PhD Defence by Giorgia Scartozzi: Beyond economic impact: Technology entrepreneurship as transformative force for people, organizations and society

Giorgia Scartozzi will defend her PhD project "Beyond economic impact: Technology entrepreneurship as transformative force for people, organizations, and society".

Summary

Technological innovation and entrepreneurship are increasingly positioned as central mechanisms for addressing major societal and environmental challenges, from climate change and public health to social inequality and sustainable development. Policymakers and innovation­driven organizations promote entrepreneurship as a vehicle for generating solutions that extend beyond economic growth. Yet, despite these expectations, entrepreneurship research has largely continued to privilege economic performance and growth, offering limited insight into how entrepreneurial activity produces broader forms of impact, and under what conditions. As a result, the transformative potential of entrepreneurship is rarely empirically examined.

This gap is particularly pronounced in the context of technology entrepreneurship. While technology­based ventures are widely regarded as engines of progress and innovation, their broader consequences for individuals, organizations, and societal systems remain insufficiently understood. Research addressing social and environmental impact remains fragmented across subfields, lacking integrative frameworks that connect individual experiences, organizational dynamics, and institutional contexts. Against this backdrop, this Ph.D. thesis addresses the following research question:

RQ: How, and under what conditions, does technology entrepreneurship enable and shape impact beyond economic outcomes for individuals, organizations, and broader society?

To address this question, the thesis brings together three interrelated articles that collectively adopt a multi­level and multi­dimensional perspective on entrepreneurial impact.

• Article A establishes the conceptual foundation by examining how impact has been conceptualized and measured in the entrepreneurship literature. Through a systematic literature review and bibliometric analysis, it advances an integrative framework that captures the multi­dimensional and multi­level nature of entrepreneurial impact, while identifying key blind spots and fragmentation.
• Article B shifts the focus to the micro­level and investigates how engagement in technology entrepreneurship transforms academic entrepreneurs over time. Drawing on longitudinal qualitative data from interviews and diaries, it shows that entrepreneurial impact also unfolds inwardly, through dynamic interactions between identity formation and well­being, and that such transformations are neither uniformly positive nor linear.
• Article C examines the university entrepreneurial ecosystem by considering it as a socially constructed and interpretative space. Through interviews and visual mapping exercises, it suggests how alignment or misalignment between institutional narratives and actors’ lived experiences conditions the ecosystem’s capacity to support entrepreneurship and enable broader impact.

Overall, the thesis advances a holistic understanding of entrepreneurial impact by showing that its transformative potential is contingent on how entrepreneurship is conceptualized (Article A), how it is experienced and negotiated at the individual level (Article B), and how it can be institutionally supported or constrained (Article C). By integrating insights across levels of analysis, the thesis contributes to entrepreneurship research by repositioning impact as a central theoretical concern and by highlighting the importance of processes, contexts, and lived experiences alongside economic outcomes.

Keywords: technology entrepreneurship; entrepreneurial impact; well­being; identity; university entrepreneurial ecosystems; sensemaking

Master of ceremony

Live streaming of Giorgia's defence

Click here to follow online via ZOOM (link will follow)