Scholars and popular writers have written a great deal about entrepreneurs and the formation of new companies, but they have not succeeded in predicting when and where large numbers of new organizations will emerge. This volume attempts, from the viewpoint of the interdisciplinary field of organization studies, to answer two major questions about entrepreneurship: First, what are the conditions that prompt the founding of large numbers of new organizations or entirely new industries? Second, what are the real and significant effects of such entrepreneurial activities on existing industries, economies, and societies?

The authors emphasize that new organizations do not emerge full blown from the idiosyncratic minds of individual entrepreneurs. Their ideas for new organizations, their ability to acquire capital and other essential resources, and their likelihood of survival as entrepreneurs derive from the contexts in which they live and work. At the same time, new organizations fundamentally and immediately transform their contexts.

The first part of the book explores the mental models that founders of new companies bring with them from previous experiences, the ways in which their ideas come not only from the companies in which they work but from the surrounding organizational communities, and the importance of local and regional dynamics in nurturing innovative communities. Other papers in this section shift perspective from geographic communities to other contexts—the university, the knowledge industry, and the technology cycle.

The second part of the book explores the role of entrepreneurial activity in the transformation of contexts and the evolution of industries, focusing on the processes and tools that entrepreneurs use to legitimate new organizational populations, and the collateral industries and communities that build up around new organizational populations, aiding in the development of new companies.