Innovation and entrepreneurship in organization studies

CASTRIOTTA, EMANUELE

2014-06-16

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Abstract

This work, following the conceptual recombination theory, by which ideas and concepts are mentally merged to transform and extend knowledge, explores and summarizes the current sources of academic literature, simultaneously engaging research in the fields of entrepreneurship and creativity. A bibliometric co-citation analysis was applied to identify the invisible colleges and the latent relationships among the most significant papers. Multivariate analyses including cluster, latent class, multidimensional scaling, and Pathfinder were combined to map the nodes positioning the literature. The goal of this study is (1) to increase the awareness of scholars by detecting and visualizing the intellectual structure of the shared ground among both sets of literature; (2) to identify the connected schools of thought, methods, constructs, and theories to problematize or literature gaps to be filled; (3) to reveal the network structure the central, bridge, and peripheral nodes and to hypothesize trailblazing trends, sidings, or forgotten contributions; and (4) to generate, thanks to a creativity grant, new insights to enable entrepreneurs to explore new frontiers. Using creativity techniques and a panel of experts in support, 26 keywords were generated, extracted, assessed and exploited to identify the research unit of 1533 articles. Following a further evaluation process, 73 major co-cited items were finally selected. Given the transverse nature of the creativity domain and of the search for academic interdisciplinary comminglings, data were collected from Science (SCI), Social Sciences (SSCI) and Arts and Humanities (A&HCI) citation indices for the 1991-2013 period.