Conventions, Business Model, and Entrepreneurship

Abstract

This chapter presents how convention theory has shed light on the entrepreneurial phenomenon and its artifacts, the business model. The term “business model” appeared and spread with the advent of Internet start-ups. Beyond its systemic meaning (modeling a business to make it intelligible), the term has become part of the register of entrepreneurship, irrespective of whether it concerns for-profit or nonprofit organizations. An organization is taken here to be an arrangement of tangible and intangible resources coordinated into tasks, activities, and processes. Led by an entrepreneur or an entrepreneurial team, the organization gives “body” to the convention. Putting this theory into practice through managerial valuation of the convention theory perspective may serve the design of entrepreneurial projects and their deployment, with the development of tools for entrepreneurs, managers, and their advisors in an engineering approach to research (including the deployment of action research aimed at improving practices). Beyond the issue of competition, these tools may help them grasp the conventions of business function and considerably enrich their strategy. Indeed, the entrepreneurial convention is one of the many forms of interactions that structure the social spheres in which a project evolves, and which are not limited to the mere competitive dimension of a market.