Co-creation in Entrepreneurial Teams - introducing distinctive principles of team-membership

Other conference contribution, 2025

When developing and validating new ideas, entrepreneurs deal with genuine uncertainty (Ratinho and Sarasvathy, 2024), not just on their own but also through relying on others. Entrepreneurial teams, small groups of committed individuals that share emotional ownership of and evolution of ideas (Schjoedt et al., 2013), learn together and generate a common normative frame that also shapes the fabric of their venture. Although most new ventures are started by teams and not individuals, we still know little about how entrepreneurial teams function and differ from other teams, whether top-management teams or more operative work-teams. This paper therefore introduces and illustrates three distinctive actionable principles of entrepreneurial team-membership – Including, Over-engaging and Interdepending – that make entrepreneurial teams distinctive and able to co-create over time. The question that we care about is: what are distinctive principles applied by entrepreneurial team-members when co-creating?  We illustrate how three distinctive actionable principles can play out, applying them first to a famous example – the founding of Apple Computers – often wrongly associated with one lead entrepreneur; and then to an entrepreneurship program-based team example, where co-creative team membership broke down.  We address the question we care about through offering a new approach to entrepreneurial team membership.