The chapters of this dissertation are focused on the role that social networks play, within the fields of entrepreneurship and innovation, as crucial playfields in which networking activities occur and outcomes are generated. The chapters constitute individual, free-standing papers united by a common theme.
In the first chapter I study Silk Road, an online community complementing a pioneering illegal marketplace situated on the Dark Web, with the aim of understanding who are the individuals most likely to become innovators in online communities. In doing so, I distinguish between users’ social and cultural embeddedness, and investigate how these affect the likelihood of individuals becoming - in particular - linguistic innovators. Mostly relying on insights from sociolinguistics and the literatures on online communities and innovation in organisations, and exploiting network techniques and advanced text-mining methods, I analyse the interplay between the network’s structure and its content, providing fresh evidence concerning the long-held notion that individuals who are social brokers benefit more from recombining diverse contents, while socially constrained ones are better off building on a tighter set of contents. Additionally, I find that while cultural “norm-breaking” does increase one’s probability of introducing linguistic innovations, too much deviation from the cultural norms of the community eventually harms one’s potential to do so.
In the second chapter, I study how entrepreneurs make networking attempts within the social structure defined by the London entrepreneurial ecosystem’s network. I define a novel and meaningful category of networking behaviours, which I label “showcasing” behaviours: I argue that through showcasing, founders can send implicit or explicit signals in terms of their competence and their belonging to the entrepreneurial community, which in turn will affect their visibility and legitimacy in the community...