Quality Assessment: PhD Dissertation Process

Last March 24th, Carla Riverola, a PhD candidate in Innova Institute, presented the advances in her dissertation.

The title of the Thesis is "Technology Based Entrepreneurship in Networked Environments". You can have a look at the abstract below:

Among the different theories that study entrepreneurial practices, literature highlights how entrepreneurs acquire critical resources (i.e. financial capital, key team members, and lead users) during the venture creation process.  Thus, while entrepreneurs hold some resources themselves, some entrepreneurs may access resources through their social networks or market (Zhang, 2010).

At the same time, recent disruptive socio-economic trends (social media) are a range of digital applications that have changed the way individuals and organizations communicate and access information, creating a networked environment.

While some researchers claim that within this networked environment there is a wider range of options to access different sorts of resources, other researchers suggest that it is more difficult to profit from these online settings (Wellman, Quan-Haase, Witte, & Hampton, 2001). Thus, it seems there are some aspects of this apparent paradox that remain unclear.

In order to shed some light on this controversy, the goal of the research is to understand how and why entrepreneurs use social media to acquire valuable resources, and in turn, how these new technological settings impact the different stages of the entrepreneurial process. Thus, this work aims to contribute to understand how social media contributes to the ability of new ventures to access to resources during the exploration and exploitation of opportunities.