Drifts of support systems on entrepreneurial decision making and risk taking : reflections for research and practice
This article questions the role of entrepreneurial support systems from a thorough examination of decision making and risk taking in entrepreneurship. Adopting a pragmatic and abductive approach based both on our experience in coaching entrepreneurs and an in-depth articulation of three distinct theoretical corpuses, we present a dynamic view of the business creation process in which a mentored entrepreneur must make decisions under risk and uncertainty, within the boundaries of her rationality. The decisions and resulting actions have consequences that can be unpredictable and unintentional, but that will still impact the dialogic entrepreneur/project, project/mentor, and entrepreneur/mentor. From this perspective we discuss three possible drifts of support systems on entrepreneurial decision making and risk taking : retreat to the mentor’s expertise, submission to the constraints imposed by the support systems even at the expense of the project and the entrepreneur, as well as a possible temporal alteration of the entrepreneurial process. We conclude by suggesting some potential solutions to help prevent these drifts, which may constitute interesting areas for further research.