Venture Builders: Organizing Strategic Entrepreneurship Support

This thesis aims to add to our knowledge about venture builders and how they may help extend the understanding of entrepreneurship support organizations. Venture builders are a novel type of for-profit organization that create, develop, and support new ventures. Although scantly researched, venture builders have garnered increasing interest from practitioners and scholars in recent years. They initiate and organize new ventures using structured methodologies, controlling and committing resources, and orchestrating networks to rapidly foster successful businesses. Additionally, this thesis includes four appended papers that shed light on different aspects of venture builders. Theoretically, this thesis contributes to the entrepreneurship support literature by examining venture builders as for-profit actors with a strategic intent to engage in new venture creation. Unlike traditional entrepreneurial support organizations, venture builders act with urgency, use resources effectively, and leverage their business networks to maximize return on investment. Thus, they represent what this thesis refers to as a distinct type of entrepreneurship support organization.