Entrepreneurial Knowing: Connecting Knowledge management and Intellectual Capital in Early-Stage Startups

Abstract

This study examines how insecurity forms entrepreneurial knowing in early-stage startups and how knowledge management conditions the development of intellectual capital, with a focus on information behavior in resource-constrained settings. Based on 11 semi-structured interviews with early-stage entrepreneurs, the study explores how insecurity influences information-seeking, belief formation, and testing processes. Entrepreneurial knowing is driven by market hybridity, identity complexity, disciplinary ambiguity, and access constraints, creating epistemic fragmentation. Founders concentrate information processing and interpretation, while shared understanding across boundaries is limited. Knowledge Management facilitates information flow, enabling access, trust, and shared interpretation, but also introducing misalignment and filtered knowledge exchange. Belief formation trusts on ambiguous information, whereas testing is constrained by socially structured barriers. Intellectual capital arises enthusiastically through these socially refereed information behaviors. The study highlights the active, socially conditioned nature of knowledge in startups, clarifies how insecurity shapes information behavior, and validates Knowledge management and intellectual capital relationships are dependent with each another.