De Gruyter Handbook of Sociology of Innovation and Entrepreneurship

To build a new organization, entrepreneurs mobilize multiple types of resources including human, social, and financial capital. This chapter begins by summarizing classic research on social relationships and entrepreneurial resource mobilization. The chapter then proceeds to examine how the resource mobilization landscape has shifted with the rise of accelerators, crowdfunding, and pitching contests; the global diffusion of entrepreneurial finance; and the use of bootstrapping to reach proof points prior to seeking external investors. Lastly, the chapter analyzes how resource mobilization interacts with organizational scaling, which is characterized as entrepreneurial resource deployment. The two processes are in a reciprocal relationship, whereby anticipated scaling can support initial resource mobilization, while successful scaling enables future episodes of resource mobilization. The chapter provides an overview of the central challenges surrounding entrepreneurial resource deployment, highlighting opportunities this phenomenon surfaces for future research.