“It’s just a hobby! (isn’t it?)”: A case of digital entrepreneurship and its paradoxes

February 2017: the top three contenders in the AESlot Club, a slot car association in Lisbon, Portugal, used chassis from National Racers 3D (NR3D). Eight other contenders in the Top 25 of the Club also used NR3D chassis. In the national competition, 7 of the Top 10 racers also used NR3D chassis. As these results suggest, NR3D is the top provider of chassis for the slot car community in Portugal. NR3D constitutes a father-and-son hobby turned into a small informal business “born global” in its reach since its inception. Conceptually, the case of NR3D corresponds with Barley, Bechky and Miliken’s (2017, p.113) suggestion that in the context of entrepreneurship more study of hobbies that become businesses is required because, entrepreneurship “overlooks the idea that some people are able to turn their hobbies into paying businesses”. Because the idea is overlooked, the process it follows is unknown. With this research we aim to contribute to fill this gap. Management studies have long known that play can be serious (March, 1976; Schrage, 1999) and that understanding play can help to illuminate the emergence of creativity in the formation of new business ventures (Mainemelis & Ronson, 2009). More precisely, the case of NR3D is an example of a serendipitous business opportunity gestated from a small informal garage hobby to become a global business initiative. That hobbies may fuel businesses and careers may be less exceptional than is often thought, suggest Barley et al. (2017), hence the need to develop a conceptual understanding of how hobbies become business projects. We ask: how does a hobby become a business opportunity? We answer this question by studying the case of NR3D inductively. We contribute to the entrepreneurship literature by exploring the dialectic of play and work in the entrepreneurial process by exploring the role of paradox in the creation of businesses from hobbies and explain the importance of maintaining a dynamic balance between the two dimensions. We adopt an explanatory case study approach, approaching our research question with the case study method because it allows the tracking of a real process over time (Yin, 1994). We strive to remain as conceptually neutral as possible, adopting a courtroom approach to the evidence (Eisenhardt, 1989). Based upon this data we seek to understand the phenomenology of the process.