GUEST EDITORS' INTRODUCTION TO THE SPECIAL ISSUE STRATEGIC ENTREPRENEURSHIP: ENTREPRENEURIAL STRATEGIES FOR WEALTH CREATION

Abstract

Entrepreneurship involves identifying and exploiting entrepreneurial opportunities. However, to create the most value entrepreneurial firms also need to act strategically. This calls for an integration of entrepreneurial and strategic thinking. We explore this strategic entrepreneurship in several important organizational domains to include external networks and alliances, resources and organizational learning, innovation and internationalization. The research in this special issue examines both traditional (e.g., contingency theory, strategic fit) and new theory (e.g., cultural entrepreneurship, business model drivers). The research also integrates, extends, and tests theory and research from entrepreneurship and strategic management in new ways such as creative destruction (discontinuities), resource-based view, organizational learning, network theory, transaction costs and institutional theory. The research presented herein provides a basis for future research on strategic entrepreneurship for wealth creation.Copyright © 2001 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd. The age of progress is over. It was born in the Renaissance, achieved its exuberant adolescence during the Enlightenment, reached a robust maturity in the industrial age, and died with the dawn of the twenty-first century … We now stand on the threshold of a new age—the age of revolution … it is going to be an age of upheaval, of tumult, of fortunes made and unmade at headsnapping speed. For change has changed. No longer is it additive. No longer does it move in a straight line. In the twenty-first century, change