Event-Based Entrepreneurship
The Event-Based Perspective in Entrepreneurship: Time, Shocks, and Experience
The landscape of entrepreneurship research has long been dominated by static models—looking at enduring products, permanent brick-and-mortar storefronts, or long-term industry trends. However, a major theoretical pivot treats time and context not as background noise, but as the main event. By looking at the intersection of two foundational papers on this topic, we can map out the Event-Based Perspective in Entrepreneurship.
Summary of the Theory
The event-based perspective shifts the entrepreneurial focus from stable environments and physical assets to the dynamic, time-bound impact of discrete occurrences. This theory operates through two distinct yet complementary lenses:
- Events as Contextual Shocks: Events are external, unexpected, and bounded occurrences (such as crises or natural disasters) that radically disrupt the status quo, generating subsequent chains of entrepreneurial action and shifting individual self-efficacy (Rauch & Hulsink, 2023).
- Events as Venture Foundations: Event-Based Entrepreneurship (EBE) is the intentional creation and scaling of ventures built entirely around delivering temporary, experience-centric occasions (like festivals, conferences, or sports tournaments) that require intense orchestration of diverse stakeholders before the opportunity expires (Fisher, Josefy, & Neubert, 2024).
Combined, the theory shows that entrepreneurship is fundamentally punctuated by time, requiring unique mechanisms to navigate or exploit brief windows of intense activity.
Detailed Explanation
1. Shifting the Lens: Events as Environmental Drivers
According to Rauch and Hulsink (2023), traditional entrepreneurship literature frequently utilizes a "levels" approach, assessing environmental variables across broad blocks of time. The event-based perspective breaks away from this by looking at proximal causal mechanisms.
- Event Characteristics: To deeply influence entrepreneurship, an event must be discrete, bounded in space and time, unexpected, and strong enough to produce systemic change.
- The Chain Reaction: Rather than viewing a crisis as a single flat variable, this view treats it as a catalyst. A major event alters the context in real-time, triggering a cascade of subsequent events and forcing entrepreneurs to adapt to shifting moments of feasibility and desire.
2. The Venture Blueprint: Event-Based Entrepreneurship (EBE)
While Rauch and Hulsink look at how events impact entrepreneurs, Fisher, Josefy, and Neubert (2024) look at how entrepreneurs create events. They define EBE through three core dimensions:
- Experience-Centricity: The venture’s value proposition is an intangible, shared experience rather than a physical commodity or permanent service line.
- Time-Bound Boundaries: The venture has an explicit, strict expiration date (e.g., a specific weekend where everything must peak perfectly).
- Platform & Stakeholder Dynamics: An event acts as a temporary platform. Value is only captured if a diverse array of stakeholders—including audiences, participants, sponsors, and media—simultaneously commit and interact.
To pull this off, EBE relies on two critical operational phases:
- Founding via Hype: Because the venture doesn't exist in a tangible form yet, founders must generate massive initial commitment using projective narratives—essentially spinning a compelling story of what the experience will look like to get stakeholders to buy in early.
- Scaling via Collective Identity: Once the first iteration of the event concludes, scaling the venture for future iterations relies entirely on the post-event hype and the degree to which participants feel a sense of collective identity rooted in their shared engagement.
Detailed Example: The Wilderness Mud Run
To see both sides of this theory in action, imagine an entrepreneur operating in a region unexpectedly hit by a sudden change—such as a series of eco-tourism zoning updates (an unexpected, bounded event creating a shockwave of new context, per Rauch & Hulsink, 2023).
Spotting an opportunity, the entrepreneur decides to found an extreme obstacle course race called "The Wilderness Mud Run." This is a textbook example of Event-Based Entrepreneurship (Fisher et al., 2024):
- The Founding (Projective Narratives): A year before any mud is trodden, the entrepreneur has no physical product. They use high-energy videos, bold social media messaging, and projective storytelling to convince athletes to register, local vendors to supply food trucks, and corporate brands to sponsor the finish line. They are aligning a multi-sided platform purely on a promise.
- The Event (Time-Bound Experience): The entire venture stakes its capital and reputation on a single 48-hour weekend. The value created is the grueling, adrenaline-pumping experience of the race itself. Temporary organizational teams deploy and disband rapidly to manage the chaos.
- The Scaling (Collective Identity): On Monday morning, the event is over, but the business isn't dead. Participants change their profile pictures to photos of themselves covered in mud, sporting finish-line medals. This shared collective identity and the lingering digital hype lay the groundwork for the entrepreneur to successfully scale the brand, opening ticket sales for next year's iteration.
Discussion of Recent Research
Recent advancements in the field highlight a deliberate movement toward integrating time, context, and temporary organizing into mainstream entrepreneurship literature.
Rauch and Hulsink (2023) call out the historical lack of a differentiated analysis concerning macro-disruptions. Their work sets a framework for analyzing how specific temporal shocks alter the trajectory of business creation, challenging future researchers to move away from static, cross-sectional data collection.
Building on these temporal foundations, Fisher, Josefy, and Neubert (2024) formalize EBE by merging insights from stakeholder theory, platform strategy, and temporary organizational forms. Their research establishes specific propositions around how trust and hype are manufactured out of thin air. Collectively, this recent wave of literature provides scholars with the tools to map out how ventures survive and thrive when their entire runway is defined by a clock ticking down to zero.
References
Fisher, G., Josefy, M. A., & Neubert, E. (2024). Event-based entrepreneurship. Journal of Business Venturing, 39(1), 106366.
Rauch, A., & Hulsink, W. (2023). Just one damned thing after another: Towards an event-based perspective of entrepreneurship. Entrepreneurship Theory and Practice, 47(3), 662-681.
How I Started a Creative Event Business from Scratch (No Experience, No Plan)
Featuring Lex (Fosforita) • Published: May 2025 • Source: YouTube
In this personal narrative, creator Lex (Fosforita) walks through the organic evolution of her creative event rental and balloon design business, Lunona, based in Central Florida. Initially sparked as a casual creative outlet for her mother during the pandemic, the venture illustrates an emergent, action-first path to business ownership rather than a traditional planning-first model.
Lex details the progressive phases of their entrepreneurship timeline: navigating a three-year "limbo" phase as a part-time side hustle while maintaining primary full-time employment, managing the structural shock of a corporate layoff, and systematically building execution capabilities by acquiring technical skills in web design, Google Search Console, and targeted ad spend. From a strategic management perspective, the case emphasizes that operational capabilities often develop through active experimentation, highlighting the physical demands of event-based operations and the logistical benefits of leveraging a family-based or collaborative ownership structure to withstand operational chaos.
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