EE ROLES

EE roles also concern venture-level effects of EEs but represent more abstract conceptualizations than EE mechanisms. EE roles capture the influence of activated EE mechanisms on individual ventures across various stages of venture creation, organizational development, or other processes of economic activity development. For example, triggering a venture creation journey, affecting its continued development trajectory, and/or shaping the substance of what a business is and does. It can also affect eventual outcomes, but not necessarily exactly in the way the agents anticipated when they undertook artifact- and process-shaping actions based on the EE. This distinction between shaping and outcome-enhancing roles is an important focus for EE scholarship as it speaks to potential discrepancies between the anticipated mechanisms that agents act on and the effective mechanisms that influence outcomes. The table below lists, defines and exemplifies our updated (2025) conceptualization of EE Roles.