PORTFOLIO ENTREPRENEURSHIP AND RESOURCE ORCHESTRATION Q1 CAROLINE BAERT , 1 MIGUEL MEULEMAN, 1,2 * MARION DEBRUYNE 1 and MIKE WRIGHT 2,3 1 Vlerick Business School, Ghent, Belgium 2 Imperial College Business School, Imperial College London, London, U.K. 3 Ghent University, Ghent, Belgium Research summary: This study examines the role of resource orchestration for the exploration and exploitation of opportunities through portfolio entrepreneurship. Adopting a single-case study approach, we identify eight distinctive resource orchestration subprocesses that we group into three aggregate resource orchestration processes that enable the development and exploitation of a set of resources and capabilities across a portfolio of ventures. Our findings extend the literature on enduring entrepreneurship by building theory on how resource orchestration across a portfolio of ventures facilitates the emergence of synergies when exploring and exploiting opportunities. Managerial summary: This study examines the processes through which an entrepreneur structures and rearranges resources and capabilities across multiple firms as he/she grows a portfolio of firms to engage in the exploration and exploitation of market opportunities. Entrepreneurs can obtain insights for building their businesses from the eight processes we identify; these processes allow entrepreneurs to develop synergies as they create and put to use a set of resources and capabilities across their businesses. Through these synergies, entrepreneurs can share, transform, and harmonize resources and capabilities across their firms. This can enable them to continuously and simultaneously explore and exploit market opportunities, which ultimately facilitates the sustainability of their businesses. INTRODUCTION Entrepreneurship involves identifying and exploiting opportunities in a setting characterized by uncertainty (Shane and Venkataraman, 2000). The strategic entrepreneurship perspective has stressed the need to focus on how firms create change by exploring opportunities in the external environment while at the same time exploiting those opportunities to sustain value creation across time (Hitt et al., 2001, 2011). Some firms and individuals consistently engage in high levels of entrepreneurial behavior through constant renewal and repeated acts of entrepreneurial activity such that entrepreneurship endures across time and systems. A key question that arises then is what processes and organizational practices help firms and individuals achieve enduring entrepreneurship? The development of a group of new ventures in the context of portfolio entrepreneurship provides an opportunity to investigate these processes and organizational practices. Portfolio entrepreneurship has proven to be a valuable entrepreneurial Keywords: portfolio entrepreneur; resource orchestration; exploration/exploitation; enduring entrepreneurship; strategic entrepreneurship *Correspondence to: Miguel Meuleman, Vlerick Business School, Reep 1, 9000 Ghent, Belgium. E-mail: Miguel. Meuleman@vlerick.com. Strategic Entrepreneurship Journal Strat. Entrepreneurship J., ••: ••–•• (2016) Published online in Wiley Online Library (wileyonlinelibrary.com). DOI: 10.1002/sej Copyright © 2016 Strategic Management Society Journal Code Article ID Dispatch: 16.07.16 CE: S E J 1 2 2 7 No. of Pages: 25 ME: 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10 11 12 13 14 15 16 17 18 19 20 21 22 23 24 25 26 27 28 29 30 31 32 33 34 35 36 37 38 39 40 41 42 43 44 45 46 47 48 49 50 51 52 53 54 55 56 59 60 61 62 63 64 65 66 67 68 69 70 71 72 73 74 75 76 77 78 79 80 81 82 83 84 85 86 87 88 89 90 91 92 93 94 95 96 97 98 99 100 101 102 103 104 105 106 107 108 109 110 111 112 113