A paper co-authored by Anuradha Sharma (IIMB) and Prof. R. Srinivasan (IIMB) was presented at the EURAM Online Conference 2026 by Ms Sharma. The paper introduces and theorises the concept of ‘enabling entrepreneurs’, a category of commercial actors who design their business models specifically around empowering other ventures that face capability constraints.
While entrepreneurship literature has long explored prosocial developmental roles, this study addresses a gap: the under-theorised phenomenon of commercial entrepreneurs enabling other commercial ventures. Drawing on an external enablement framework, the paper examines how enabling entrepreneurs deploy the concepts of opacity and agent intensity to activate action in constrained ventures, creating synergistic value in the process. Using a qualitative methodology, the study contributes new mechanisms and conditions to external enablement literature and opens a novel theoretical lane within entrepreneurship research