User entrepreneurs in times of crisis: Innovators you can count on

• Date: 01 December 2020
• Published date: 01 December 2020
• Author: Mary Tripsas,Sonali K. Shah
• DOI: http://doi.org/10.1002/sej.1384

REFLECTIVE PIECE

User entrepreneurs in times of crisis: Innovators

you can count on

Sonali K. Shah

1

| Mary Tripsas

2

1

University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, Champaign, Illinois

2

Boston College, Chestnut Hill, Massachusetts

As humans, crises give us pause, causing us to reevaluate our priorities, our interests, and our behaviors. They gener-

ate a need for quick thinking, innovation, and actions in support of the common good. The COVID-19 pandemic,

striking in its worldwide grip on the human population, is just one example. Natural disasters such as storms, wild-

fires, earthquakes, and hurricanes and man-made disasters such as climate change; and social, political, and economic

strife have and are altering how people live and work. The need for innovation in light of these challenges is

immense. User entrepreneurship—“the commercialization of a new product and/or service by an individual or group

of individuals who are also users of that product and/or service”(Shah and Tripsas, 2007, p. 123)—is one important

source of such innovations. Users, driven by necessity, are often forced to innovate in times of crises.

Our 2007 SEJ piece proposed a process model of user entrepreneurship that contrasted with the conventional

model of entrepreneurship and documented the prevalence of user entrepreneurship in the juvenile products indus-

try. A subsequent study showed that 46% of innovative startups (and 10.7% of all startups) that survive to 5 years or

more are founded by user entrepreneurs (Shah, Smith, & Reedy, 2012). In this piece, we reflect on the role of user

entrepreneurship in providing the innovations that might help us adapt to, as well as combat, crises—and suggest

adjustments and extensions to the theory of user entrepreneurship that we proposed in our prior work.

1|POSTFOUNDING ADAPTATION: EXPOSURE TO USER KNOWLEDGE

INFORMS PIVOTS IN TIMES OF CRISES

Our original model focused on how the process leading to firm formation for user entrepreneurs differed from classic

models of entrepreneurship. As we gauged the responses of user-founded firms to COVID-19, we observed that

some of these differences also mattered postfounding. Specifically, the deep need-related knowledge and privileged

access to a user community that often helped user entrepreneurs identify and validate their ideas before firm

founding helped them adapt.

For instance, Kidadl is a classic example of user entrepreneurship: “Struggling to find inspiration online for bril-

liant child-friendly experiences, they wanted a better way to uncover fantastic family fun to enjoy. After creating a

Facebook group that quickly grew to thousands of users and lots of brainstorming late into the night, Kidadl was

born”(Kidadl.com, 2020). Their business connected parents with providers of novel family experiences through an

online platform. In response to COVID-19, their connections with the parent community helped them identify an

opportunity to pivot. While their first instinct might have been to make a minor shift in the platform and connect

DOI: 10.1002/sej.1384

© 2020 Strategic Management Society

566 Strategic Entrepreneurship Journal. 2020;14:566–569.wileyonlinelibrary.com/journal/sej