Scholarship of EIC Stories

I will open with a strongly held personal belief built on my nearly 55 years of being on this dynamic planet and 25+ years of engaging with thousands of entrepreneurs, innovators and changemakers: The only way out of the messes that we have created for ourselves is to innovate our way out of them.  (I suspect that EICs have their fair share of responsibility in creating our current situations...)

This is the time for Entrepreneurs, Innovators and Changemakers to rise to the challenge and help shift from degeneration to sustainability and on to regeneration.  Not just a few people…in mass.  And if we are to do this in mass, humans must be free to discover, develop and share their gifts with the world.  Inside and Outside. 

In doing so, they have a shot at taking their bite out of the messy apple and personally flourishing at the same time.  And if done in community, the doors open wider, more people join in, persistence increases and we might just be that much happier overall.  When people hear stories of others living this way of life, they are inspired and start to say…why not me? 

--Arthur

Our Curiosities and Research Questions

The questions below have been emerging as we advance our work locally and around the globe.  They are starting to shape into important directions for The ESP.

  1. What are the Sustainable Development Goal issues involved with this place?

  2. What has been the history?  What is the current situation?  What is the trend into the future?

  3. Who is involved?  Individually?  Collectively?  What has been the history?  The current situation?  Trends?

  4. What role have and do Entrepreneurs, Innovators and Changemakers play in all this?  Historically?  Currently?  Potential for the Future?

Purpose and Overview

The longitudinal programmatic purpose of The ESP is to add to the theoretical and practical knowledge related to the experiences of Entrepreneurs, Innovators and Changemakers (EICs) together and in collaboration.  This ultimately means collecting, processing and sharing stories (data) into curricular innovations, practical tools and academic research.  Guided by scholarly mixed methodologies, this series of inductive discovery and exploratory projects seeks to collect, understand the experiences of EICs locally and globally in order to evolve theory, pedagogy and industry practice through formal systematic investigations and less formal, idiosyncratic story collection.

“Story” is the word that will be used as shorthand for experiential data collected directly or indirectly.

The program of projects intentionally seeks out experiences or “stories” of EICs from diverse places and people including the WWU community (current and alumni), the Salish Sea Bio-Region (Bellingham and Beyond) and Globally (across multiple countries and continents).  This is intentionally linked to the United Nation’s Sustainable Development Goals and the local to global issues these identify and then framed within the 3 Hunches and other emerging practical, curricular and theoretical questions and “hunches” from the early stages of this ongoing scholarly pursuit.   

In turn, the program seeks to translate this understanding into scholarly publication, curricular innovation and guidance for EIC practitioners and supporters.  The intention is to create a positive feedback loop (i.e. outputs that are valuable) to Academia, WWU’s Entrepreneurship & Innovation Academic Programs, The Cole Professorship, The Salish Sea Bio-Region and to the global network of EICs and EIC supporters involved whether they be scholars, students or practitioners.  The specific outputs will be identified as the program goes on and needs are identified.

To achieve these purposes, the program will build upon my prior experiences including research, writings, teachings, presentations  and network development to further engage in a series of projects that utilize formal human subjects mixed-method research as well as collecting experiences that fall outside of formal human subjects research.  All work that falls within the definition of “human subjects research” will be approved by the WWU IRB system (two embedded projects are already approved).

Guiding Research Questions and Evolving Theories

The research questions and evolving theories cover two levels of analysis:

  1. The EIC's Experiences

  2. The EICs' Experiences

The EIC’s Experiences

(note the apostrophe denotes singular possession)

What does the experiential journey of EIC’s look like?  Are there patterns?  Are their blocks?  Facilitators?  How does this impact the EIC and their well-being/flourishing?  Does this change over time and if so, how?  Why?  How might this vary culturally?  Among various groups and demographics?  

Theoretical Development:  Toward A Theory of Dynamic Fit.

The program will actively develop an EIC nascent theory that emerged from my preceding research that seeks to explain the behaviors and series of outcomes for people as they engage in EIC related processes.  Basics: humans reach for EIC experiences to create greater fit between themselves and their way of life in order to continuously increase their own well-being/flourishing.

Methodologies

Scholarly methodologies will guide the projects whether they be formal research needing approval or work that does not fall within the definition of “research” for human subjects purposes.

The primary methodological approaches are inductive/abductive and qualitative while allowing, but not requiring, expansion to mixed methodologies that include more deductive and quantitative approaches.  

Thus, The ESP intentionally prioritizes the rich, qualitative discovery and exploration portions of the scientific process over empirical testing of theories through traditional quantitative experimental/correlational methodologies.

Induction, Abduction, Deduction

Inductive research uses a “type of reasoning that begins with study of a range of individual cases and extrapolates patterns from them to form a conceptual category”(Charmaz, 2014, p. 343).  Abduction is used for theory building and is “a type of reasoning that begins with the researcher examining inductive data and observing a surprising or puzzling finding that cannot be explained with conventional theoretical accounts.” (Charmaz, 2014, p. 341). Deductive research “starts with the general or abstract concept and reasons to specific instances” (Charmaz, 2014, p. 342), typically following the process of identifying hypotheses a priori, collecting data, analyzing and testing in relation to the hypotheses.

Qualitative Research

Robert Yin, a highly regarded scholar and methodological expert asks why might one want to do qualitative research.  He answers, “…you would like to understand how people cope in their real-world settings.  Because qualitative studies can attend to the contextual richness of these settings, you research will enable you to study the everyday lives of many different kinds of people and what they think about, under many different circumstances” (2016, p. 3). Cresswell ( 2018) defines qualitative research as “an inquiry process of understanding based on distinct methodological approach to inquiry that explores a social or human problem.  The research builds a complex, holistic picture; analyzes words; reports detailed views of participants; and conducts the study in a natural setting” (p. 326)

 

Qualitative Methods, Integrated

The description above fits the methodological strategy to the purpose of discovery and exploration related to the experiences of EICs individually and collectively.  While most is “basic” research to discover and explore without specific applications in mind, some of the projects within the program may start with an “applied” focus. 

Specific qualitative methods employed and integrated in The EIC are:

  • Descriptive Research

  • Exploratory Research 

  • Ethnographic Research 

  • Narrative Research 

  • Grounded Theory Research 

  • Case Study Research 

  • Survey Research (interviews) 

  • Survey Research (self-reports) 

  • Content Analysis

Idiosyncratic Stories for Curricular Innovation and Practice-Methods that support this audience

Additionally, The ESP will employ methods of mass media to identify, collect, understand and share stories.  Rather than be a systematic investigation like traditional academic research, these methods are meant to collect individual and/or group stories/biographies.  When these stories are collected, the clear and transparent purpose is to turn around and share the information with others rather than to use it in a formal research inquiry.   Approaches include:

  • Podcast interviews

  • Video interviews

  • Photography

  • On-site visits

  • Secondary information collection on-site or on the web about the individual and/or group and the context of their story

The priority audience for these stories are university students.  The forms will be examples, short case vignettes to full multi-media case studies and other classroom and curricular innovations.

 

References:

Charmaz, K. (2014). Constructing grounded theory (Second edition.). SAGE Publications.

Creswell, J. W. (2018). Qualitative inquiry & research design: Choosing among five approaches (Fourth edition.). SAGE.

Yin, R. K. (2016). Qualitative research from start to finish (Second edition.). Guilford Press.