had decided on scope, distilling the spatial, sectoral, sociodemographic, and temporal subdimensions came rather naturally. Likewise, the suddenness and (un)predictability of how changes occur ought to influence what action might be successful as well as what agents would have the capacity to take that action. This led to the notion of EE onset.
We had already developed the notion of EE mechanisms in von Briel, Davidsson & Recker (2018) and just expanded the list with demand-side and value-appropriation related mechanisms. Prior studies of entrepreneurship in response to various business-environmental changes provided part of the inspiration for this (see Davidsson, Recker & von Briel, 2020, Table A1.1). Dual effects on supply and demand had been in the argument since the AoM version (see Table 1) while a “file drawer paper” from 2013 on “venture idea characteristics” suggests value appropriation (the enclosing mechanisms) was inspired by Amit and Zott (2001), Eckhardt and Shane (2003) and others.
While all the phenomena covered by the resulting list of EE mechanisms appear somewhere in past literature, we saw value in labeling, defining, and collecting them in one place. Further, the lack of recurring ‘opportunity characteristics’ with theorized effects in the literature on ‘opportunity identification/evaluation’ suggested a need for labels for the more specific potentials that makes something become widely perceived as an ‘opportunity’. Examples like Hiatt et al. (2009) clearly identifying instances of demand substitution and resource expansion while neither coining these terms nor highlighting the phenomena as relevant to many entrepreneurial processes beyond their empirical context strengthened our conviction that we were on a worthwhile mission in developing a library of EE mechanisms.

The properties of EE mechanism that agents must overcome in order to actualize them—their degree of opacity and agency-intensity—arose from adopting Ramoglou and Tsang’s (2016) reasoning about varying agency-intensity pertaining to instances of their notion of ‘entrepreneurial opportunities’ as real but unactualized, external phenomena.6 We split the original notion into a cognitive (opacity) and a behavioral (agency-intensity) dimension and applied these to comparatively concrete EE mechanisms rather than to “opportunities as unactualized propensities” (Ramoglou & Tsang, 2016, p. 410).
With statements like “a major role in triggering initiation or determining success” and “the role(s) of External Enablers across the venture creation process” Davidsson (2015, p. 689) hinted at EEs playing different roles at different stages of venture development. von Briel, Davidsson and Recker (2018) also refer to ‘triggering’—especially to emphasize the distinction between triggering and successful establishment and that enabling of the early stage of venture creation would have particularly strong effects on triggering.
However, neither paper coined ‘EE roles’ or used ‘triggering, shaping, and outcome-enhancement’ as defined, theoretical concepts. Instead, this became part of the development of the EE framework by Davidsson, Recker and von Briel (2020). In this development, the processual nature of the IT hardware theorizing we had just been through in von Briel, Davidsson and Recker (2018) likely inspired us to emphasize the distinction between triggering and outcome-enhancement and to develop the subdimensions of shaping that may occur in-between.

We submitted the completed EE framework paper to AMR, where it was rejected after review. In a way, this was a blessing in disguise because we could now submit our constructive and forward-looking EEF to the AMP Symposium issue rather than delivering yet another round of criticism of discovery- and creation-theorizing surrounding ‘entrepreneurial opportunities’.7 AMP was more appreciative of the kind of contribution we tried to achieve, and after revisions the paper was accepted mid-2018 and achieved final publication as Davidsson, Recker and von Briel (2020).