SEAM as Infrastructure for Entrepreneurship Research

Entrepreneurship is often told through success stories, bold ideas, and fast-moving ventures. Yet one important question remains difficult to answer with precision: what do entrepreneurs do over time as they build, adapt and try to sustain a venture?

At Webster Vienna Private University (WVPU), this question is becoming part of a broader research agenda in entrepreneurship led by Dr. Kevin Reuther, Associate Professor of Entrepreneurship and Innovation.

His work focuses on entrepreneurship, innovation and transformation, with particular interest in how entrepreneurial ecosystems, support mechanisms and organizational contexts shape venture development, performance and impact. Across this agenda, one recurring theme is heterogeneity: entrepreneurs, ventures and support environments differ substantially, and understanding these differences is essential for both research and practice.

A key part of this work is the development of the SEAM Research Institute as a data-driven entrepreneurship institute at WVPU. Through this project, WVPU is building a research profile that connects international, national and university-based collaboration with practice-relevant, evidence-based entrepreneurship research. This includes work with colleagues and partners investigating entrepreneurial ecosystems, entrepreneurship support, venture performance and venture impact across different types of entrepreneurs and ventures, including social, sustainable, technology-oriented and cultural entrepreneurship.

SEAM, the Systemic Entrepreneurship Activity Model, plays a central role in this effort. It was developed to make entrepreneurial development visible at the level of observed activity and to turn entrepreneurial practice into a source of systematic evidence. Rather than looking only at outcomes or retrospective accounts, SEAM allows researchers to study venture development through what entrepreneurs actually do over time.

Reuther leads this work together with Dr. Yngve Dahle through the SEAM Research Institute. Dahle, Associate Professor of Entrepreneurship at the Hauge School of Management, serial entrepreneur and co-founder of Entreprenerdy AS and Sosolo AS, has played a central role in developing the digital system on which the SEAM dataset is based. Together, Reuther and Dahle are advancing an approach that connects entrepreneurial practice, digital observation and evidence-based entrepreneurship.

Why SEAM Matters

Entrepreneurship research has long been strong in concepts, surveys and case studies, it has had fewer opportunities to work with large-scale, comparable process data on venture development. Many established datasets help explain entrepreneurial attitudes, founder characteristics, or broader ecosystem conditions. Much less is known about the concrete sequence of activities through which opportunities are explored, business models are shaped, networks are built and ventures either survive or fail.

SEAM addresses this gap by structuring venture development as a systemic process and captures entrepreneurial activity through a digital Entrepreneurship Management System. The dataset includes more than 40,000 entrepreneurial projects from over 100 countries and more than two million logged activities collected since 2015.

What makes SEAM distinctive is its process perspective. It allows entrepreneurship to be studied not as a single moment or static profile, but as an evolving sequence of decisions, entries, revisions and interactions. This makes it possible to observe how venture development unfolds over time and how different pathways are associated with different outcomes.

Research and Teaching Opportunities at WVPU

At WVPU, this creates strong opportunities for research, teaching and collaboration. SEAM supports research on entrepreneurial ecosystems, support programs such as incubators and accelerators, entrepreneurial motivation and different forms of venture performance and impact. It is especially useful for studying how different entrepreneur types develop in different ways and under different support conditions.

The data also allow for a broad methodological range, including longitudinal analysis, natural language processing, network analysis and configurational approaches such as Qualitative Comparative Analysis. This makes it possible to combine qualitative richness with analytical scale in ways that are still relatively rare in the field.

For WVPU, this means more than access to an interesting dataset. It creates a foundation for an internationally connected research profile in entrepreneurship and innovation, for collaboration across disciplines and institutions and for research-led teaching that brings students closer to real entrepreneurial processes. In this way, SEAM supports the development of evidence-based entrepreneurship research and strengthens the connection between academic inquiry and entrepreneurial practice.

In this sense, SEAM is more than a model and more than a dataset. It is an infrastructure for entrepreneurship research and teaching and an important building block in shaping WVPU’s emerging profile in data-driven, practice-relevant entrepreneurship and innovation research also supports broader inquiry into economic and socio-political change.