Stakeholder enrolment and business network formation: a process perspective on technology innovation

Entrepreneurial healthcare firms rarely possess all requisite resources to successfully develop and deploy knowledge-intensive technological innovations. It is critical for such firms to understand, manage, and cultivate networks of partners to gain access to essential strategic resources and to shape the viability of resultant networks in a mutually beneficial way. Firms accomplish this through an intentional process of stakeholder enrolment under conditions of risk and uncertainty. This paper examines a multi-year case study about the development and deployment of a personal health management system (PHMS) within the US healthcare industry in order to illustrate how organisational goals shape stakeholder enrolment processes and how outcomes affect the way in which networks form, adapt, and evolve. This study integrates and draws upon business network adaptation and stakeholder enrolment processes to present a theoretical framework for conceptualising and understanding entrepreneurial networks for technological innovations.