Summary:  

Entrepreneurs face the unique challenge of simultaneously imagining future-focused opportunities while bringing (i.e., identifying, deploying, and orchestrating) resources into use. Our study, recently publish in Journal of Management Studies, highlights the critical role of entrepreneurial resourcefulness (ER) in helping entrepreneurs navigate this unique challenge when starting, developing, and growing ventures. While resourcefulness is commonly invoked by practitioners, scholars, and educators, our findings reveal that there is a fragmented understanding of what ER is and how/why it matters across stages of entrepreneurial venturing. 

Challenge and opportunity—the ubiquity of ‘resourcefulness’ in entrepreneurship, business, and life.  

What comes to mind when you think of ‘resourcefulness?’ A quick internet search reveals all kinds of definitions and interpretations. Here are just a few:  

• People are ‘full of resources’ or tools that can be used to come up with adaptive, situation-specific solutions in new, different, and/or difficult situations, such as finding a way to coax an escaped animal back to its cage in a pet store.  

• An ability to find solutions that are ‘clever’ and non-obvious to emergent problems in quick ways.  

• Finding scrappy ways to overcome surprising challenges in difficult and resource constrained contexts.  

Similarly, a perusal of recent news stories shows how frequently resourcefulness is invoked: Here are a few recent headlines:  

• “Kindness 101 shows how a group of fifth graders is teaching resourcefulness.”  

• “Ukraine’s resourcefulness: Using a 140 year-old machine gun to repel Russian attacks.”  

• “Resourcefulness resurgence: ‘Lidia Celebrates America: Changemakers’ showcases chefs, farmers and entrepreneurs striving to change the future of food.” 

• “Resourcefulness allows AP to tell remarkable Helene stories from exclusive datelines.”  

In reading these headlines and definitions one can conclude at least a couple of things: resourcefulness seems pretty important as it is relevant across multiple contexts. But also, resourcefulness appears to mean many different things—so what is it and how is it relevant?  

Theoretical foundations, conceptualization, and literature review 

In this study we evaluate the diverse theoretical origins of resourcefulness to clarify what it is as a concept and how that concept has been constructed. In doing so, we identify cognitive, inter-personal, and organizing aspects of ER that are informative to both practitioners and researchers.  

We define ER as a social-cognitive process of bringing resources into use for an entrepreneurial schema that challenges and extends normative boundaries. While this definition is notably academic, our goal was to capture how ER involves the human mind, interpretations of situations and the environment, and behaviors designed to re-define boundaries. Imaginations for what is possible in the future and the resources that might be relevant to that future begin in the mind and unfold as individuals take action. ER involves a process of imagining future entrepreneurial scenarios and then bringing people, financing, knowledge, and other available ‘things’ to that project as resources. Finally, this process alters boundaries about what is possible for current resources (i.e., altering them, combining them with something else), market opportunities, and ‘norms’ of getting things done.  

We explore themes in the literature that highlight different aspects of ER coming from a wide variety of psychology, sociology, culture, and organizational theoretical domains. In doing so we bring together diverse streams of research to cohere them into a more common foundational understanding.  

Future research agenda 

We conclude the study by noting that there is much to be learned about ER. In particular, we note that ER may sometimes be helpful if not critical for entrepreneurs, such as in early stages of venturing or when individuals face constraints. Furthermore, ER may be helpful in a corporate venturing setting, where actors must think creatively about how to identify new entrepreneurial projects and then marshal corporate resources toward those projects. However, we also note a significantly understudied downside to ER. For example, failing to move from an ER approach to venturing to more traditional resource-seeking practices can undermine venture growth and/or expansion. There is a need to better understand when and how ER is most helpful in facilitating different aspects of the entrepreneurial process, and when it becomes ‘too much of a good thing’ or even an ‘inappropriate thing’ in different contexts.  

Conclusion 

In summary, we agree with David Burkus that “a hard truth for some to accept” is that “a lack of resources may not be their true constraint, just a lack of resourcefulness.” ER is important as it frees up individuals to try out their ideas rather than waiting in stagnation for funding to come through or someone to grant them ‘more’ so they can move forward. ER allows people to take action and, in doing so, identify novel ways of applying resources, alter market norms and expectations, and help push society forward in a wide range of ways.