Passion and Entrepreneurship: Contemporary Perspectives and New Avenues for Research

Preface

Chapter 1: The connections between passion and entrepreneurship. Identify and develop a new research agenda - by Enrico Baraldi, Simone Guercini, Marcus Lindahl, Andrea Perna

In this book we analyze and discuss the relation between passion and entrepreneurship. Passion has been a subject of study for some time with particular reference to the field of entrepreneurship (Cardon et al., 2009; Cardon, Foo & Sheperd, 2012). In this literature on entrepreneurial passion some important aspects have already been considered, such as the positive and negative aspects that may have been associated with it, its "contagiousness", assessed with respect to others as employees and financiers, the problem of measurement, among the others.

In this chapter these results are developed by presenting them through what emerges from a systematic review of the literature on the relationship between passion and entrepreneurship. A second component of the chapter is in the definition of its own approach to the theme of the relationship between passion and entrepreneurship. Passion is considered as a context capable of supporting the emergence of entrepreneurship, both for its individual dimension and for its aggregation potential as a connecting element at the base of community formation, in which entrepreneurship can find incubation. This can be considered in terms of both positive and negative implications. Finally, an interpretative scheme is proposed for reading the following chapters that make up this volume, a scheme that will be taken up in the final and epilogue of the volume itself.

Chapter 2: Discovering passion through entrepreneurial stories: emerging features from a content analysis - by Silvia Ranfagni, Andrea Runfola, Matilde Milanesi, Simone Guercini

The aim of the chapter is to investigate the meanings and dimensions of passion resulting from narratives by entrepreneurs who have made passion, cultivated as consumers, their business. The study advances the knowledge of entrepreneurial passion by giving centrality to an internal vision of passion and of its meaning and dimensions. Indeed, within entrepreneurship studies, the methodology to approach the construct of passion is mainly based on sources and definitions generated by scholars, rather than those generated by entrepreneurs themselves.

In this paper, a mixed methodology is adopted that integrates in-depth interviews with content analysis driven by text-mining techniques. The analysis of data includes a semantic clusters analysis that identifies the meanings that entrepreneurs attribute to passion, and a co-occurrences analysis that reveal the words that the entrepreneurs associate to passion. The chapter shows that entrepreneurs define passion through six dimensions: passion as travelling companion, passion as targeted action, passion as practice, passion as organizational context, passion as collectivism, passion as struggle.

Chapter 3: The Role of passion(s) in entrepreneurial team evolution - by Francesco Petrucci, Alessandro Pagano and Roberta Bocconcelli

In the past few years a remarkable number of so-called 'alternative', or 'unconventional', research streams in the field of entrepreneurship emerged. These 'alternative' studies have contributed to recognize entrepreneurship as a heterogeneous and complex phenomenon, calling for going beyond the long-standing 'classical' theory of entrepreneurship focused on the figure of the entrepreneur and on the notion of 'opportunity recognition' that lies at the core of the entrepreneurial process (Guercini & Cova, 2018).

Contrarily to this view, entrepreneurship has been found to be a more 'collective' and 'contextual' process. Many entrepreneurial frameworks such as the social entrepreneurship (Borzaga & Defourny, 2004), the community entrepreneurship (Johannissson, 1990), a