Abstract

How do e-commerce entrepreneurs acquire e-commerce technologies and associated competences to build their online retail organisations? How does e-commerce innovation take place in the technological economy? The answer to both of these questions is the same: through the process of qualification. In this paper I claim that entrepreneurial learning can be described from an object-oriented perspective as a process of qualification. Specifically it is e-commerce services as organisational components that become qualified via entrepreneurial learning, and this process of qualification is simultaneously an organisational process and a market process, connecting the site of the firm and the site of the market. The qualification process is also the mechanism by which e-commerce technologies become disseminated and individual ICT artefacts become constituted. Qualification thus emerges as a core driving force of the technological economy in which macro actors are conjoined with micro-enterprises.