Meaningful venturing: Examining how entrepreneurs generate meaning in life
提出“有意义的创业”概念，基于创业者动机和知识差异，构建了四条生成人生意义的路径，并解释每条路径中的权衡与解决方式，对创业者和研究者均有启发。
This paper introduces the concept of meaningful venturing, which refers to entrepreneurial action that generates a sense of meaning in life for the entrepreneur. Although entrepreneurs have considerable freedom to create meaning in life through their venturing, they appear to struggle to do so. To address this tension, we theorize about how entrepreneurs can generate meaningful venturing and the tradeoffs that may arise during this process. The emerging framework of meaningful venturing offers four pathways based on differences in nascent entrepreneurs’ motivation and knowledge. For each pathway, we explain the tradeoffs that the focal entrepreneur is most likely to experience between the three facets of meaning in life. We then explain how each entrepreneur might resolve these tradeoffs to generate fully-meaningful venturing by taking specific schema-enhancing action that would be less effective for the other entrepreneurs. Overall, the framework contributes to the entrepreneurship literature by providing new insights into how meaningful venturing manifests, why entrepreneurs exploring the same opportunity may experience different tradeoffs, and how different entrepreneurs might generate fully-meaningful venturing. Additionally, we offer possibilities for future research at the intersection of meaningful venturing, and the literatures on entrepreneurial identity, well-being, and passion. Executive summary Because entrepreneurship provides founders with the freedom to enact their personal vision, entrepreneurs have high potential to generate meaning in life for themselves through their venturing. However, they often struggle to do so. We introduce the concept of meaningful venturing to encompass entrepreneurial action that generates a sense of meaning in life for the entrepreneur. To theorize about how entrepreneurs generate meaning in life, we integrate the psychology literature on meaning in life with the entrepreneurship literature, emphasizing how entrepreneurial action theory (McMullen and Shepherd, 2006) can be a helpful theoretical lens for examining meaningful venturing. We develop a framework of meaningful venturing that contains four pathways based on nascent entrepreneurs' initial motivation and knowledge and the entrepreneurial action they engage in to reduce perceived uncertainty. Each pathway contains different tradeoffs between the three formative facets of meaning in life — a sense of purpose, mattering, and comprehension. These tradeoffs suggest unique ways for each entrepreneur to generate fully-meaningful venturing that would not be effective for the other entrepreneurs. Overall, the framework of meaningful venturing contributes to the entrepreneurship literature by providing new insights into how meaningful venturing manifests, what causes it, and how it can progress for different entrepreneurs. To expand the theoretical relevance of the meaningful venturing concept, we discuss the potential to integrate meaningful venturing with established literatures in entrepreneurship on identity, well-being, and passion. Through this research agenda, we highlight how meaningful venturing could offer exciting possibilities for entrepreneurship scholarship.