Necessity Entrepreneurship as a Process: A Response to “Beyond the Individual,” “Feedback as a Mechanism,” and “Toward Communalism”

In our recently published paper. we developed a theoretical framework for understanding how individuals transition out of necessity entrepreneurship and into more voluntary forms of venturing (Coff-man, Cottle & Sunny, 2025). Three thoughtful commentaries on the paper (Nolan, 2025; Smolka, Bacq & Heugens, 2025: Xia, Wang. Yan & Bia, 2025) highlighted the need to further delineate between the individual entrepreneur, and necessity entrepreneurship as a process that the individual enacts. In the original manuscript, we conceptualized individual-level motivations and venture-level processes as existing on parallel but interwoven tracks. Our model focused on the individual level. and we constrained our commentary on the entrepreneurial process accordingly. However, our work has significant implications for understanding the characteristics of the venture-level processes that define necessity entrepreneurship as a distinct category of entrepreneurship. In this note, we address some of these implications and attend to many of the points raised in the response articles along the way.