1. Raghu Garud & Peter Karnøe PATH CREATION A PROCESS OF MINDFUL DEVIATION A set of ideas to think about the role of human agency in entrepreneurship and change

2. PATH CREATION AS A PROCESS OF MINDFUL DEVIATION The living language is like a cowpath: it is the creation of the cows themselves, who, having created it, follow it or depart from it, or depart from it according to their whims or their needs. From daily use, the path undergoes change. A cow is under no obligation to stay in the narrow path she helped make, following the contour of the land, but she often profits by staying with it and she would be handicapped if she didn't know where it was or where it led to. E. B. White, 1957

3. PATH DEPENDENCE A sequence of events constituting a self-reinforcing process that has the potential to unfold into one of several potential states based upon small differences in any of the events constituting the sequence. (Lock-in - QWERTY) Implication: Markets are not efficient due to re-inforcement (‘best’ wins out) -dynamic learning effects- economies of scale –coordination effects – expectations dominance – critical mass - - first mover Beta max VHS, DK wind

4. MORE FORMALLY A path dependent sequence of economic changes is one of which important influences upon the eventual outcome can be exerted by temporally remote events, including happenings dominated by chance elements rather than systematic forces. Stochastic processes like that do not converge automatically to a fixed point distribution of outcomes, and are called non-ergodic. In such circumstances, "historical accidents" can neither be ignored nor reality quarantined for the purpose of economic analysis; the dynamic process itself takes on an essentially historical character. David, 1985: 332

6. The Path dependence ‘outsider’ perspective makes the emergence of novelty a black box and there is no role to human agency - Path creation entertains an ‘insider’ perspective – and tend to theorize emergent paths and actors and how their possible actions are constrained-and- enabled from the path where they are embedded – and resources they can mobilize Path dependence and Path creation as different perspectives

7. The Path dependence ‘outsider’ perspective - Tends to underscore the constitutive character of paths and the way different part of the history become re-assembled to make new futures History or the past become often too homogenous a force Path creation entertains an ‘insider’ perspective – the micro-sociological perspective combined with emergent irreverbilization (lock-ins) highligths the active constitution of the ‘lock-in’ by contributing actors, materials and economic and symbolic resources Path dependence and Path creation as different perspectives

8. Everything emerges out of an essentially historical dynamic process of contingent ordering, irreversibilization, momentum and possible lock-in Path dependence and Path creation do share ideas of On what level does one see lock-in? Wind power as Path Creation and Transformative changes in energy production Any technology or organization in the present build upon various fragments of solutions from ‘old’ history BUT

9. PATH DEPENDENCE OR CREATION as a choice of ontology and epistemology (Garud and Karnøe 2001:7-8) A shift from path dependence to creation occurs as researchers theorize how embedded actors endogenize objects, relevance structures and time (history as experienced past, present, future) – irreversibility as outcome As embedding dimensions become strategic variables, there is a shift from "describing our past worlds" to "shaping our current states" to create new futures. Entrepreneurship involves judgment and choice about time, relevance structures and objects within which entrepreneurs are embedded and from which they must deviate mindfully to create new paths.

10. PATH CREATION Entrepreneurship requires an ability to span boundaries of relevance structures, translate objects and mobilize time as a resource. As entrepreneurs endogenize time, relevance structures and objects, they generate power to manipulate and mobilize these elements strategically. Path creation is the binding of objects, relevance structures and time into an overall co-evolutionary process.