Abstract
Talent management deals with identification of key positions and filling them appropriately in order to improve an organization's performance (Bourdreau and Ram- stad, 2007; Collings and Mellahi, 2009). This involves the development of a talent pool and mechanisms to facilitate filling the positions and ensure ongoing commitment to the organization. Talent Management involves drawing from the external labor as well as from the “internal” market, i. e. talents that are already employed in some function with- in the organization (Vaiman et al. 2012).
A general question for talent management is when does it make more sense to pick talent and where to develop talent? This general question can also be applied to temporary organizations in an entrepreneurial context. Entrepreneurs need to find ways to develop their own potential through the accumulation of appropriate experiences, which should also help them to identify and pick talents for filling missing positions.
Temporary organizations are set up to pursue a specific project, once the project goals are reached or failed, the organization cedes to exist. Therefore in temporary or- ganizations, talent needs to be identified in external factor markets and be integrated in the project team. To some extent, we can conceive serial entrepreneurs, i. e. individuals that create multiple ventures sequentially (one after the other), as individuals continu- ously creating temporary organizations.
In this setting, one question arises: how can serial entrepreneurs creating tempo- rary organizations develop talent?