The relational antecedents of project-entrepreneurship: Individual connectedness, team composition and project performance

Project-firms have become increasingly pervasive in today’s economy. Alternatively called temporary systems (Goodman & Goodman, 1972), project-based enterprises (DeFillippi and Arthur, 1998), or single-project organizations (Baker & Faulkner, 1991), project-based organizational forms are common in the context of market-based freelance contracting, where they are deliberately created for a limited purpose and disbanded upon its completion. Industries where project-firms are the common form of organizing activities include: construction (Eccles, 1981), music (Peterson & Berger, 1971), television (Starkey, Barnatt, & Tempest, 2000), software (Ibert, 2004) and advertising (Grabher, 2001). Because project-firm leaders are engaged in founding and growing firms in a serial manner, we label them project-entrepreneurs. What makes project-entrepreneurs particularly intriguing from a theoretical standpoint is that they they are exposed repeatedly to problems and tasks typical of the entrepreneurial process. Indeed, project-entrepreneurs face two critical challenges that invariably characterize the creation of a new venture: locating the right opportunity to start the project venture and assembling the most appropriate team to exploit that opportunity effectively (Venkatraman, 1997; Shane & Venkatraman, 2000). Searching and collaborating are challenging tasks compounded by the fact that unlike most CEO-entrepreneurs project-entrepreneurs must solve this “search and combine” problem repetitively – because projects are by design short-lived. We argue that by analyzing the search for opportunities and the formation of project teams within a relational framing we can offer valuable insight into the project-entrepreneur’s effectiveness in identifying and exploiting new opportunities. We formulate two hypotheses to develop this argument. First, drawing on the entrepreneurial literature on opportunity discovery and social network theories on information access, we suggest that the ability of projectentrepreneurs to spot valuable project opportunities can be expressed as a function of their degree of centrality within the social field. Second, bringing together another dimension of the relationship perspective that examines team coordination and repeated social interaction, we anticipate that project-entrepreneurs will be better off by assembling teams that combine past collaborators and newcomers. We test our hypotheses in the context of the US feature film industry over the period 1992-2003. Although a few major corporations still control film distribution, Hollywood hosts one of the world’s most entrepreneurially-oriented production networks. In this context, the project entrepreneur typically is an independent producer whose main task is to identify suitable project opportunities and pursue them by assembling teams of free agents best suited to those jobs.