Making Connections: Linking Marketing Knowledge and Culture to Entrepreneurial Marketing S. V. Halliday University of Gloucestershire Abstract: Innovation is the lifeblood of entrepreneurship. Innovation, as a construct linking novelty and creativity and the ability to learn, is the key differentiator between entrepreneurial marketing and mainstream marketing. How can this mix be enabled? is a central question for entrepreneurial marketing as a discipline, or sub-discipline. This paper addresses the connections to be made between creating marketing knowledge and using it. To learn there needs to be shared meaning and these meanings have to be shared within and across organisations and their customers. These patterns of meanings therefore have to cross cultures. We propose a couple of conceptual models that link dynamic culture creation with learning, with external market information and signals. We ask the following questions: How can this be useful in enabling innovation? How might these issues be relevant to marketing entrepreneurship? In sum, how in product and service innovation it is possible to discern and develop patterns of meaning between the firm and its network of stakeholders. INTRODUCTION Increasingly the firm is seen as a social community, whose central function is the transfer of knowledge (Hampden-Turner, 1999, Kogut & Zander, 1993), or as a series of re-negotiated contracts (Kay, 1995), where managers, and therefore, marketers, are less rational planners and more ‘symbolic actors, whose primary function is to develop desirable patterns of meaning’ (Starkey, 1998, p.125). The marketing question is how desirable patterns of meaning can be understood and conveyed cross-culturally, both within the firm and to a range of stakeholders. In other words, there is a need for understanding to transcend cultural borders in terms of staff, suppliers and customers. This would appear to be the case regardless of size of firm. Indeed a smaller firm may be able to pay heed to this more easily. An entrepreneurial firm needs to continue to develop these patterns of meaning in order to continue to innovate. The flexibility required for success in start-up situations may be linked to the shared mindset required for successful learning. This need highlights the value of nurturing any latent capacity for learning and those skills that enable and motivate learning, in order to develop shared understandings of all the cultures crossed. Western firms often miss the pivotal place of this ability to learn. For Hamel, Doz and Prahalad (1989) lament that where: the Japanese have generally learnt more than their UK or US partners, this is not due to oriental deviousness, but to occidental indolence. The key to competing through collaboration is to have the mindset to learn. (p.147) 1