Industry Boundary Perspectives and Opportunity Recognition within Creative Professional Service Firms

The aim of this paper is to extend insight into entrepreneurship within creative professional service firms (creative PSFs). Entrepreneurs within creative PSFs are both artists and professionals within a commercial organization. This peculiarity creates a dichotomy across firms within the sector depending on whether their capability development is more oriented towards developing novel services or efficient services (Canavan et al., 2013) for their clients and this is influenced by the driving motivations of the underlying entrepreneurs. Our preliminary research exploring entrepreneurship within creative PSFs suggests that entrepreneurs have varying perspectives of the boundaries of their industry in terms of who they are targeting and who benefits from their service. Our intuition guided by this preliminary research, together with calls by scholars within the field to explain how industry boundaries facilitate the recognition and exploitation of opportunities (Hoskisson et al., 2011) provided the basis for our study within the context of creative PSFs. Exploring this phenomenon within the creative PSF sector is particularly relevant and interesting because of the dichotomous conflict between art and business which enables richer theorizing and contextual insights to emerge through cross case comparison.