About this blog

Bridging theory and practice

What this blog will try to accomplish is to bridge academic research on value co-creation and technological entrepreneurship, with practice in a knowledge-intensive context. Because research on these topics do exist - they are presented in journals dedicated to business, marketing, and entrepreneurship. The book that truly inspired this blog is “Disclosing New Worlds” by Charles Spinosa, Fernando Flores and Hubert L. Dreyfus (1999), which explores the concept of world disclosure in the context of entrepreneurship.

While having been completely immersed while studying chemical engineering, I had the chance to attend Entrepreneurship school for my fifth and last year of my engineering studies.The book that inspired this blog was a part of a course in technological entrepreneurship, and gave me very interesting insights on the “inner works” of entrepreneurship - not necessarily how “become” an entrepreneur, but certain sensitivities that can be heightened. Here is an excerpt of what the book tries to achieve, with highlights I think are important:

“This book does not present a theory of entrepreneurship, democratic action, and solidarity production. Nor is it a manual that will tell you how to succeed in these domains. Rather, we hope that this book will help you develop a skill that is essential for being an entrepreneur, a virtuous citizen, and a solidarity cultivator (..) Your ability to appreciate and engage in the ontological skill of disclosing new ways of being will, we hope, be expanded when you reexamine your old experiences(..) As you read, we ask you to keep the following questions in mind: Is the description true of some part of my life? In what situations have I experienced something like this? Are the authors seeing only part of a larger phenomenon whose overall shape they are missing? On the basis of experiences that I share with the authors, is what they say compelling?”

My goal is to link that knowledge together with technology-based entrepreneurship, value co-creation, and aesthetics, and to explore how knowledge-intensive ideas can become meaningful. I will attempt to paint a picture of the importance of empathy and fostering deeper connections in order to breathe new life into the creative process and gaining support from key stakeholders. By looking closer at “how” value can emerge in technology-based contexts, we can gain insights into how new technologies and products become integrated into practice. As with many cases before, looking at this field may prove fruitful in light of the adoption of participatory design, lean entrepreneurship, and other customer-centred approaches to innovation.

Who is involved?

I'm Arwin Zendehrokh, and I recently completed my masters at the School of Entrepreneurship in Uppsala. It was a great program that allowed me to apply my technical knowledge from my 4-year chemical engineering degree, specifically in materials, and integrate it with various aspects of business development.

I'm really interested in discussing topics such as aesthetics, value co-creation, knowledge-intensive businesses, materials science, deep-tech, and anything in-between.

This website was built with NextJS and React, so if you have any questions about that, I'm happy to chat about that too.