Entrepreneurial marketing (EM), born out of the practice of firms operating in conditions of uncertainty, is emerging as a powerful alternative to cope with the decreasing effectiveness associated with traditional marketing. In this article, the authors provide their collective position regarding the field of EM. A brief history and conceptual background of EM is presented and the contextual differences that have shaped its evolution are considered. Distinctions between traditional and EM are derived based on discussions of the concepts of size, speed, market, opportunity, risk, and uncertainty. The perspective of value co-creation in uncertainty is used to develop a contingency framework to serve as the foundation towards a general theory of EM. Operand and operant resources and environmental conditions are proposed to moderate the EM process from opportunity recognition to entrepreneurial organization, EM, and temporary competitive advantage. The theoretical facets are illustrated with seven propositions and directions for future research.

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Purpose – Very little is known about why, how and to what effect firms deviate from intended marketing plans. The aim of this paper is to extend the understanding of this phenomenon, post plan improvisation (PPI), and begin to identify and categorize such deviations along with their apparent causes and outcomes. Design/methodology/approach – Using the critical incident technique, 384 incidents of PPI were gathered and systematically classified from marketing planners (managers who use marketing planning software) on six different continents using an online survey. Findings – The principal contributions of this study are: the systematic development of a taxonomy for post-plan improvisations; the reported frequencies associated with those categories; and tentative findings regarding relationships between the causes, deviations, and success of PPI. Improvisations that were prompted by changes in external market factors were more likely to be judged by planners as having been successful than those made for reasons internal to the firm. The results also suggest that there exists an optimal level of PPI, that improvisations in pricing are likely to result from changes in the external macro environment, that improvisations in promotion are likely to be responses to competitors, and that managers who are less experienced at planning are less successful than experienced planners at improvisation. Originality/value – Due to the inherent unpredictability of improvisational decision making, few empirical studies have attempted to capture details regarding specific deviations from intended actions. This study is the first attempt to capture and categorize those data in order to allow for more meaningful future investigations.

Introduction to the special issue: the business model canvas and customer development A business model is a framework to assist in developing and communicating how an organization creates, delivers and captures value from customers. Osterwalder and Pigneur (2010) published the business model canvas (BMC or "canvas") to help organizations articulate their business model. The canvas evolved from the dissertation work done by Osterwalder (2004). The essence of his dissertation was to find commonalities across the disparate business models that had previously appeared in the literature. The BMC ultimately unites the fragmented business model literature using nine elements that appeared across the various models in the literature: customer segment, value proposition, customer relationships, channels, key activities, key resources, key partnerships, revenue streams and cost structure. The design of the canvas, with key partnerships on the left and customer segments on the right, follows Porter's (1985) value chain framework. While the BMC was initially developed primarily to help existing companies, it became rapidly (and almost rabidly) adopted by the entrepreneurship community. At the turn of the millennium, the prevailing concept of the new venture development process followed the traditional, large company, waterfall or Stage-Gate (Cooper, 1990) development process. It started with developing a product around an initial idea, conducting a feasibility analysis, writing a new venture business plan, raising capital to produce and promote the product and eventually launch. Marketing was a function that fully depended upon product development and, maybe, market research done toward the end of the business planning process. Outcomes of this process generally had a low chance of success. In the first decade of the 2000s, Blank (2005, 2013) challenged this existing dominant view, suggesting that it did not handle the high level of market uncertainty that exists in many new ventures, particularly in software and technology. Blank (2005) articulated a "customer development" process, which combines the new product development process and market/customer research. The customer development process (also known as Lean Startup) involves iterative, rather than sequential, product development and customer testing. Upon learning about Osterwalder's BMC, Blank and Dorf (2012) adopted it as the framework for organizing the customer development process. This customer development process involves back-and-forth interaction with prospective customers and other market participants. It seeks to iteratively test hypotheses about every aspect of the business model, beginning with understanding customer needs and testing potential product and service ideas to meet those needs, using prototypes or minimum viable products. Insights from these tests lead to reworking designs of these offerings, which are then subsequently retested. Thus, it is an iterative process of finding product-market fit. Why this special edition The efforts of Blank and D...