Samaggi Abstract Competition 2022

Wisuwat Wannamakok


Session

02-19
10:45
20min
From Maker Movement and Democratized Innovation to Entrepreneurship: Exploring the Roles of Common-Pool Resources, Opportunity Creation, Startup Incubation, and Bricolage
Wisuwat Wannamakok

This study investigates how makerspaces may serve as the cradle of many groundbreaking technologies at the early stages of development and subsequently become the foundation for numerous entrepreneurial businesses. Although makerspaces have increased rapidly and become a global phenomenon in recent years, little research has been done to understand the entrepreneurial activities driven by the maker's movement. Drawing on the view of innovation commons, the study explores how innovation resources in makerspaces affect individual makers’ entrepreneurial intentions and behaviors. Through a systematic review of user innovation and maker movement literature, we establish a four-dimensional typology of common-pool resources in the amateur innovators’ community: technology availability, community bonding, social connectedness, and psychological capital. The research model was empirically examined on the sample of 718 makers receiving from a questionnaire-based survey across multiple countries using both online and offline surveys. The results show that the common-pool resources in makerspaces could encourage grassroots innovators’ entrepreneurship through facilitating the amateur technology enthusiasts’ opportunity creation. Interestingly, the technology and social resources available in makerspaces do not influence the amateurs’ opportunity creation and entrepreneurship. In contrast, community bonding and psychological capital perceived by makers are pivotal to their entrepreneurial intentions. Through testing the moderated mediating model, our results imply that the three dimensions of the common-pool resources positively impact the amateur innovators’ opportunity creation and entrepreneurial intentions when startup incubation and entrepreneurial bricolage are at high levels. Besides, a multi-group analysis is also adopted to examine the differences between American and non-American makers’ perspectives. This study adds to the existing literature by offering a new perspective to understand amateur hobbyists’ entrepreneurship and how user innovation shapes the future industrial dynamics as well as impacts the producer-driven paradigm of technology development.

H1: Economics and Business Studies
Economics and Business Studies (H1)