Entrepreneurial Co-Pilot Lab is rooted in Entrepreneurial Action Theory (EAT), bridging Chinese entrepreneurship scholarship with global practitioners.
"Not only to inform — but to make action possible."
A unified framework developed by Chen Sirui, Lin Nan (蔺楠), and Yu Xiaoxuan at Shanghai's global innovation ecosystem, published in Foreign Economics & Management (2025). EAT grounds entrepreneurship in three interlocking dimensions:
Entrepreneurship is fundamentally a subjective act — the entrepreneur as conscious, reflexive agent. Not a passive responder to opportunity, but an active shaper of reality.
Action unfolds within specific institutional, relational, and temporal contexts. Chinese entrepreneurship is distinct from Silicon Valley — and EAT makes that distinctiveness analytically tractable.
Entrepreneurship is a lived process of iterated commitment, learning, and transformation. Not a one-time event of opportunity discovery, but an ongoing path of collective action.
"The first time Chinese entrepreneurship scholarship has its own named theoretical language."— On EAT, Foreign Economics & Management, 2025
The platform organizes 187 concepts and 20 lectures into four interconnected modules — from theoretical foundation through action and governance, to the inner life of the entrepreneur.
Risk & uncertainty, opportunity discovery vs. creation, effectuation, bricolage, social capital — the conceptual scaffolding every entrepreneur needs.
How entrepreneurs actually mobilize resources: bootstrapping, venture capital, institutional arbitrage, legitimacy, resource pyramids.
Cap table, dual-class shares, board governance, agency cost — how founders keep control while growing the company.
The inner life of the entrepreneur: sense-making, conscience, meaning, awakening. Where Chinese philosophy meets modern entrepreneurship.
Most platforms tell you about entrepreneurship. We make entrepreneurship possible. Three layers of affordance:
Clear concepts, comparison tables, decision frameworks — see the structure of opportunity.
Cap table templates, legitimacy diagnostic, action checklists — actually do it.
Da-Chuang-Zhi Park (大创智园区), Oxford Said Business School, scholarly network — connect with fellow travelers.
Whether you are an entrepreneur in Shanghai, a scholar at Oxford, a policy maker in Brussels, or a founder in Nairobi — this platform is built for the global entrepreneurship community.