Cournot seminar – Tom Elfring (EM Lyon)

Event details :

We are pleased to welcome to the next session of the BETA Cournot seminar organised with the support of the FSEG on Friday 02/10, at 02:00pm:

Tom Elfring (EM Lyon)

who will present his paper entitled

Network Agency in Entrepreneurship: From Literature Synthesis to New Frontiers

Abstract: Entrepreneurs do not merely occupy networks; they actively shape, manage, and develop them. Yet research on entrepreneurial networking has long been fragmented across different perspectives, emphasizing, for example, social skills, networking abilities, motivation, tie formation, tie upgrading and dissolution, and specific networking behaviours. In Klyver et al. (2025, ET&P) we integrate these dispersed insights through an integrative review of the network agency literature in entrepreneurship. The central contribution is to shift the dominant perspective from one in which social networks primarily shape entrepreneurs toward an agentic perspective in which networks simultaneously shape entrepreneurs and are shaped by them. Network agency was conceptualized around three interconnected components: motivation, ability, and behaviour. These components are helpful to understand how network agency enables or constrains entrepreneurs to purposefully shape their networks.
Building on this synthesis, we are pursuing two research projects that extend network agency into changing entrepreneurial networking environments. The first (with Tatiana Khvatova) examines offline and online networking among entrepreneurs in university incubators. Entrepreneurs in university incubators increasingly construct and navigate their own networks across physical and digital spaces. Early results give some answers to the following questions: how do these entrepreneurs exercise network agency and how such networking contributes to entrepreneurial learning and venture development. The second project (with Lara Hitgen) examines how AI might change entrepreneurial network agency. Generative and agentic AI can help entrepreneurs identify potential contacts, evaluate fit, and conduct outreach on their behalf; in short, execute networking activities once considered fully human. This project examines how entrepreneurs use AI to augment and delegate networking activities, potentially redistributing network agency between entrepreneurs and intelligent systems, such as generative AI. Together, these projects extend the network agency perspective by 1) examining how entrepreneurs exercise agency as the networking environment change and 2) the actor performing networking action increasingly includes or becomes AI.

If you would like to meet Tom Elfring, please contact Pauline Brunner.