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personal manifest destiny.

Theme 7: The Act of Realizing their Vision

The act of creating their new venture was not typically consistent with how they envisioned the process ensuing. The new venture creation experience ultimately resulted in a realization of difficulties and cultural adjustments in the transition from scientist to businessperson and employee to business owner. Various statements detailed the feelings of disenfranchisement including “I was not accepted at first...” or “My friends thought I was mistaken...” and “I felt miserable and all alone...” Several of these entrepreneurs stated their surprise at this aspect of the new venture creation process. Fear and trepidation was pervasive in statements such as “I stared out the window and wondered what I had done ...” or “I lost a lot of sleep in those early years...”

The cause of this disenfranchisement rested in the myriad of business-related difficulties that ensued. This is evidenced in statements like, “The personnel problems were frequent...” or “Cash flow was killing us...” This resulted in a personal appraisal that oftentimes led to an acknowledgement of their lack of preparedness, lack of business adroitness, or the many mistakes made in the managerial aspects of starting a business. This became tangible in the consequences and penalties caused by their lack of business knowledge. Various stories of uninformed accounting decisions, inadequate financial choices, mistaken human resource judgments, unapprised operational dilemmas, and other decisions indicated this theme. This theme was comparatively pervasive among the group as they sought to attain sustainability.

DISCUSSION AND IMPLICATIONS

Themes are presented to facilitate understanding of the raw data and these themes can be synthesized. This provides further clarity of the themes in a manner that facilitates enhanced epistemological meaning using the social constructivist approach. Theme synthesis is consistent with Husserl's (1931) concept of phenomenological reduction. This consolidation involves an abstraction of the lived experience because this structural portrayal of the emergent themes resides outside of the individual experiences presented in the data (Patton, 2002).

Dicsussion of the Research Findings

It is perhaps less relevant the derivation of the decision to engage in the entrepreneurial process as the meaning to the phenomenon. In all cases, the textural descriptions reflect an inward focusing of the entrepreneur, which led to a choice to change their lifeworld. The phenomenon amounted to a shift in perspective from looking to others for sustaining their security, flexibility, or control. This suggests that their vision for the future was, in some measure, influential in realizing the phenomenon.

First, each scientist reached his or her decision based on his or her vision that a better outcome would be achieved through engaging in the entrepreneurial process. Various statements led the researcher to conclude that a mental cost/benefit equation aided the decision. This fit with the scientist's quantitative understandings because this is how decisions are made in their lifeworld. Most of the scientists-turned-entrepreneurs discovered that they had underestimated the cost side of the equation as detailed in their comments. This means the phenomenon started with a consideration of life