Generativity: A System for Organizational Value Creation

Document Type : Research Paper

Authors

1 Department of Organizational Entrepreneurship ، Faculty of Entrepreneurship, University of Tehran, Iran

2 Department of Organizational Entrepreneurship, Faculty of Entrepreneurship, University of Tehran, Iran

10.22059/jed.2025.397772.654546

Abstract

Objective: Organizational entrepreneurship is one of the types of corporate entrepreneurship focused on the dimensions of intrapreneurship and strategic entrepreneurship and is vital and necessary for the emergence of innovation in organizational functional and performance strategies. Focusing on the conceptualization of entrepreneurship based on value creation, generativity is a socio-technical system whose design and implementation within any organization will lead to value creation and ultimately organizational entrepreneurship. The most important feature of the generativity phenomenon is the adoption of a systemic approach and the assumption of an open system in the dynamic economic equilibrium of the Austrian school, as the main economic school supporting entrepreneurship in focusing on the value-creating minds of creative and innovative individuals. In this regard, and in the entrepreneurship literature, an emerging discourse called generativity has been formed, and researchers, by adopting a systemic approach in the research study method of the creativity phenomenon, have sought to apply this concept in providing research and operational solutions for the development of organizational value creation. Describing what generativity is and how the generativity process works for all stakeholders in an organization will be a way to unlock the potential of that organization in achieving innovation goals for organizational entrepreneurship.

Method: Based on the lack of conceptual development of the phenomenon of generativity in the entrepreneurship literature and especially the discourse of organizational entrepreneurship, this study, while reviewing documents related to organizational generativity from the literature of entrepreneurship research, information and technology management, and organization management, by adopting an interdisciplinary study approach, has additionally reviewed the literature of the systems paradigm in order to identify the principles and characteristics mentioned for socio-technical systems. In this regard, the article, by adopting a qualitative and conceptual study approach to develop the concept of organizational generativity, has reviewed 23 related articles using the document meta-synthesis research method and has achieved its research findings by extracting analytical codes for the concept of organizational generativity in the form of platforms and socio-technical systems.

Findings: The article, while achieving a systematic analytical framework to identify the components, principles, and characteristics of socio-technical systems, has undertaken an analytical comparison of documentary texts from the literature of organizational management, information technology management, and entrepreneurship to explain and examine the systemic concept of the generativity phenomenon. The findings of this research, in addition to extracting an analytical framework of systems engineering methodology for socio-technical systems discussed in the humanities, point to a conceptual development framework for the phenomenon of organizational generativity and a reconceptualization of the structure of organizational generativity.

Conclusion: Finally, this study considers the concept of organizational generativity in the proposed framework as "directed to a socio-technical system that, with multiple configurations of the three elements of technical, process, and human, leads to emerging combinations of means-ends relationships in the form of system architecture as combinatorial innovations that supported by institutional and human enabling factors, while they are referred to as values.

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Main Subjects

References

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Journal of Entrepreneurship Development
Volume 18, Issue 5
February 2026
Pages 207-242

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