Environmental change, strategic entrepreneurial action, and success: Introduction to a special issue on an important, neglected topic

Abstract

The two premises that underpin this SEJ Special Issue on Environmental Change, Strategic Entrepreneurial Action, and Success are that all environmental changes provide positive potentials for some ventures, and that this has been under-emphasized in past theory and research. After stating these premises and illustrating how present research treats the environment, we proceed to explain how the five articles selected for the special issue advance our thinking in this domain. We then broaden our discussion to how future entrepreneurship research can make further progress by studying interaction among environmental changes as well as their links to entrepreneurial agents, contexts (sectoral, spatial, organizational, etc.) and the entrepreneurial artifact (emerging venture). Throughout, the focus is on the enabling rather than constraining role of environmental changes.