Dynamic Creation: Extending the Radical Austrian Approach to Entrepreneurship

We develop a new perspective on entrepreneurship as a dynamic, complex, subjective process of creative organizing. Our approach, which we call ‘dynamic creation’, synthesizes core ideas from Austrian ‘radical subjectivism’ with complementary ideas from psychology (empathy), strategy and organization theory (modularity), and complexity theory (self-organization). We articulate conjectures at multiple levels about how such dynamic creative processes as empathizing, modularizing, and self-organizing help organize subjectively imagined novel ideas in entrepreneurs’ minds, heterogeneous resources in their firms, and disequilibrium markets in their environments. In our most provocative claim, we argue that entrepreneurs, by imagining divergent futures and (re)combining heterogeneous resources to create novel products, drive far-from-equilibrium market processes to create not market anarchy but market order. We conclude our exposition of each dynamic creative process by offering one possible direction for future research and articulating additional conjectures that help point the way. Throughout, we draw examples from CareerBuilder—a firm that has played a major role in creating and shaping the online model in the job search/recruiting industry—and its industry rivals (e.g. Monster, Yahoo’s HotJobs) to illustrate selected concepts and relationships in dynamic entrepreneurial creation