ABOUT THE CONFERENCE

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The aim of Entrepreneurship as Practice Conferences is to advance the understanding of entrepreneurship-as-practice, foster network ties, facilitate collaborative writing relationships, and build a strong community of practice scholars.

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In the twelfth edition of the conference, we focus on entrepreneuring in the age of technological transformation and invite participants to explore ways in which entrepreneuring is accomplished with, through and alongside technologies; we also invite to investigate how technological futures themselves are imagined, enacted and brought into being through entrepreneuring.

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Sophisticated robots and automation systems, artificial intelligence and digital platforms, space, biotech, clean energy and other technological developments do not simply serve as objects of entrepreneurial endeavour and novel working tools, or contextual factors. They are constitutive of social entrepreneurial realities, identities and socio-material arrangements (Davidson & Vaast; 2010; Orlikowski, 2007; Orlikowski & Scott, 2008) and transform social relationships and the entrepreneurial practice itself (Nambisan et al., 2019). Through entrepreneurial practices, entrepreneurs envision opportunities, mobilise teams and resources, create new knowledge, and otherwise organise emerging ventures entangled in discursive and socio-material assemblages (Glaser et al., 2021; Liubertė & Dimov, 2021).  Thus, drawing on the onto-epistemological foundations of entrepreneurship-as-practice (Thompson & Byrne, 2020), entrepreneuring emerges through interconnected practices involving people, knowledge, bodies, artefacts, technologies and material arrangements (Johannisson, 2011; Thompson, Verduijn, & Gartner, 2020).

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Technology becomes consequential to entrepreneuring in multiple ways. In technology entrepreneurship, technological developments constitute the central resource – the core asset of a venture. Yet what counts as “technology entrepreneurship” is itself changing. Earlier understandings emphasised high-tech products; yet, recently, digitalisation has enabled new services, business models, and forms of entrepreneurial organising in which technologies may simultaneously become less visible (Giones & Brem, 2017). At the same time, technologies increasingly participate in mundane entrepreneuring and organising practices. Everyday entrepreneurial action relies on the material affordances of technology and on agency distributed across human and non-human actors (Garud & Karnøe, 2003; Gherardi, 2010; Townsend & Hunt, 2019); thus, inviting socio-material and post-humanist perspectives on entrepreneuring.

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The 12th Annual Entrepreneurship as Practice Conference invites conceptual, empirical and methodological contributions that advance entrepreneurship-as-practice scholarship. We are particularly interested in contributions that examine entrepreneuring amid technological transformation. However, alignment with the theme is not a requirement – we equally welcome entrepreneurship-as-practice papers on other topics.

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We invite contributions engaging with questions including, but not limited to, the following:

• How are technological inventions imagined, developed, and materialised through entrepreneurial practice? What new practices emerge, and what existing practices erode?

• How do AI and other technologies reshape practices of opportunity creation, imagining futures, decision-making, venturing and entrepreneurial organising, and become entangled with everyday entrepreneurial practices? How do entrepreneurs appropriate, improvise with, resist or repurpose technologies in practice?

• How does agency, entrepreneurial knowing and learning change when knowledge is increasingly produced with and through technological artefacts?

• How do bodies interact differently with changing accessibilities of technologies? What is the role of bodies and embodiment in technology entrepreneuring?

• How do technological transformations reshape entrepreneurial ecosystems and the practices of investors, accelerators, educators, policymakers and other ecosystem actors?

• What methodological challenges arise when we seek to observe entrepreneurial practices and the changing uses of technologies?

• What can entrepreneurship-as-practice contribute to wider debates about technology, and societal transformation?

• How might alternative conceptualisations of technology, as for example, Foucauldian technologies of the self, extend our understanding of what constitutes entrepreneuring and entrepreneurial practices?

 

We look forward to welcoming you to Vilnius and engaging in conversations about socio-material, situated, negotiated and lived practices of technological futures and entrepreneuring!

 

CONFIRMED KEYNOTE SPEAKERS

 

Silvia Gherardi (University of Trento)

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Michael Barrett (University of Cambridge)

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CONFERENCE PROGRAMME (PRELIMINARY)​

To be announced

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LOCATION

The 12th edition of this Conference will be hosted by ISM University of Management and Economics at Vilnius, Lithuania.  If you are not able to join in person, we have an online symposium every year in the autumn, please see events page.

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HOW TO JOIN 

There are three routes for you to join the Conference:

 

Submit paper to Paper Development Workshop. We welcome submissions to our popular PDW sessions. The abstract is due on TBA. The abstract is a maximum of 500 words. Upon acceptance, please notify us if you plan to join. Early bird registration and final registration deadline are below. The deadline for the full paper is TBA. Full papers are 10,000 words maximum including references. 

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Submit an abstract to the Emerging Paper Session. The Emerging Paper Session (EPS) allows scholars to give and receive feedback on developing ideas or ongoing work that still needs to be developed into a full paper. Early bird registration and final registration deadline are below. The submission deadline for the Emerging Paper Session is TBA. The abstract is a maximum of 500 words. Upon acceptance, we will communicate the date and time for your presentation.

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No paper, no problem. We welcome scholars of all levels who are interested in EAP. The conference includes many opportunities to learn from keynote speakers, participate in roundtable discussions, and network with EAP scholars. You can also participate as an audience member in the presentations and give feedback on PDW papers. We will have special breakfast mentoring sessions for PhD students and early-career scholars. See registration deadlines below.

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KEY DATES

TBA 

March 31 – 2nd April, 2027                   Conference Dates

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CONFERENCE COSTS AND REGISTRATION

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TBA

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Travel and accommodation are not included. For hotel discounts, see below.

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ACCOMMODATION

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TBA

 

TRANSPORTATION

Getting to Vilnius TBA

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PLEASE SEND ALL INQUIRIES TO: EAP12@ism.lt

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BACKGROUND OF THE CONFERENCE

​The practice-theory tradition (also known as practice-based studies, the practice-theory approach or the practice-theory lens) forefronts the notion that practices and their connections are fundamental to all social phenomena (Rouse, 2006; Gherardi, 2019; Schatzki, Knorr-Cetina, & Savigny, 2001). For entrepreneurship it means that people together “perform” ventures, startups and firms on an everyday basis through materially accomplished and ordered practices (Chalmers & Shaw, 2017; Hill, 2018; Johannisson, 2011; Vincent & Pagan, 2019). This is to say that descriptions and explanations of entrepreneurship—such as, recognizing, evaluating and exploiting opportunities—are incomplete without the ‘alternate’ description and explanation of how entrepreneurship is actually lived in and through practices (Gross, Carson, & Jones, 2014; Keating, Geiger, & Mcloughlin, 2013). The term ‘practice’, therefore, does not refer to an ‘empty’ conceptual category of ‘what entrepreneurs think and do’ (Sklaveniti & Steyaert, 2019), but encompasses the collective meaning-making, identity-forming and order-producing interactions (Chia & Holt, 2006; Nicolini, 2009; Thompson et al., 2022) enacted by multiple entrepreneurial practitioners and situated in specific (historical) conditions. Therefore, practice theories orient entrepreneurship scholars to take seriously the practices of entrepreneuring as they unfold and are experienced in real-time (Bell, 2025; Gherardi, 2022). Simply put, practice-theory scholars are concerned with the ‘nitty-gritty’ work of entrepreneuring—all the meetings, the talking, the selling, the form-filling and the number-crunching by which opportunities actually get enacted (Ge et al., 2024; Hill et al., 2025; Matthews, Chalmers, & Fraser, 2018).

For background and information on EaP literature, prior conferences, media and other pertinent materials, please go to: https://www.entrepreneurshipaspractice.com.

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​​​​The Conference aims at educating interested scholars as well as helps to develop empirical and conceptual papers regarding the ‘practice turn’ taking place in entrepreneurship studies. Building on the 

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• First (February 2016 at VU Amsterdam), 

• Second (February 2017 at University College Dublin Quinn School of Business), 

• Third (April 2018 at Linnaeus University), 

• Fourth (April 2019 at Nantes Business School), 

• Fifth and sixth (virtual events), 

• Seventh (April 2022 at Vrije Universiteit Amsterdam), 

• Eighth (Leuphana University), 

• Ninth (University of Leeds) and 

• Tenth (Jönköping International Business School) 

• Eleventh (University of Liverpool)

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​​For more up to date information straight to your inbox, sign up to our newsletter here.

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REFERENCES​

Davidson, E., & Vaast, E. (2010, January). Digital entrepreneurship and its sociomaterial enactment. In 2010 43rd Hawaii international conference on system sciences (pp. 1-10). IEEE.

Garud, R., & Karnøe, P. (2003). Bricolage versus breakthrough: distributed and embedded agency in technology entrepreneurship. Research policy, 32(2), 277-300.

Gherardi, S. (2010). Telemedicine: A practice-based approach to technology. Human relations, 63(4), 501-524.

Giones, F., & Brem, A. (2017). Digital technology entrepreneurship: A definition and research agenda. Technology innovation management review, 7(5).

Glaser, V. L., Pollock, N., & D’Adderio, L. (2021). The biography of an algorithm: Performing algorithmic technologies in organizations. Organization Theory, 2(2), 26317877211004609.

Johannisson, B. (2011). Towards a practice theory of entrepreneuring. Small Business Economics, 36, 135–150.

Nambisan, S., Wright, M., & Feldman, M. (2019). The digital transformation of innovation and entrepreneurship: Progress, challenges and key themes. Research policy, 48(8), 103773.

Liubertė, I., & Dimov, D. (2021). “One tiny drop changes everything”: Constructing opportunity with words. Journal of Business Venturing Insights, 15, e00242.

Orlikowski, W. J. (2007). Sociomaterial practices: Exploring technology at work. Organization Studies, 28(9), 1435–1448.

Orlikowski, W. J., & Scott, S. V. (2008). Sociomateriality: Challenging the separation of technology, work and organization. Academy of Management Annals, 2(1), 433–474.

Thompson, N. A., & Byrne, O. (2020). Advancing entrepreneurship as practice: Previous developments and future possibilities. In Research handbook on entrepreneurial behavior, practice and process (pp. 30-55). Edward Elgar Publishing.

Thompson, N. A., Verduijn, K., & Gartner, W. B. (2020). Entrepreneurship-as-practice: Grounding contemporary theories of practice into entrepreneurship studies. Entrepreneurship & Regional Development, 32(3–4), 247–256.

Townsend, D. M., & Hunt, R. A. (2019). Entrepreneurial action, creativity, & judgment in the age of artificial intelligence. Journal of Business Venturing Insights, 11, e00126.