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entrepreneurship research paper example

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entrepreneurship research paper example

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A study on effect of entrepreneurship on entrepreneurial intention: Focusing on ICT majors

Asia Pacific Journal of Innovation and Entrepreneurship

ISSN : 2398-7812

Article publication date: 7 August 2017

The purpose of this study is to show effect of entrepreneurship on entrepreneurial intention. Currently, the long-term global economic crisis is accelerating, and the concerns for future uncertainties are spreading throughout our society. The ICT majors in Busan region are no exception so that business start-up is being considered as a new alternative to survive and grow in such uncertain environments at home or abroad. That is, business start-ups and entrepreneurship are being emphasized as a strategy that individuals can change not only one’s own life but also the fate of a region and even the destiny of a country.

Design/methodology/approach

For this reason, the youth start-ups based on social networks and leadership have become the focus of our social concern along with the entrepreneurship that can actively cope with the ever-changing global environments. Thus, some of the major factors (i.e. innovation, enterprise and risk-taking) which should be considered when promoting the entrepreneurial intention of the ICT majors in Busan region have been researched, as well as the concept of entrepreneurship itself.

This demonstrates that young people will be able to successfully lead their start-up companies through their enterprising spirit, networks and leadership and learning with firm determination. Therefore, it is important to make such a network and leadership-based entrepreneurship become foundational in overcoming the long-term Korean economic depression; surviving in such an opaque situation; leading the growth and development of Busan region; and becoming the driving force for national growth, by developing the unique characteristics and strength of the students.

Originality/value

In this regard, this study will be useful for understanding the entrepreneurship of the ICT majors in Busan region more while contributing to the invigoration of a creative economy by studying the factors essential for the entrepreneurship and development of networks and leadership.

  • Entrepreneurship
  • Entrepreneurial intention

Park, C. (2017), "A study on effect of entrepreneurship on entrepreneurial intention: Focusing on ICT majors", Asia Pacific Journal of Innovation and Entrepreneurship , Vol. 11 No. 2, pp. 159-170. https://doi.org/10.1108/APJIE-08-2017-024

Emerald Publishing Limited

Copyright © 2017, Cheolwoo Park.

Published in the Asia Pacific Journal of Innovation and Entrepreneurship . Published by Emerald Publishing Limited. This article is published under the Creative Commons Attribution (CC BY 4.0) licence. Anyone may reproduce, distribute, translate and create derivative works of this article (for both commercial & non-commercial purposes), subject to full attribution to the original publication and authors. The full terms of this licence may be seen at http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/legalcode

1. Introduction

Currently, the concerns for uncertain future due to a long-term economic depression and global economic crisis are spreading throughout our society. Moreover, along with the trend in industrial scale downsizing and profit generation with a small manpower cost, concerns about the increase of youth unemployment due to jobless growth are deepening. According to National Statistical Office of Korea, the youth unemployment rate reached the highest record of 9.8 per cent in 2016. This was the value 0.6 per cent higher than the same rate in 2015. Many countries agree that the business start-ups are the solution for youth unemployment so that our government is also expending much effort in developing the policies to stop the increase in youth unemployment rate and create more jobs by instilling youth entrepreneurship and creating a positive atmosphere for business start-ups in this grave period of low economic growth. This method is important and also useful in maintaining steady economic and social growth. The young people at present are living in an era where a variety of new businesses are being continuously launched through internet media, and industries are developing according to the stretch of the imagination for contents and software. Thus, this study attempts to identify what factors of entrepreneurship affect innovative start-ups like ICT-based businesses that are quite effective in creating jobs.

2. Research background

2.1 concept of entrepreneurship.

Since the dawn of the twenty-first century, the importance of entrepreneurship started to be recognized as an element of promoting economic growth so that the researches for finding how entrepreneurship contributes to the growth have become active. The definitions mainly used for the studies related to entrepreneurship are as following: “Seizing an opportunity regardless of available resources” ( Stevenson and Jarillo, 1986 ); “The way of inferring, thinking and behaving focusing on overall approach and specific leadership based on the importance of recognizing the opportunities” ( Timmons, 1999 ); and “The spirit of challenge and adventure that commercializes the opportunities seized at risk” (Peter F. Drucker). Meanwhile, Hisrich and Peters (1998) described entrepreneurship as a discernment that an enterpriser considers necessary, rather than defining it as his/her psychological state. Song (2011) defines the term as an enterpriser’s will to create a new business through management innovation by showing his/her challenging spirit. Park and Ahn (2016) explained to the young CEOs that entrepreneurship is an important factor in improving their business performances, and they need to expend the effort to cultivate their business competency. Although the definition of entrepreneurship varied depending on the situations which individual business, country or generation faced, the definition mainly used for recent studies is Miller’s (1983) concept of definition which states that entrepreneurship is a behavior that re-combines or re-distributes resources with innovativeness, enterprising spirit and risk-taking mind to create a new value. The core of entrepreneurship is a positive energy that challenges or changes existing conventions by acutely responding to the changing environments with an innovative and creative mind. Cultivating entrepreneurship for young people will be effective in solving the problems concerning youth unemployment, low and falling economic growth rates while contributing to Korean economic growth.

2.2 Elements of entrepreneurship

There are varied opinions about the elements of entrepreneurship among the scholars. Schumpeter (1939) defined entrepreneurship as the driving force of modernization having the characteristics such as innovation-seeking spirit, pro-activeness and risk-taking tendencies. Lassen et al. (2006) distinguished the characteristics of entrepreneurship as autonomy, adventurousness, innovativeness and future-orientation. Based on the recent detailed and systematic researches conducted for the nature of entrepreneurship, the definition of entrepreneurship by Miller (1983) , who has claimed that the elements such as pro-activeness, innovativeness and risk-taking consist entrepreneurship, became the dominant view. Thus, this study also considers these three characteristics as core elements.

2.2.1 Innovativeness.

Van de Ven (1992) defined that innovativeness, which can be regarded as the most critical element of entrepreneurship, is an organizational and cultural management to recognize the necessity of new ideas and behaviors, while Lumpkin and Dess (1996) maintained that it is a crucial element for promoting new products and services, novel experience, technological leadership, R&Ds for new methods and creativeness. Meanwhile, Lee (1999) argued that innovativeness is one that an organization emphasizes the technological innovation or actively conducts product designing, market survey as well as product advertisement through product or market innovation based on process innovation and experimental management technique. Kang (2011) suggested that innovation is one of the elements of entrepreneurial strategies which can be an important means of promoting investments for consistent development of new technologies and improvement of products to gain a competitive advantage. Therefore, with all of these definitions and contentions, innovativeness should be considered as a critical element of entrepreneurship with which companies can adapt themselves to the rapidly changing environment in the age of forth industrial revolution.

2.2.2 Risk-taking.

Risk-taking is one’s or organization’s desire to actively capture and pursue opportunities in an uncertain environment accepting the risks involved. Jung (2015) defined this term as a risk preferring decision-making behavior in an uncertain environment.

While the entrepreneurs with low risk-taking tendency try to avoid risks or make decisions cautiously, ones with high risk-taking inclination tend to make decisions faster to capture opportunities ( Bin and Park, 2002 ). Meanwhile, Sexton and Bowman-Upton (1986) maintained that risk-taking indicates the degree of entrepreneur’s will or tendency to boldly challenge uncertainties or enjoy them. Risk-taking is meaningful only if an entrepreneur is proactive in seizing an opportunity, not just accepting the risks.

2.2.3 Pro-activeness.

Pro-activeness is a future-oriented disposition that allows an entrepreneur to forecast future when he is supposed to make a decision strategically. The entrepreneur takes active behaviors after forecasting future opportunity and market demands. Lumpkin and Dess (1996) maintain that pro-activeness means a company preoccupying the market opportunity or holding a predominant position in the market. Thus, with pro-activeness, companies develop new products and attempt to find new opportunities in a highly uncertain environment or actively endeavors to secure a leading/discriminative position in a newly created market ( Kim, 2015 ). Covin and Slevin (1991) claimed that pro-active entrepreneurs compete more aggressively than the others. This means that they are not just simply counteracting their competitors but also consistently trying to introduce some new products/services development and management techniques into their companies. That is, pro-activeness can be defined as a tendency or behavior of actively participating in the market changes one step ahead of their competitors ( Kim, 1994 ).

2.3 Leadership

It is possible to say that leadership is an important element in many success factors for start-ups and their continuous growth, but it is not easy to define them with a few words and its definition varies depending on the approaches taken individual researchers. Bass (1990) considered leadership as an interaction process among the group members to structure or restructure their perceptions and expectations. Meanwhile, Northouse (2013) defined leadership as a process where an individual attempt to affect group members to achieve their common goal. However, Katz and Kahn (1978) defined it as one’s influence that allows to produce more results than the results obtained from just carrying out everyday orders. A strong leadership that leads to harmonious and organized business activities is essential to achieve more than expected. This study attempts to analyze and substantiate the impact of a strong leadership on the entrepreneurial intentions and the success of start-ups.

2.4 Network

In a complex information-oriented society like present, it is not easy for small-scale companies to satisfy economic demands while maintaining their competitiveness just by themselves, as they often lack some of the necessary resources. Creative ideas and networks are essential for achieving a successful business performance.

Huggins and Johnston (2010) claimed that it is indispensable to use some of the external resources to surmount the difficulties in start-up businesses caused by the lack of internal resources. Similarly, Choi (2010) supported this by suggesting that start-ups will be able to optimize their performance by using the resources they lack by establishing some external networks. According to Jang (2013) , the network activities that can be regarded as the personal and social activities of an entrepreneur refer to the behavior of using external resources for his/her start-up process depending on his/her internal capability. The importance of networks and their roles are being emphasized in many types of research conducted for start-ups. Thus, this study also attempts to identify how network establishment and their activities affect the entrepreneurial intention of ICT majors in Busan area.

2.5 Entrepreneurial intention

The concept most widely used to understand the phenomena associated with the establishment of a business is entrepreneurship. Analyzing the definition of entrepreneurship found in Morris’s (1998) studies, it was possible to find that entrepreneurship has been often emphasized when one plans to establish a company. Yoon (2004) considered entrepreneurial intention as the first step in establishing one’s business and a positive attitude and experience toward business start-up should be preceded prior to actually making a decision to start his/her business. Krueger et al. (2000) defined entrepreneurial intention as an individual’s effort to start his/her business so that without it, one would not be able to proceed further. Considering that starting a business can be fulfilled through calculate and intentional activities, the first step, entrepreneurial intention, is essential for understanding overall phenomena involved in business start-up, as it is a key element in determining the early characteristics of start-ups ( Bird, 1988 ; Katz and Garter, 1988 ). Shapero (1981) claimed that the roles of entrepreneurs with entrepreneurial intentions are important for the nation, region or organization to have their power of recuperation to ride out economic downturns and self-reforming traits. Therefore, it is important for our society to contribute to continuous economic growth by inculcating a positive perception in the minds of students with entrepreneurial intentions to promote and activate start-ups and let the ones with potentials to challenge and succeed.

3. Research method

To study the magnitude of influence factors of entrepreneurship of Busan-area ICT majors over their entrepreneurial intentions, we have randomly extracted the samples from the ICT majors in Busan area during the period from November 1, 2016 to February 15, 2017. A five-point scale was used for the survey. A total of 250 questionnaires were distributed, and 147 (71.70 per cent) of them were collected eventually, excluding unreliable responses. For the empirical analysis of influence factors, the SPSS 23.0 program was used. Based on the study model shown in Figure 1 , a series of hypotheses were developed to deduce the influence factors and put to verification afterward.

4. Result of empirical analysis

In this study, the effect of the independent variables, entrepreneurship, leadership and network promotion factors on entrepreneurial intention were analyzed using Pearson’s correlation analysis. The result of the analysis shows that the correlation coefficient between network and entrepreneurial intention is very high, and overall, the measurement factor has a positive (+) relationship Table I .

A multiple regression analysis was used in this study to verify the effect of facilitating factors of entrepreneurship on the entrepreneurial intention (dependent variable). Here, independent variables were also included for analysis (i.e. simultaneous input).

From the results obtained from the multiple regression analyses performed against all the respondents, the applied regression equation was effective in explaining the dependent value, as the overall explanatory power for activation of entrepreneurial intention was 49.4 per cent, F -value of analysis model was 38.352 and P -value 0.000. Also, as the variance inflation factor (VIF) showed the maximum value of 1.616 while minimum tolerance was 0.619, it was determined that there was no multicollinearity problem. Specifically, the factors such as pro-activeness in entrepreneurship, leadership, and network were analyzed to the statistically significant variables at P = 0.05. However, innovativeness and risk-taking factors were excluded at this level. Observing the relative effect of each independent variable on entrepreneurial intention through a standardized regression coefficient, the pro-activeness in entrepreneurship was most influential (=0.603) from the positive (+) side Table II .

For the study, some hypotheses for the influential factors of entrepreneurship which should be considered to promote the entrepreneurial intentions of ICT majors in Busan area have been developed and put to empirical analysis using a statistical technique. First, as for the verification by regression analysis, H1 , which assumes that entrepreneurship will give a positive influence on entrepreneurial intention was partially accepted compared to leadership which was fully accepted. Innovativeness and risk-taking in H1-1 and H1-3 , respectively, were rejected as they did not have a positive influence, whereas pro-activeness ( H1-2 ) was accepted. Such results are quite the contrary to the results presented in Hwi-Yeol Choi’s (2016) study where he concluded that innovativeness and risk-taking tendencies had a significant influence on entrepreneurial intention while pro-activeness did not. This may have resulted from the fact that his survey was conducted for the general college students rather than for the ICT majors. The difference is that this study has targeted the ICT majors who have sufficient knowledge and experience that the high-tech industries involving artificial intelligence, robotics or other cutting-edge technologies can lead to a social innovation after being internalized as a foundation of our current society. It is true that the knowledge associated with the 4th Industrial Revolution and in their potentials also contributes to such an innovation. Thus, this study has empirically proven that both innovativeness and risk-taking are not that influential, at least for the ICT majors in Busan area.

Meanwhile, H1 -1 was accepted such that it is possible to determine that pro-activeness of entrepreneurship has a positive influence on entrepreneurial intention. This result is consistent with most other research results which concluded the same ( Yoon, 2012b ; Park and Kim, 2009 ; Yoon, 2012a ; Kim, 2016 ). Pro-activeness can be considered as the tendency that actively solves problems by positively dealing with changes and pursues something distinctively novel to find new opportunities. The above result also means that pro-activeness is necessary for all the business founders for them to occupy a dominant position in a fluid and rapidly changing market on the threshold of the 4th Industrial Revolution.

Next, for the H2 , the studies on correlations between leadership and entrepreneurial intention are quite insufficient in the ROK. Yoo (2014a , 2014b ) and Kang and Ha (2015) are the typical researchers who claim that leadership has a significant influence on entrepreneurial intentions. Likewise, this study accepted the hypothesis that assumes the same.

Finally, as for the H3 , most of the researches conducted for entrepreneurial intention find that network(s) do have a positive influence on entrepreneurial intention ( Burt, 1992 ; Yoo, 2012 ; Yoon, 2004 ) also maintains that the network environments are essential for producing a large number of start-ups. These researchers verified that various types of networks actually stimulate entrepreneurial intention. As these precedent studies, the hypothesis in this study which made the same assumption was accepted. This means that a practical and operational network(s) are vital to students’ business success. It is also true that entrepreneurial intentions can be highly inspired when the student business founders themselves endeavor to understand and perceive various aspects of start-ups by actively participating in a variety of experimental environments or network/leadership activities with a positive mind and attitude ( Table III ).

5. Conclusion and policy proposal

Current young people in the Republic of Korea (ROK) are in the midst of the 4th Industrial Revolution which goes beyond the information-oriented society. This new era focuses on a variety of novel ideas including artificial intelligence and advanced robotics. The ROK government and most Korean universities should foster intelligence information industry to respond to the requirements of this era and enhance global competitiveness of start-ups by promoting an appropriate start-up ecosystem to create more jobs. Many developed countries around the world view creating quality jobs as the most important measurement for conflict resolution and income imbalance. Developed countries such as the EU, America, Japan and as well as emerging countries such as China are pursuing on the development of existing industries and the creation of new industries as core policies ( Ministry of Science, ICT and Future Planning, 2014 ) based on ICT development. The Korean government also needs to make efforts, basing on ICT, to expand the employments and also the number of young entrepreneurs who have a proper entrepreneurship or a challenging spirit to contribute to the national economy. Thus, a study was conducted to determine what factors of entrepreneurship promote the entrepreneurial intention of ICT majors in Busan area. Also, an empirical analysis was performed by deducing the factors that need to be considered to activate the entrepreneurial intention in the universities. The existing factors that affected the entrepreneurial intention of university students were mostly structurally defined ones such as entrepreneurship education, support policies for start-ups and relevant educations which would drive the students to pursue start-up businesses. However, these factors, or impact categories, were often theoretical and indoctrinating that they were somehow ineffective as a base for creating jobs for college students or realizing the creative economy. For this reason, the importance of entrepreneurship which can give a positive impression to these people’s entrepreneurial intentions has been studied and verified not only in prior treatises (Byong Geun, JO 2013, KIM, 2016 etc.) but also in this research paper.

In the study, pro-activeness of entrepreneurship was found to be most influential to students’ entrepreneurial intentions. In Finland, innovative entrepreneurs are deliberately cultivated based on the saying, “entrepreneurs are not born but are trained through education”. This means that without entrepreneurship education, students’ entrepreneurial spirit cannot be cultivated ( Park, 2010 ). This paper also considered that efforts to review the means to foster pro-activeness at the practical level and expanding them are critical to improving the entrepreneurial intentions of the students. It has been also verified that the substantive indirect experiences such as leadership and network activities are highly influential to the entrepreneurial intentions of ICT majors. Existing studies ( Yoon, 2004 ; Yoo, 2012 ) showed that establishment of networks from which the students can receive help while they are preparing for their start-ups or afterward are significantly important to the improvement. This study also proves that, which is focused on ICT departments in Busan, the student with high pro-activity and enhanced leadership actually respond more effectively to the difficulties or the fluidal variables during their start-up preparations than those who received the lecture-oriented start-up education. Therefore, entrepreneurship education that will boost pro-activity and practical experience which can lead to actual start-ups are essential, in addition to well-trained leadership and well-organized networks. The government and relevant authorities should focus on providing more diverse educational programs to invigorate youth start-ups, and we expect that this study will be useful for that purpose.

entrepreneurship research paper example

The study model

The correlation analysis for the effect of entrepreneurship over entrepreneurial intention

Verification result of hypothetical influence factors of entrepreneurship on entrepreneurial intention

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Further reading

Huh , J.H. and Seo , K. ( 2016a ), “ Smart grid framework test bed using OPNET and power line communication ”, 2016 Joint 8th International Conference on Soft Computing and Intelligent Systems (SCIS) and 17th International Symposium on Advanced Intelligent Systems , IEEE , pp. 736 - 742 .

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Huh , J.H. , Kim , H.B. and Seo , K. ( 2016 ), “ A design of smart-based education gamification platform using mobile devices ”, Advanced Science and Technology Letters, SERSC , Vol. 127 , pp. 85 - 90 .

Huh , J.H. , Koh , T. and Seo , K. ( 2015 ), “ NMEA2000 ship area network (SAN) design and test bed using power line communication (PLC) with the 3-phase 3-line delta connection method ”, SERSC ASTL , Vol. 94 (Networking and Communication 2015) , pp. 57 - 63 .

Huh , J.H. , Otgonchimeg , S. and Seo , K. ( 2016 ), “ Advanced metering infrastructure design and test bed experiment using intelligent agents: focusing on the PLC network base technology for smart grid system ”, Journal of Supercomputing, Springer, USA , No. 5 , pp. 1862 - 1877 .

Jo , H.Y. ( 2016 ), “ A study on the effect of entrepreneurship toward entrepreneurial intention: focusing on the mediating effect of entrepreneurship education satisfaction”, Master’s thesis , Graduate School of Global Venture of Kookmin University .

Kim , S.S. ( 2010 ), “ A comparative study of the entrepreneurial intention between Korea and China ”, Doctor’s thesis , Graduate School of Venture Hoseo University .

Park , J. , Koh , T. , Huh , J.H. , Kim , T. , Lee , J. , Kang , J. , Ju , D. , Kim , J. , Lee , J. , Hwang , T. , Park , Y. and Seo , K. ( 2015 ), “ Design of the real-time mobile push system for implementation of the shipboard smart working ”, Advances in Computer Science and Ubiquitous Computing , LNEE, Springer , Singapore , Vol. 373 , pp. 541 - 548 .

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Entrepreneurship →

entrepreneurship research paper example

  • 05 Dec 2023
  • Cold Call Podcast

What Founders Get Wrong about Sales and Marketing

Which sales candidate is a startup’s ideal first hire? What marketing channels are best to invest in? How aggressively should an executive team align sales with customer success? Senior Lecturer Mark Roberge discusses how early-stage founders, sales leaders, and marketing executives can address these challenges as they grow their ventures in the case, “Entrepreneurial Sales and Marketing Vignettes.”

entrepreneurship research paper example

  • 10 Oct 2023

Scaling Two Businesses Against the Odds: Wendy Estrella’s Founder’s Journey

Entrepreneur Wendy Estrella is attempting to simultaneously scale her law practice, as well as her property management and development company. What strategy will benefit both businesses, and is there a downside to scaling them together, rather than focusing on each one separately? Harvard Business School senior lecturer Jeffrey Bussgang and Estrella discuss her unique founder’s journey – from immigrating to the U.S. to building both of her businesses in Lawrence, Massachusetts despite the specific challenges she faced as a minority entrepreneur. The related case is “Wendy Estrella: Scaling Multiple Businesses.”

entrepreneurship research paper example

  • 01 Aug 2023

Can Business Transform Primary Health Care Across Africa?

mPharma, headquartered in Ghana, is trying to create the largest pan-African health care company. Their mission is to provide primary care and a reliable and fairly priced supply of drugs in the nine African countries where they operate. Co-founder and CEO Gregory Rockson needs to decide which component of strategy to prioritize in the next three years. His options include launching a telemedicine program, expanding his pharmacies across the continent, and creating a new payment program to cover the cost of common medications. Rockson cares deeply about health equity, but his venture capital-financed company also must be profitable. Which option should he focus on expanding? Harvard Business School Professor Regina Herzlinger and case protagonist Gregory Rockson discuss the important role business plays in improving health care in the case, “mPharma: Scaling Access to Affordable Primary Care in Africa.”

entrepreneurship research paper example

  • 05 Jul 2023

How Unilever Is Preparing for the Future of Work

Launched in 2016, Unilever’s Future of Work initiative aimed to accelerate the speed of change throughout the organization and prepare its workforce for a digitalized and highly automated era. But despite its success over the last three years, the program still faces significant challenges in its implementation. How should Unilever, one of the world's largest consumer goods companies, best prepare and upscale its workforce for the future? How should Unilever adapt and accelerate the speed of change throughout the organization? Is it even possible to lead a systematic, agile workforce transformation across several geographies while accounting for local context? Harvard Business School professor and faculty co-chair of the Managing the Future of Work Project William Kerr and Patrick Hull, Unilever’s vice president of global learning and future of work, discuss how rapid advances in artificial intelligence, machine learning, and automation are changing the nature of work in the case, “Unilever's Response to the Future of Work.”

entrepreneurship research paper example

  • 16 May 2023
  • In Practice

After Silicon Valley Bank's Flameout, What's Next for Entrepreneurs?

Silicon Valley Bank's failure in the face of rising interest rates shook founders and funders across the country. Julia Austin, Jeffrey Bussgang, and Rembrand Koning share key insights for rattled entrepreneurs trying to make sense of the financing landscape.

entrepreneurship research paper example

  • 14 Mar 2023

Can AI and Machine Learning Help Park Rangers Prevent Poaching?

Globally there are too few park rangers to prevent the illegal trade of wildlife across borders, or poaching. In response, Spatial Monitoring and Reporting Tool (SMART) was created by a coalition of conservation organizations to take historical data and create geospatial mapping tools that enable more efficient deployment of rangers. SMART had demonstrated significant improvements in patrol coverage, with some observed reductions in poaching. Then a new predictive analytic tool, the Protection Assistant for Wildlife Security (PAWS), was created to use artificial intelligence (AI) and machine learning (ML) to try to predict where poachers would be likely to strike. Jonathan Palmer, Executive Director of Conservation Technology for the Wildlife Conservation Society, already had a good data analytics tool to help park rangers manage their patrols. Would adding an AI- and ML-based tool improve outcomes or introduce new problems? Harvard Business School senior lecturer Brian Trelstad discusses the importance of focusing on the use case when determining the value of adding a complex technology solution in his case, “SMART: AI and Machine Learning for Wildlife Conservation.”

entrepreneurship research paper example

  • 17 Jan 2023

8 Trends to Watch in 2023

Quiet quitting. Inflation. The economy. This year could bring challenges for executives and entrepreneurs, but there might also be opportunities for focused leaders to gain advantage, say Harvard Business School faculty members.

entrepreneurship research paper example

  • 10 Jan 2023

Time to Move On? Career Advice for Entrepreneurs Preparing for the Next Stage

So many people shift from one job to the next, with little time to consider how the experience changed them and what they want out of future ventures. Julia Austin recommends that entrepreneurs look within and reflect on these questions before they jump into a new opportunity.

entrepreneurship research paper example

  • 03 Jan 2023

Wordle: Can a Pandemic Phenomenon Sustain in the Long Term?

Wordle went from a personal game, created by a developer for his girlfriend, to a global phenomenon with two million users in just a few months. Then The New York Times made an unexpected bid to acquire it. But will Wordle outlast other pandemic pastimes? Harvard Business School senior lecturer Christina Wallace discusses the journey of software engineer and accidental entrepreneur Josh Wardle in the case, “Wordle.”

entrepreneurship research paper example

  • 26 Oct 2022
  • Research & Ideas

How Paid Promos Take the Shine Off YouTube Stars (and Tips for Better Influencer Marketing)

Influencers aspire to turn "likes" into dollars through brand sponsorships, but these deals can erode their reputations, says research by Shunyuan Zhang. Marketers should seek out authentic voices on YouTube, not necessarily those with the most followers.

entrepreneurship research paper example

  • 19 Oct 2022

Cofounder Courtship: How to Find the Right Mate—for Your Startup

Like any other long-term partnership, choosing the right cofounder is a complicated decision with big implications for a venture. Julia Austin offers practical advice for entrepreneurs who are searching for "the one."

entrepreneurship research paper example

  • 06 Sep 2022

Reinventing an Iconic Independent Bookstore

In 2020, Kwame Spearman (MBA 2011) made the career-shifting decision to leave a New York City-based consulting job to return to his hometown of Denver, Colorado, and take over an iconic independent bookstore, The Tattered Cover. Spearman saw an opportunity to reinvent the local business to build a sense of community after the pandemic. But he also had to find a way to meet the big challenges facing independent booksellers amid technological change and shifting business models. Professor Ryan Raffaelli and Spearman discuss Spearman’s vision for reinventing The Tattered Cover, as well as larger insights around how local businesses can successfully compete with online and big box retailers in the case, “Kwame Spearman at Tattered Cover: Reinventing Brick-and-Mortar Retail.”

entrepreneurship research paper example

  • 16 Aug 2022

Now Is the Time for Entrepreneurs to Play Offense

With the specter of recession looming, many worried founders and executives are aggressively shoring up cash. But shrewd entrepreneurs are using these six tactics instead to gain advantage, says Jeffrey Bussgang.

entrepreneurship research paper example

  • 26 Jul 2022

Can Bombas Reach New Customers while Maintaining Its Social Mission?

Bombas was started in 2013 with a dual mission: to deliver quality socks and donate much-needed footwear to people living in shelters. By 2021, it had become one of America’s most visible buy-one-give-one companies, with over $250 million in annual revenue and 50 million pairs of socks donated. Later, as Bombas expanded into underwear, t-shirts, and slippers, the company struggled to determine what pace of growth would best allow it to reach new customers while maintaining its social mission. Harvard Business School assistant professor Elizabeth Keenan discusses the case, "Bee-ing Better at Bombas."

entrepreneurship research paper example

  • 07 Jul 2022

How a Multimillion-Dollar Ice Cream Startup Melted Down (and Bounced Back)

A Brooklyn-based ice cream shop was getting buzz, and Disney was pitching a brand partnership. So how did the business wind up filing for bankruptcy? A case study by Thomas Eisenmann and Lindsay N. Hyde examines the rise and fall—and recent rebound—of Ample Hills Creamery.

entrepreneurship research paper example

  • 10 May 2022

Being Your Own Boss Can Pay Off, but Not Always with Big Pay

Working for yourself might bring freedom and autonomy, but it increasingly comes with a major risk: low pay. Research by William Kerr explores the shifting sands of self-employment.

entrepreneurship research paper example

  • 03 May 2022

Can a Social Entrepreneur End Homelessness in the US?

Community Solutions is a nonprofit founded in 2011 by Rosanne Haggerty, with the ambitious goal of ending chronic homelessness in America. Its “Built for Zero” methodology takes a public health approach, helping communities across the US use better data collection and outreach to improve government processes and piecemeal solutions. In 2021, Community Solutions was awarded a $100 million grant from the MacArthur Foundation, and Haggerty and her team had to decide how to prioritize projects and spending to maximize the grant’s impact. Should they continue to focus on unhoused veterans or expand their work to include families and youth in need of housing? Senior Lecturer Brian Trelstad discusses Haggerty’s approach in his case, "Community Solutions."

entrepreneurship research paper example

  • 22 Feb 2022

How to Scale a Startup Marketplace for Used Furniture

AptDeco, a peer-to-peer marketplace for used furniture in the New York City area, was growing rapidly in the massive $120 billion furniture market, despite its complexity and high costs. Co-founders Reham Fagiri and Kalam Dennis were considering different options to scale the business, including converting sellers into buyers and vice versa, finding superusers to fuel the supply for their platform, expanding to new markets, and rebranding with a sustainability focus. Professor Ayelet Israeli and AptDeco co-founder Kalam Dennis discuss the best way to scale the business in the case, “AptDeco: Circular Economy Furniture Marketplace.” Open for comment; 0 Comments.

entrepreneurship research paper example

  • 25 Jan 2022

How Footwear Startup Allbirds is Decarbonizing Fashion

In 2021, the footwear startup Allbirds was extending its product range into apparel and expanding beyond its online store to open more retail stores around the world. It was also freely sharing its know-how and material innovations with its competitors to try to scale its efforts to decarbonize fashion, by substituting natural materials for conventional petroleum-based materials and leather. But the company also had to find ways to remain differentiated, based on design and comfort. Professor Mike Toffel and Allbirds co-founder and CEO Joey Zwillinger discuss the growing environmental impact of the fashion industry and how the company managed the tension between advancing its environmental mission and staying ahead of competitors in the case, Allbirds: Decarbonizing Fashion. Open for comment; 0 Comments.

entrepreneurship research paper example

  • 11 Jan 2022

Can Entrepreneurs and Governments Team Up to Solve Big Problems?

In 2017, Shield AI’s quadcopter, with no pilot and no flight plan, could clear a building and outpace human warfighters by almost five minutes. It was evidence that autonomous robots could help protect civilian and service member lives. But was it also evidence that Shield AI—a startup barely two years past founding—could ask their newest potential customer, the US government, for a large contract for a system of coordinated, exploring robots? Or would it scare them away? Harvard Business School professor Mitch Weiss and Brandon Tseng, Shield AI’s CGO and co-founder, discuss these and other challenges entrepreneurs face when working with the public sector, and how investing in new ideas can enable entrepreneurs and governments to join forces and solve big problems in the case, “Shield AI.” Open for comment; 0 Comments.

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The impact of entrepreneurship research on other academic fields

  • Research article
  • Open access
  • Published: 22 May 2023
  • Volume 62 , pages 727–751, ( 2024 )

Cite this article

You have full access to this open access article

  • A. Roy Thurik 1 , 2 ,
  • David B. Audretsch 3 ,
  • Jörn H. Block   ORCID: orcid.org/0000-0003-4564-0346 2 , 4 , 5 ,
  • Andrew Burke 6 ,
  • Martin A. Carree 7 ,
  • Marcus Dejardin 8 , 9 ,
  • Cornelius A. Rietveld 10 ,
  • Mark Sanders 11 ,
  • Ute Stephan 12 &
  • Johan Wiklund 13  

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6 Citations

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The remarkable ascent of entrepreneurship witnessed as a scientific field over the last 4 decades has been made possible by entrepreneurship’s ability to absorb theories, paradigms, and methods from other fields such as economics, psychology, sociology, geography, and even biology. The respectability of entrepreneurship as an academic discipline is now evidenced by many other fields starting to borrow from the entrepreneurship view. In the present paper, seven examples are given from this “pay back” development. These examples were first presented during a seminar at the Erasmus Entrepreneurship Event called what has the entrepreneurship view to offer to other academic fields? This article elaborates on the core ideas of these presentations and focuses on the overarching question of how entrepreneurship research impacts the development of other academic fields. We found that entrepreneurship research questions the core assumptions of other academic fields and provides new insights into the antecedents, mechanisms, and consequences of their respective core phenomena. Moreover, entrepreneurship research helps to legitimize other academic fields both practically and academically.

Plain English Summary

Entrepreneurship research questions the core assumptions of other academic fields and legitimizes them both practically and academically. Since the 1980s, entrepreneurship research has seen tremendous growth and development, establishing itself as an academic field. Entrepreneurship is also taught extensively in leading business schools around the world. Indeed, few business schools do not address entrepreneurship in their curriculum. This represents a sea change: although entrepreneurs and new ventures had a remarkable impact on society, academia barely noticed it in the 1980s. Simply put: economics and business students rarely, if ever, encountered any mention of entrepreneurship during their studies. While entrepreneurship research has now developed its own methodological toolbox, it has extensively borrowed perspectives, theories, and methods from other fields. In the 2020s, we now find that entrepreneurship scholars are sharing its toolbox with other academic fields, questioning the core assumptions of other academic fields and providing new insights into the antecedents, mechanisms, and consequences of their respective core phenomena. Moreover, entrepreneurship research helps to legitimize other academic fields both practically and academically. Hence, entrepreneurship research now plays not just an important role in entrepreneurship education, practice, and policy but also throughout many other research fields.

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1 Introduction

Entrepreneurship research has seen tremendous growth and development over the last 4 decades and concomitant recognition as an academic field. The leading entrepreneurship journals receive ever more submissions from ever more countries, and their citation impact factors are on a steady rise. According to the 2021 impact factors, nine entrepreneurship journals are among the top hundred business and management journals included in the Social Sciences Citation Index (SSCI). Footnote 1 Entrepreneurship is taught extensively in leading business schools throughout the world, and business schools without entrepreneurship courses in the curriculum simply do not exist. In summary, there is little doubt that entrepreneurship as a field has grown strongly and is now fully established.

Four decades ago, the situation was very different. Entrepreneurs and new ventures had a remarkable impact on society but were barely noticed in academia. It was unusual for both economics and business students to encounter any mention of entrepreneurship in their degree programs. On the whole, economics was embedded in a comparative static framework, where firms were assumed to maximize profits and where industry, technology, and consumer preferences were exogenously defined and unchangeable. There was no role for entrepreneurship in economic theory and little interest in entrepreneurship as a phenomenon.

The academic landscape started to change in the 1980s. Among the leaders pioneering this underexplored area were scholars who contributed to the establishment of the Small Business Economics Journal (SBEJ). Their new perspective did not take the existence of firms for granted or assume an infinite supply of capable entrepreneurs. Instead, they viewed the market entry of start-ups as essential to economies, albeit these startups were constrained in both number and capability due to limitations in their human and financial capital. Among other things, this new school of thought showed that economic performance depended on the ability for any industry to have a sufficient number of capable start-ups. For the first time, economic analysis was relevant for economic policy prioritizing entrepreneurship.

Beyond market entry, these scholars offered a more dynamic perspective of post-entry industry performance. In addressing the evolution of industries, new research questions were addressed well beyond the initial visions. For example, strategic entrepreneurship and entrepreneurial finance have evolved as subfields with their own academic journals.

Early entrepreneurship research extensively borrowed perspectives, theories, and methods from other fields but has now developed its own toolbox. The next step in the maturation of entrepreneurship research would be to start giving back to these other fields. Have we reached that point yet? Can we now, several years after the birth of entrepreneurship research, also observe knowledge flows in the opposite direction? Or, in a more provocative way, does anybody outside the field of entrepreneurship really care about entrepreneurship research? Answering these questions is important because it helps to further evaluate the state of entrepreneurship as an academic field and establish its academic legitimacy.

To answer these questions, a seminar called “What has the entrepreneurship view to offer to other academic fields?” was organized at the Erasmus School of Economics for a group of scholars to reflect upon how entrepreneurship research relates to other academic fields. The following three specific questions were at the core of the discussion: (1) what did the field look like before contemporary entrepreneurship research? (2) How has contemporary entrepreneurship research influenced/impacted the field? (3) How will this influence evolve in the future/in the next few years?

The specific fields represented are (clinical) psychology, (occupational) health, genetic epidemiology, culture, industrial organization, macro-economics, and public policy. We do not claim that the fields chosen are fully representative of the entire spectrum of fields upon which entrepreneurship has an impact. Footnote 2 What matters is that the fields are very different in their theories and methods as well as in their research traditions and research culture. Taken together, they clearly illustrate the wide range of academic fields with which entrepreneurship as a field interacts.

The next seven subsections describe the respective view on the impact of entrepreneurship research on the different fields. Footnote 3 After that, we provide structure and categorization to the insights and provide an overview of the impact that entrepreneurship research has had on these as well as other fields. The final section concludes and provides an outlook on the paths and scenarios of how entrepreneurship and its neighboring (and not so neighboring) fields and disciplines can co-evolve. While the impact of entrepreneurship research varies considerably across specific academic fields, what emerges from this article is an undeniable impact. Research has not only transformed what we know and understand in the scholarly field of entrepreneurship but thinking across a broad spectrum of other fields has also developed considerably.

2 Entrepreneurship and its relationship with other academic fields

2.1 entrepreneurship and (clinical) psychology.

Borrowing without giving back is not truly borrowing. It is stealing. We often say that entrepreneurship borrows from other areas of research. However, we rarely clarify what entrepreneurship brings back to these other fields or disciplines. Perhaps we sometimes steal? Clinical psychology is an area from which entrepreneurship has started borrowing increasingly over the past decade (see, for example, Gish et al. ( 2022 )). However, it is also an area where it is evident that entrepreneurship is bringing much back to clinical psychology. Specifically, we will discuss how the development of research within entrepreneurship regarding the associations between entrepreneurship and the clinical condition of attention deficit hyperactivity disorder (ADHD) contributes to the evolution of clinical psychology.

Clinical psychology represents normal science as defined by Thomas Kuhn. This means that within the field, there is great agreement on what kind of research belongs within the field and what does not; which methods are appropriate, and which are not; and which theories should be applied and which should not. For a recent example pertaining to ADHD, see, for example, the review by Song et al. ( 2021 ). The bulk of research follows a “coherentist” approach, where coherence among theory, measurement, and statistical analysis takes priority over new observational knowledge (Tal, 2013 ). This is fruitful, as the validity of findings is contingent on whether constructs hold up (cohere) with established theory and facilitate the accumulation of knowledge. The downside is that new phenomena receive scant attention and that observational anomalies tend to be discounted. Entrepreneurship research represents its antipode. There are few established definitions, methods, and theories. An attitude of “anything goes” characterizes the field (Wiklund et al., 2019 ). For many clinical psychologists, the field appears confusing, sloppy, and not as real science.

Given these fundamental differences between the fields, it is no surprise that studies of potential associations between ADHD and entrepreneurship have been observed by entrepreneurship scholars and not clinical psychologists. Of the 62 peer-reviewed journal articles to date on the potential association between ADHD and entrepreneurship, 61 appear in the entrepreneurship and management journals and not even one in a clinical psychology publication. Across a variety of samples, utilizing various methods and measures, a pattern of results has started to emerge that calls into question some of the fundamental assumptions made by clinical psychologists regarding ADHD. Findings from this stream of research suggest that people with ADHD diagnoses or ADHD symptoms are attracted to entrepreneurship as an occupation (Verheul et al., 2015 ), that they are likely to actually engage in entrepreneurial endeavors (Verheul et al., 2016 ) and that they may even perform well in entrepreneurship (Yu et al., 2021 ). These research questions lie outside the mainstream of what clinical psychology concerns itself with; the findings represent an anomaly to fundamental theory and are often derived using methods that are not standard within the field. Perhaps most interesting is the finding that a clinical condition that is associated with many challenges may actually be associated with certain strengths within entrepreneurial endeavors. We believe these are findings that have extensive practical and theoretical implications.

It is within these areas of research, outside of the mainstream of normal science that entrepreneurship scholarship truly shines. Scholars have been willing to ask novel and relevant research questions, to use whatever data they could find, and to analyze them using a variety of methods. Unless some scholars are willing to accept such tradeoffs between relevance and rigor, new important phenomena will remain unexplored, and scholars risk becoming increasingly locked into ivory towers. We have provided ADHD as an example where entrepreneurship scholarship informs clinical psychology. Similar arguments can be made regarding the relationship between dyslexia and entrepreneurship, where Julie Logan pioneered research showing positive relationships that clinical psychologists had hitherto overlooked (Logan, 2009 ).

Therefore, what comes next? First , there are indications that clinical psychologists indeed are becoming more interested in researching entrepreneurship and ADHD. This includes citation to the work conducted by entrepreneurship scholars, entrepreneurship scholars delivering keynotes at clinical psychology conferences, and informal discussions about researching the topic during these conferences. We also know that papers on the topic are submitted to clinical psychology journals, even though they have not yet been published there. We should keep in mind that this is a rapidly evolving field of research. Our review located 5 articles published between 1993 and 2015 and 57 articles published between 2016 and 2022. As a normal science, clinical psychology is slow to change. Second and more important, we believe this area of research on the links between entrepreneurship and ADHD will take long strides forwards when scholars in entrepreneurship and clinical psychology come together, asking the novel and relevant questions that entrepreneurship scholars are good at and applying the methodological rigor of clinical psychology. Thus, this research has the potential to make it into mainstream clinical psychology. Such a development would be an excellent example of how entrepreneurship research can advance clinical psychology research.

2.2 Entrepreneurship and (occupational) health

Occupational health and related fields (occupational medicine, occupational health psychology) traditionally study work-related risk factors of disease. With the emergence of a broader understanding of health as “… a state of complete physical, mental and social well-being and not merely the absence of disease or infirmity” (World Health Organization, 1948 ), interest in mental well-being—positive experiences and functioning—and its drivers grew (Antonovsky, 1979 ; Warr, 1987 ). Today, largely parallel lines of research focus on how work stress produces health impairments (Ganster and Rosen, 2013 ) or on the motivational effects of work and well-being (Judge et al., 2017 ).

The study of health and well-being by entrepreneurship researchers has accelerated over the past decade (for reviews see Stephan, 2018 ; Stephan et al., in press a; Torrès and Thurik, 2019 ; Wiklund et al., 2019 ). More recently, the COVID-19 pandemic drew further attention to health and well-being, including that of entrepreneurs (Batjargal et al., in press ; Stephan et al., in press b; Torrès et al., 2021 ). For occupational health and related fields, studying entrepreneurship (1) helps to integrate the research lines on health impairments (ill-being) and well-being, (2) uniquely offers insights into the future of work, (3) provides opportunities to showcase the relevance of health/well-being for economic and social outcomes, and (4) reinforces the need to expand occupational health and related fields to the study of (strategic) leadership.

Entrepreneurship is an “extreme” work setting that is often simultaneously intensely stressful and fulfilling (Baron, 2010 ; Stephan, 2018 ; Wiklund et al., 2019 )—often described as a “rollercoaster” by entrepreneurs. Compared to employees who are studied in occupational health, entrepreneurs’ work involves longer working hours (the longest of any occupation), higher workload, more time pressure, and often more loneliness and financial worries. Entrepreneurs’ work also entails more uncertainty and frequently changing demands (e.g., slumps in market demand). In addition to stressors, entrepreneurs’ work is also more extreme in regard to well-being resources. Because entrepreneurship combines ownership and control, entrepreneurs have a degree of independence and autonomy that is difficult to find in other occupations. They can decide with whom, on what, when, and how to work. This autonomy allows entrepreneurs to shape work in line with their values, skills and knowledge—much more so than is possible for typical employees—which makes work more meaningful for entrepreneurs. Autonomy and meaning enhance entrepreneurs’ sense of personal responsibility, which leads them to further invest in their work, often neglecting their private life, family and friends and granting themselves little respite from work.

Because it is an extreme work setting, entrepreneurship can uniquely enhance both ill-being and well-being, leading to a so-called well-being trade-off (Stephan et al., in press a) that is not yet recognized in occupational health research. The high levels of stressors that entrepreneurship entails trigger health impairment processes accompanied by feelings of distress, enhanced levels of stress biomarkers and, with a time delay, ultimately stress-related mental and physical disease (Rauch et al., 2018 ). At the same time, the high levels of well-being resources simultaneously trigger motivational processes and “happiness.” Thus, studying entrepreneurship expands occupational health research that has often ignored the potential negative effects of well-being resources such as autonomy and meaning (for an exception: Warr, 1994 ) and integrates the study of well-being and ill-being because without considering both, detrimental health effects go unnoticed (Grant et al., 2007 ).

The features of entrepreneurial work make entrepreneurship an excellent laboratory in which to understand the health/well-being effects of the future of work . The future of work is marked by more uncertainty, more variable and dynamically changing work demands, blurring of work-life boundaries, and personal responsibility, i.e., all hallmarks of entrepreneurs’ work. Because research on entrepreneurs’ health/well-being draws attention to new stressors and resources beyond those typically considered in occupational health research, it is uniquely positioned to offer insights into both the “bright” and the “dark” side of the future of work, into both thriving and fulfillment but also strain and precariousness. Moreover, entrepreneurship calls attention to well-being trade-offs and thus that thriving can be intimately linked to strain. At the same time, entrepreneurs are at the frontline of creating the future of work. For instance, start-ups instigated fully remote work and flexible hours to enhance employee wellbeing before the COVID-19 pandemic. In another example, entrepreneurial firms use strength-based organizational design to create inclusive work for those living with disabilities. Of course, entrepreneurship is itself part of the future of work as more individuals become entrepreneurs.

Entrepreneurship is also an exemplary context in which to document the relevance of health/well-being for economic and social outcomes. For occupational health research interested in making a case that health/well-being “matters,” entrepreneurship provides a fruitful context. Because the organization that an entrepreneur creates is an expression and extension of herself or himself, entrepreneurs’ health/well-being matters more directly for organizational productivity, growth, and survival than the health/well-being of individual employees matters for the same organizational outcomes. Similarly, the social consequences of health/well-being may be particularly salient in an entrepreneurship context, for instance, the way entrepreneurs’ own health/well-being impacts other stakeholders from employees, customers, suppliers to investors (Bort et al., 2020 ) or how it may lead to (un)ethical business practices and even positive social change by fostering positive business climates and tolerance (Tobias et al., 2013 ). Thus, studying entrepreneurs’ health/well-being substantially widens the scope of social outcomes beyond those typically considered in occupational health (such as spillover effects on life partners, family, and hobbies).

Finally, studying entrepreneurs’ health/well-being also offers new insights into research on strategic leadership , such as how the health/well-being of C-level executives may shape strategic decision-making and firm performance. Strategic leaders have been absent from occupational health research (although there is growing interest in how (middle-management) leadership intersects with health/wellbeing; Inceoglu et al. ( 2021 )). Equally, strategy research has not yet considered the health/well-being of strategic leaders. Entrepreneurs and strategic leaders face a similar challenge—to stay productive despite the intense and persistent stresses of their work. Recent contributions point to the importance of self-care and stress recovery routines for such work settings, which present opportunities for new academic insights with practical relevance (Weinberger et al., 2018 ; Williamson et al., 2021 ).

In sum, entrepreneurship draws attention to neglected and understudied areas of occupational health research. Emerging research documents the potential for research at the intersection of entrepreneurship and health to advance new insights and to “future-proof” health research for an increasingly dynamic and uncertain world of work.

2.3 Entrepreneurship and genetic epidemiology

Thousands of heritability studies analyzing a large variety of traits (i.e., observable characteristics) have led to the formulation of the “first law” of behavior genetics stating that all human behavioral traits are heritable (Turkheimer, 2000 ; Polderman et al., 2015 ). With entrepreneurship as another instance of a behavioral trait, it is not surprising that several studies have found evidence for its heritable nature (Nicolaou et al., 2008 ; Nicolaou et al., 2008 ; Nicolaou and Shane, 2010 ; Van der Loos et al., 2013 ; Zhang et al., 2009 ). Heritability estimates capture the proportion of observed differences in a trait among individuals from a certain population that is due to the genetic differences among these individuals (Visscher et al., 2008 ). The completion of the sequencing of the human genome some 20 years ago now (Venter et al., 2001 ) kick-started the large-scale collection of genetic data in medical cohort studies. With these genetic data, genetic epidemiologists started to search for the specific genes influencing heritable diseases and traits such as heart disease, diabetes, auto-immune diseases, and psychiatric disorders (Visscher et al., 2012 ). Motivated by the idea that matches and mismatches between genetic predispositions and career choices could impact morbidity and mortality (Koellinger et al., 2010 ; Van der Loos et al., 2010 ), an international consortium was set up to analyze the molecular genetic architecture of entrepreneurship using genome-wide association study (GWAS) meta-analysis (Van der Loos et al., 2011 ; Van der Loos et al., 2013 ).

Despite the heritable nature of entrepreneurship and the fact that entrepreneurship tends to run in families (Andersson and Hammarstedt, 2010 ), no single robust and replicable association between a genetic variant and entrepreneurship has been identified by this “Gentrepreneur consortium”. Many individuals attempt to set up a business at least once in their life, making it not surprising that a large-scale GWAS meta-analysis based on mostly cross-sectional data about someone’s current self-employment status from various countries did not result in statistically significant estimates of relationships between genetic variants and entrepreneurship (Van der Loos et al., 2013 ). However, to capitalize on lessons learned, with others, the Gentrepreneur consortium members also established the Social Science Genetic Association Consortium (SSGAC) with the aim of analyzing the genetic architecture of behavioral outcomes more comprehensively. For the first time in history, the SSGAC identified genetic variants that were robustly associated with a behavioral outcome (Rietveld et al., 2013 ). Although only three genetic variants with tiny effects on educational attainment were found, this study is commonly appreciated as a “game-changer” (Bliss, 2018 ): This study showcased the possibility of finding replicable genetic associations with behavioral outcomes if sufficiently large analysis samples are gathered and analyzed.

The ongoing publication of successful GWASs on behavioral outcomes raised the question of whether the estimated genetic effects should be attributed to biological factors or to environmental factors through which these genes operate (Bliss, 2018 ). Answering this question is not straightforward. For instance, although the genetic variants associated with educational attainment relate to biological pathways involved in neural development (Okbay et al., 2016 ), their effects are dependent upon the presence of a schooling system in which differences in endowments tend to lead to particular educational trajectories. Similarly, genetic effects on entrepreneurship are not expressed in a communist country where private enterprising is not allowed. Thus, the effects of “nature” and “nurture” are not additive and separable but intrinsically intertwined and nonlinear (Biroli et al., 2022 ).

This is where entrepreneurship research, or economic research more generally, can contribute to genetic epidemiology and social science genetics. A growing stream of literature is using gene-by-environment (G×E) analysis to investigate the dependency of genetic effects on conditions in the environment (Pereira et al., 2022 ). For example, G×E studies can be used to identify (institutional) environments that compensate for genetic disadvantages (Barcellos et al., 2018 ) or that amplify the production of human capital (Muslimova et al., 2021 ). Economic tools are of particular relevance to better design G×E studies for behavioral outcomes (Biroli et al., 2022 ). The reason is that, empirically, both genetic endowments and environmental factors are likely to be endogenous when modeling a particular behavioral outcome (Keller, 2014 ). Economists have developed a large toolbox (containing, e.g., regression discontinuity designs and instrumental variable regression) to address endogeneity, and they have a long tradition of exploiting exogenous variation in environmental exposures to estimate causal effects. The entrepreneurship literature is replete with studies analyzing the effects of exogenous changes in the environment on entrepreneurship phenomena (Block et al., 2012 ; Block et al., 2013 ; Hoogerheide et al., 2012 ). Therefore, economists and entrepreneurship researchers are well positioned to improve the understanding of the complex interplay between nature and nurture in shaping behavioral outcomes.

Eventually, well-designed G×E studies can also reveal how matches and mismatches between genetic predispositions and entrepreneurship could impact stress and health. Then, we are back at where the “quest for the entrepreneurial gene” (Van der Loos et al., 2011 ) started, but no longer to analyze how genetic predisposition for entrepreneurship may moderate the impact of work conditions on health and morbidity but to analyze how exogenous changes in a broadly defined entrepreneurship-relevant environment may heterogeneously impact genetically different individuals. For this purpose, from a genetic perspective, one can draw on summary indices of genetic variants (so-called polygenic scores or polygenic indices) that are increasingly available in well-known, publicly available datasets (Becker et al., 2021 ). These polygenic scores are constructed for particular traits, such as educational attainment, subjective well-being or attention deficit hyperactivity disorder (ADHD), and can be used to reveal which combination of genetic endowments and environmental circumstances impact entrepreneurship and person-job fit (Rietveld et al., 2021 ; Patel et al., 2021 ; Patel et al., 2021 ).

2.4 Entrepreneurship and culture

Culture is not a discipline or field but part of a context that contributes to shaping entrepreneurship and determining its consequences and impacts (Welter, 2011 ; Baker and Welter, 2020 ). Consequently, if we want to know more about entrepreneurship and be able to appreciate it in all its aspects and variety, culture is a major point of attention, and it is essential that research in entrepreneurship takes culture into account.

Many academic disciplines have studied culture, and many definitions of culture can be found in social sciences. The historical but seminal definition of Tylor ( 1871 , p. 1) and taken up by Lévi-Strauss ( 1958 ) in anthropology describes culture as “that complex whole which includes knowledge, beliefs, arts, morals, law, customs, and any other capabilities and habits acquired by man as a member of society.” In sociology, a discipline with a keen interest in culture, Steensland ( 2018 ) defined it as follows: culture “refers to the beliefs that people hold about reality, the norms that guide their behavior, the values that orient their moral commitments, or the symbols through which these beliefs, norms, and values are communicated.” In economics, culture is also an object of interest and has been for a long time. Without going too far, we cannot ignore the work of institutional economists who define culture as a set of informal rules and distinguish them from formal institutions (Alesina and Giuliano, 2015 ).

For Guiso et al. ( 2006 , p. 23), culture is “those customary beliefs and values that ethnic, religious, and social groups transmit fairly unchanged from generation to generation.” This definition by economists contrasts sharply with that which can be found in the so-called “cultural studies,” “concerned with an exploration of culture, as constituted by the meanings and representations generated by human signifying practices, and the context in which they occur. (…) (With) a particular interest in the relations of power and the political consequences that are inherent in such cultural practices” (Barker, 2004 , p. xix).

Apart from the cultural studies approach, culture appears to be a persistent contextual element. This element is not ignored by entrepreneurship research. Culture is generally identified here as an explanatory factor that can be linked to entrepreneurial phenomena by relying on competing or complementary theoretical approaches (see Thurik and Dejardin ( 2012 ) for a brief survey), in particular post-materialism (Inglehart, 2003 ), dissatisfaction (Brockhaus, 1980 ; Shapero and Sokol, 1982 ; Baum et al., 1993 ), aggregated psychological traits (Davidsson, 1995 ; Obschonka et al., 2015 ), and social legitimation (or moral approval) (Etzioni, 1987 ; Baumol, 1990 ).

Culture is a pervasive element in general conceptualizations linking entrepreneurship, its context and economic development. See, for example, the Global Entrepreneurship Monitor conceptual framework (GEM, 2022 ); foundations behind the Global Entrepreneurship Index, its regional variation (GEDI, 2019 ; Szerb et al. 2013 ) and the entrepreneurial ecosystem view (Stam and Spigel, 2018 ).

Empirical studies in entrepreneurship research linking culture to entrepreneurship have multiplied in recent years, especially studies relying on the aggregation of psychological traits and those addressing, among others, the question of entrepreneurial persistence characterizing some regions (Fritsch and Wyrwich, 2014 ; Stuetzer et al., 2016 , Stuetzer et al., 2018 ; Audretsch et al., 2017 ; Fritsch et al., 2021 ; Obschonka et al., 2021 ).

However, as is often the case in research, new issues emerge as we move forwards. We can think of the links between culture and entrepreneurship in their persistent or change aspects (Voth, 2021 ). In particular, it would be welcome to investigate the mechanisms at work and what the conducive channels are and to progress in the measurement of these mechanisms. Moreover, alongside the aggregation of psychological traits approach, might we also get a little closer to a more holistic approach of culture, in particular by examining beliefs and values that are actively shared by individuals?

To go a little further, an appeal can be extended to the proponents of the research on culture. If culture, as an element of context, contributes to determining entrepreneurship (not only its intensity but also its kind and meaning), one should not rule out entrepreneurship as a potential explanatory factor in turn. Entrepreneurship may affect formal and informal institutions such as culture, as suggested by Feldman et al. ( 2005 ). Referring to the US Capitol region in the 1980-90s, these authors report how entrepreneurs appeared to be a critical factor in the formation of dynamic biotechnology and ICT clusters. It took 2 decades to achieve self-sustaining development with strong industry networks and a supportive local culture. Another example is provided by Thompson et al. ( 2018 ) regarding the emergence of entrepreneurial ecosystems. By carefully analyzing social impact initiatives in Seattle, they document how everyday interactions among a set of individuals can endogenously lead to building an entrepreneurial ecosystem and the sharing of beliefs and values supportive of the whole.

Entrepreneurs can be highly involved in creating new institutional and cultural combinations, which also opens new perspectives for understanding change (Lowe and Feldman, 2017 ). After all, what makes one region seem more entrepreneurial than another and a lasting success? It is undoubtedly the result of multiple intertwined factors, constituting a complex system which requires in-depth study, as Saxenian ( 1994 ) was able to propose, adopting a multidisciplinary point of view, in her now classic contribution. Beyond the emblematic Silicon Valley, Route 128, or the Tel Aviv region, there may be many more examples. Are we not often quoting culture as an explanatory hypothesis? The local culture would be more entrepreneurial, e.g., being more oriented towards a culture of entrepreneurial financing or towards entrepreneurial innovations. These conjectures lead to questioning what an entrepreneurial culture is, how it interacts with other aspects, and how to develop it (Beugelsdijk, 2010 ; Hayton and Cacciotti, 2013 ; Marti et al., 2013 ). We still know little about it.

To this batch of questions could also be added: “where is entrepreneurship in the examination of emerging cultural phenomena?” What fits best: considering entrepreneurship as an endogenous cultural factor or as an exogenous, disruptive one? Of course, everything relates to everything in social reality.

2.5 Entrepreneurship and industrial organization

The focus of entrepreneurship research appears largely complementary to that of the field of industrial organization. Although both areas of research are concerned with the supply side of the economy, the attention of entrepreneurship scholars is usually on small entrants, whereas the study of industrial organization scholars is usually that of large incumbents. Even in the case when entry as a topic is presented in industrial organization textbooks, it deals with diversification, entry barriers and entry deterrence, mainly from the focus of incumbents. This emphasis on large market players can also be seen in typical measures of “structure” such as the C4 concentration index and the Herfindahl index, which more or less neglect small firms. In this section, some aspects of entrepreneurship research especially relevant to complementing and changing our view on industry structure, conduct and performance are presented. First, the differences in scientific tradition are elaborated upon. After that, there are three questions largely neglected by industrial organization scholars but prominent in entrepreneurship research: who starts firms? Where do industries come from? How do firms innovate and compete?

2.5.1 Differences in scientific tradition

In 1989, when SBEJ started and the economics of entrepreneurship was still in its infancy, the field of industrial organization was already mature. This can be seen in still state-of-the-art books, such as Tirole ( 1988 ), Schmalensee and Willig ( 1989 ) and Sutton ( 1991 ). Since the 1930s, industrial organization research has increased our understanding of the supply side of the economy, especially in regard to the structure of industries, interdependence of firms and their choice of actions, and welfare consequences. The study of industrial organization is directly connected to micro-economics, has a clear area of application in competition policy and is, therefore, an indispensable element of economics as an academic discipline. It is also very “mainstream” (neo-classical), as it assumes rational (profit maximizing) players and tends to analyze equilibrium outcomes. The interdependence of the market players is analyzed through game theory, making industrial organization a relatively mathematics-heavy research area.

Entrepreneurship was more or less defined away in mainstream economics (see, e.g., Baumol, 1968 ), and its role was reduced to that of “assuming risk” (Kihlstrom and Laffont, 1979 ), but there were two important exceptions, both reasoning “out of equilibrium” and therefore emphasizing a much more dynamic role. Schumpeter claimed the role of entrepreneurs to lie in choosing new combinations in production (innovation) and in disrupting the steady state, while Kirzner ( 1985 ) emphasized the alertness to and exploitation of profit opportunities that result from (continuously emerging) disequilibria, thus moving the economy towards equilibrium (Hébert and Link, 1989 ). The difference in emphasis on a dynamic interpretation of the market versus a more static one has important implications. Models in industrial organizations usually take the current market structure and a certain variable on which players compete (e.g., price or product quantity) and solve for the equilibrium outcome. Entrepreneurship research is more focused on new entrants with new products and novel ways of competing, changing the market place, and making game theoretic analysis a less obvious tool.

Whereas industrial organization is part of economics, entrepreneurship research is much more interdisciplinary. Various insights and contributions of other social sciences, such as psychology and sociology, influence the field. An example of how this can enrich our knowledge of the exit of firms is an article by Lahti et al. ( 2019 ) using brain imaging to show that entrepreneurs tend to bond to their firms so that when it would not be economically wise to continue, firms may remain in existence far beyond what models assuming rationality would predict.

2.5.2 Who starts firms?

In addition to being more focused on market dynamics, a prominent difference between industrial organization and entrepreneurship research is that the latter is very interested in who actually starts (or discontinues) firms. The “human aspect” of a firm is largely irrelevant to an industrial organization researcher who regards it as a market player acting rationally, as in maximizing profit. However, Wach et al. ( 2016 ) provide strong empirical evidence that entrepreneurs tend to have multiple goals exceeding financial ones. This may impact the over-reliance on the assumption of (hyper) rationality in game theoretic analyses using one-dimensional (profit) objectives for the players. A multidimensional individual-specific objective function not only renders the assumption of profit maximization problematic but that also holds for the assumption that in their strategic choices, firms consider profit maximization by the other parties. Stenholm and Renko ( 2016 ) emphasize another important aspect distinguishing successful from less successful entrepreneurs: flexibility. They find that passionate bricoleur (i.e., flexible) entrepreneurs outperform other entrepreneurs, as they can cope better with changing market circumstances (e.g., crises). The importance of flexibility over economies of scale and scope was already suggested as one of the key advantages for small firms in the early days of small business economics (e.g., Fiegenbaum and Karnani, 1991 ). However, some entrepreneurs may be more flexible because of their social network and skills. Lazear ( 2004 ) and Stuetzer et al. ( 2013 ) suggest that those who are more balanced in their skills are more likely to become entrepreneurs. Being balanced in skills may also help adjust the company when market circumstances alter. Baron ( 2006 ) connects opportunity recognition to the background of the entrepreneur. Entrepreneurs who were already working in the industry would, for example, be better at recognizing new opportunities due to changes in the market. Adomako et al. ( 2018 ) show that it is not only opportunity recognition on its own but also the connection with useful networks that makes firms excel. This finding shows that flexibility is likely to differ across market players. Again, this makes the outcome of highly stylized game theoretic analyses of company interaction less useful.=

2.5.3 Where do industries come from?

The origin of an industry would seem to be an obvious research question in the field of industrial organization. However, it has been more or less neglected in mainstream industrial organization research. In 1982, three important publications emphasized the evolution of the industry. Those were the highly stylized formal model by Jovanovic ( 1982 ), much in line with neo-classical theory; the book by Nelson and Winter ( 1982 ), setting the stage for a range of evolutionary studies; and the empirical analysis by Gort and Klepper ( 1982 ). Klepper was an especially influential scholar in the field of entrepreneurship research. He has contributed more to answering the question of where industries emerge from than any other scholar. He called his detailed method of investigation “nano-economics” (Klepper, 2011 ) and showed the importance of pioneers and spinoffs. His study of industries such as automobiles, tires, semi-conductors and garments in India has vastly increased our understanding of where industries originate. The importance of universities and science has obviously increased over time, and Buenstorf and Heinisch ( 2020 ) provide an example of how it impacted the start of the German laser industry. Karlsson and Nyström ( 2003 ) note that knowledge intensity is especially important in the early stages of the life cycle. The origin of industries is even more important because there is strong path dependency. Pioneering firms are the seedbed for entire industry clusters decades later. Industrial organizations tend to start taking notice of a cluster when it is also very mature, but the entrepreneurial first steps are critical in themselves.

2.5.4 How do firms innovate and compete?

R&D and patents are high on the agenda in industrial organizations with regard to measuring innovation. However, the way of innovating and the protection of its results are quite different for new and small firms—often lacking financial means—compared to their larger counterparts. Acs and Audretsch ( 1988 ) were among the first to recognize the difference between large and small firms in innovation. Many (small) firms innovate without reporting substantial R&D expenses. Leiponen and Byma ( 2009 ) discuss how small firms differ from large firms in regard to protecting their innovations (if they do so). Entrepreneurs may benefit from innovations by large firms, which is important in the knowledge spill-over theory by Acs et al. ( 2009 ). They are also likely to depend much more on external sources of knowledge. Carree et al. ( 2019 ) show how small firms may benefit more from a small number of cooperations when compared to large firms. In the era of open innovation, having a well-developed network of innovation partners is vital for new and small firms to introduce new products and production technologies. Industrial organization scholars have tended to confine their attention to research joint ventures (of two parties). The benefits of cooperation in R&D versus reduced competition after R&D produce interesting welfare considerations. However, this line of inquiry provides little insight into the dynamic networks firms in high-tech industries participate in.

Competition is at the heart of industrial organization research. The means of analyzing competition is very much conditioned by oligopoly models and game theoretical approaches. Depending upon how firms competitively interact, they may achieve low or high profits. A simple Bertrand oligopoly with homogeneous goods, for example, ends with zero profit irrespective of the number of market participants. This is not attractive to an entrant, and new firms may seek to avoid competition by introducing a new product that may more or less substitute for the current one. Gans et al. ( 2018 ) discuss various ways in which new firms may enter into existing markets. Such entry normally does not follow “the rules of the game.” Many new firms want to introduce a product that does not yet exist in the market, thereby reducing price competition (Kim and Mauborgne, 2004 ). The extent to which a product is unique often derives from how special the human and social capital of the entrepreneurs is. Competition is often not so much over current products but much more over ideas (Chatterjee and Rossi-Hansberg, 2012 ). Markets have become much more volatile and interdependent. Highly stylized game theoretic models—even how useful in our understanding of “basic” situations—tend to stand further and further away from this new reality. The way entrepreneurship research has been thinking about “competition,” in a more dynamic, Schumpeterian or Kirznerian way, seems much closer.

Entrepreneurship research enriches the field of industrial organization to actively go beyond it being reduced to “applied game theory.” The actual behavior by firms, their emergence and growth and the dynamics of industries are topics of high interest that benefit considerably from scientific contributions from the field of entrepreneurship. The (potential) added-value of entrepreneurship research to industrial organization and their fruitful interaction has not gone unnoticed of course, see for example a recent special issue in Review of Industrial Organization (November 2020). In the upcoming years the field of Industrial Organization, which has been so instrumental in the development of small business and entrepreneurship research, will itself in return profit from new insights.

2.6 Entrepreneurship and macro-economics

2.6.1 entrepreneurship is absent in macro-economics.

Macro-economics has focused largely on questions of long-run economic growth and development in recent decades. For a long time, neoclassical mainstream economics had trouble explaining long-run economic growth. Diminishing returns to capital, combined with linear depreciation, implied that in the long run, the capital stock stabilizes, and perfect competition leaves no resources available for creating growth. Technical change and productivity growth were modeled but not explained. This unsatisfactory situation ended with the arrival of endogenous growth theory. In these models, the creation and introduction of new ideas, financed from temporary monopoly profits in monopolistic markets, creates the flow of innovations that sustains long-run equilibrium growth (Romer, 1990 ; Jones, 1995 ). This “leap” in macroeconomics was made possible because others developed models for imperfect competition (Barro and Sala-I-Martin, 2003 ). However, while the work of Schumpeter inspired some to present a model of creative destruction (Aghion and Howitt, 1998 ), endogenous growth theory still did not bring entrepreneurship to the center stage. Instead, macro-economists’ attention shifted to institutions (Acemoglu, 2009 ) and left entrepreneurship remain marginalized from mainstream thinking.

The reason is not that macro-economists are daft and dumb and were too stupid to see the obvious. In macro-economics, agents are defined by what they do and are only relevant to the extent that what they do has aggregate implications. Consumers are defined as agents that consume and save. Investors are agents that invest in physical or human capital, and producers hire capital and labor to produce output. The reason that entrepreneurship has contributed little to macro-economics to date is our joint inability (or unwillingness) to come up with a sensible, unambiguous, and most importantly, non-tautological definition of what it means to be an entrepreneur (Sanders, 2022 ). This implies that modeling entrepreneurial activity in a macro-economic model is impossible, and much of our empirical evidence could be set aside as trivial. Yes, growth and entrepreneurship (however, proxied) correlate at the national level (Wennekers and Thurik, 1999 ), but so do a host of other variables. These are all proximate causes of growth and, as such, not that interesting. The way a macro-economist now looks at entrepreneurs is that there is always an entrepreneur who will pick up a valuable idea. There is also a worker who will fill a vacancy and an investor who will fund a positive net present value investment. All we need is put in place an incentive for them to do so (a free-entry and zero profit condition), and it is productivity, ultimately caused by knowledge creation (and the institutions that promote or hinder it), that causes capital, labor, entrepreneurship and all other proximate causes to grow with it.

2.6.2 … but this can change …

Taking Schumpeter ( 1911 ; 1942 ) more seriously, however, entrepreneurship research has taught us that creating an innovation from an invention is far from trivial. Building an organization, refining the concept into a value proposition, and accessing and mobilizing resources to deliver that value to customers is a deeply uncertain, context-dependent, and potentially very costly affair. The people undertaking such activities are in short supply, and the success of those who try depends crucially on their traits, talents, environmental circumstances, and luck (Bosma et al., 2004 ; Coad and Story, 2021 ). There are two reasons why we may be hopeful that these insights will now also enter the world of macro-economics.

First, advances in computing power make it possible to design, run, and analyze models of increasing complexity that allow for more heterogeneity. Not unlike the advances in modeling imperfect competition, agent-based modeling (De Marchi and Page, 2014 ) now allows macro-economists to explore (relevant) heterogeneity among agents they previously were forced to consider homogenous and representative. This has already revolutionized the modeling of financial and labor markets. We know that entrepreneurs are not homogenous and cannot usefully be represented in representative agent models. Indeed, if entrepreneurship is reduced to a predictable process in the aggregate (as in all representative agent endogenous growth models), the essence of entrepreneurial venturing will be lost. However, to feed into this emerging line of research, we must provide the pioneers in this field with systematic information on how different entrepreneurs behave differently to produce different outcomes. Only then can they begin to simulate how an economy behaves in the aggregate when individual entrepreneurs are heterogeneous.

Second, their work will gain increasing importance as new challenges (e.g., climate change) and shocks (e.g., COVID-19) hit our economies. Macro-economics will be pushed towards including entrepreneurs in its models if it wants to speak to the questions that these real-world challenges pose. It is entrepreneurs who routinely handle (deep) uncertainty, creatively destroy obsolete technologies and organizations and channel society’s resources towards new value creation. This process requires creativity and resources for experimentation, while a lack of (new) knowledge and ideas is typically not what is holding them back. The bottleneck in innovation is not ideas but entrepreneurship (Schumpeter, 1911 ). Moreover, it is the same people, traits, and activities helping an economy first resist and later recover from unanticipated shocks that will also help it transition to a new paradigm (Korber and McNaughton, 2017 ; Hartmann et al., 2022 ).

Studying the behavior of the aggregate economy at the local, regional, national, or global level will increasingly demand an understanding of the processes of transition and adaptation that both, in essence, boil down to processes of rapid change under deep uncertainty. Institutions and the deep historical roots of long-run development processes become much less relevant in that context. Entrepreneurship may be a proximate cause of long-run economic development, but it is not a proximate cause of adaptation and change.

2.6.3 … if we adopt a behavioral definition of entrepreneurship

To support this development in macro-economics, however, entrepreneurship scholars need to adopt an unambiguous and exogenous definition of entrepreneurial behavior (Sanders, 2022 ). The emphasis on empirically convenient but theoretically fuzzy definitions of entrepreneurship is what holds its impact on macro-economics back. Macro-economists need to know what it is that entrepreneurship does to model its aggregate impact. Therefore, we need to be explicit and unambiguous on what it is that entrepreneurs do , that has macro-economic implications. To the extent that they are macro-economically relevant, entrepreneurs are agents of change (Schumpeter, 1911 ). And to play that role, they must challenge the status quo. They may be successful or fail in doing so, but that behavior defines an entrepreneur in a macro-economically relevant sense. Only then can we show convincingly that it is the absence/presence of such entrepreneurial behavior that explains how different economies respond differently to similar shocks. For a macro-economist, it will not do to define entrepreneurs as people starting, owning, or managing a (small and/or young) firm or being self-employed. That status can be achieved regardless of the actions taken. It is also unproductive to “measure” entrepreneurship as a complex index of many variables that we find or select to positively correlate with long-run development, growth, and/or innovation in the aggregate. Defining entrepreneurship by its outcomes ignores the trial and error involved and creates an endogeneity issue from the outset. “Entrepreneurship is what entrepreneurship does,” Forrest Gump’s mama would say. So, let us define entrepreneurs by their (macro-economically relevant) actions. If you challenge the status quo (successfully or not) you are an entrepreneur. If you do not, you are not.

2.7 Entrepreneurship and public policy

2.7.1 from the second world war to birch ( 1981 ).

Policy had little reason to prioritize entrepreneurship in the first decades after the Second World War. The economic world was obsessed with scale economies: bigger firms were more productive than smaller ones. A destroyed world needed a fast and reliable recovery, and economies of scale were an easy way to deliver it. The great lesson that ultimately led the Allies to victory was that scale economies prevail. Victory went to those able to mass produce warships, tanks and aircraft in the least amount of time with the most efficient use of resources. Coming out of a devastating Second World War, the gulf between the communist East and capitalist West ushered in a new world order. However, one thing both sides agreed upon, bigger was better, and when it came to bigger, the communist part of the world showed the capitalist part of the world all of the advantages of large-scale production (Thurik et al., 2013 ). This was the golden age of the so-called “managed economy”: economic development and growth depended upon big firms, with the government there to protect them and to not hurt their employees too much (Audretsch and Thurik, 2001 ).

The terms “young firms” and “starting firms” were barely used. Even the word “entrepreneurship” was virtually non-existent. Small firms were useful to stack away a substantial proportion of employment, to play a role in the public safety of city centers and to signal to large firms what consumers preferred. The role of small firms was seen as social rather than economic (Thurik, 2009 ). This was evidenced by the passage of the United Small Business Act in 1952, which created the United States Small Business Administration to preserve and protect what was considered to be an endangered species of business. Small and new business was valued more for its contributions to a democratic society than for efficiency, productivity, innovation, and growth (Audretsch and Moog, 2022 ).

In this world involved with recovery and reconstruction from the Second World War, rebuilding infrastructure, focusing on heavy manufacturing and engaging labor in repetitive, standardized tasks fuelled unprecedented rapid growth that had not been seen for decades. However, this antidote stopped working as a more nuanced view that social and economic values encompass a broader spectrum of goals in the 1960s, such as distribution and “social makeability.” The pop culture, hippy movement, flower power, and student revolts such as those in Paris in 1968 ushered in a new urgency for societal change. However, a transition to what? In addition, transition to a newer economy was needed because on the horizon loomed the economic crisis in the 1970s, which jolted the OECD countries out of the post-war equilibrium. Unemployment reached double digits for the first time since the Second World War. Both scholars and policy-makers looked to the tried and true stalwart, dominant large corporations, to restore the prosperity and jobs that were proving to be so elusive. A stagnant policy thinking reflected a similarly stagnant economy. The scientific metabolism of those who study competitiveness and growth had come to a halt.

In 1981, Birch startled this phlegmatic policy world by identifying new and small businesses as the primary source of new jobs (Birch, 1981 ). Dismay with this new finding was mixed with the first signs of relief that perhaps a new stalwart was on the horizon. However, jobs are not sufficient to create competitiveness. In Made in America: Regaining the Productive , the MIT Commission on Productivity argued that restoring the competitiveness of the industrial giants in the manufacturing industries that had carried post-war prosperity was the key to reigniting economic prosperity (Dertouzos et al., 1989 ).

2.7.2 From small firms to ambitious entrepreneurship

Therefore, while public policy thinking in the 1980s was moving away from the 1960s’ fixation on the dominant role of large firms and the 1970s’ fixation on the role of government distributing and supporting “social makeability,” it still offered few clues of what economic dynamics really is and how it can enhance competitiveness. Entrepreneurship was scarcely discussed and certainly not prioritized. The question of why so many small businesses still existed should have been the central research question of the time. Businesses do not just exist for social reasons as justifications for public policy. Businesses do not just exist because their owners are too stubborn to exit. The essential contribution of small business and entrepreneurship went largely unnoticed—the 1980s produced no lasting influencers.

A decade later, as the competitiveness of firms and nations was challenged by the advent of globalization (Porter, 1990 ), both scholars and thought leaders in business and public policy turned to innovation as the catalyst for restoring economic viability. Once again, research uncovered small and new firms as making an unexpected but robust contribution to the coveted economic goal, innovative activity (Acs and Audretsch, 1988 ; Acs and Audretsch, 1990 ).

The discovery that small firms played a role in the creation of jobs and later in the creation of newness completely overturned policy thinking. Of course, big firms create newness in their sophisticated laboratories, but it does not always work like that. Swarms of small firms experiment, learn from each other, die or not, grow or not, merge or not, and, in the end, sometimes something new happens. This newness may be swallowed up by some large firm that continues the road to the market (Audretsch, 2007 ). We then talk of an innovation. With this new understanding of the contribution to innovation and competitiveness contributed by small and new firms, a concomitant shift in public policy occurred, prioritizing and starting and nurturing new firms, encouraging, in particular, their aggregation in industrial zones and business parks.

In retrospect, it is remarkable how smoothly this discovery of the economic value of smallness was absorbed by the public and by policy-makers. It was never regarded as a delusion or a mirage, or worse, a conspiracy theory “avant la lettre.” In the 1980s, the supply of studies on entrepreneurship and small business economics exploded. By the 1990s, a marked demand for small business studies had developed. At the turn of the century, demand had caught up to supply, a life changer for academic entrepreneurship and small business researchers.

The first decade of the current century witnessed a less spectacular change in thinking. What are small firms? Big firms that are just small? Of course not. A small firm is built around a person, whereas its larger counterpart has many stakeholders. The concept of the entrepreneur was reinvented, and with it, the entrepreneurial economy (Audretsch and Thurik, 2000 ). Just as Taylorism (Taylor, 1911 ) had removed the need for agency and autonomous decision-making in ushering in the field of management nearly a century earlier, the burgeoning field of entrepreneurship instead celebrated a focus on the humanness of individuals and people. Public policy followed by shifting to target persons rather than firms.

The consequences of this shift in policy orientation were gigantic. Large firms were no longer the focal point of the economy, society, and policy initiatives. The entrepreneur became the persona causa (again) of economic prosperity. Business schools, for instance, had to reorient from large firms towards single persons. This took immense energy through internal conflict. Ultimately, they were successful. All leading business schools now house eminent teams of entrepreneurship scholars. A by-product of this double switch—from large incumbents to small young firms and from firms to persons—was the establishment of incubation centers. These centers have been at the forefront of a multitude of policy initiatives for the better part of the current century.

In the second decade of the current century, sentiment changed yet again. Entrepreneurship alone may be relevant, modern and heroic, but it is not enough to sustain growth in developed economies. Thus, the focus shifted to ambitious entrepreneurship: innovating, exporting, growing by using clever forms of cooperation, flexibilization, and the exploitation of modern information and communication techniques (Stam et al., 2011 ; Hermans et al., 2015 ). Moreover, recognition grew that entrepreneurship is not the sole privilege of small young firms. It can also play a role within large incumbent firms and within not-for-profit organizations. It plays a role everywhere.

2.7.3 Deep tech and the entrepreneurial society

Looking at the future, the question is what catch word can be connected to entrepreneurship in the third decade of this century?

The second information and communication technology revolution—which basically made the technology portable, miniature, cheap, and user friendly—was not masterminded. Herds of small firms housing nerds and unrelenting entrepreneurial energy played a crucial role. The message from a world where hundreds of millions live at—or even below—sea level can only be this: we need climate-tech businesses in the hope that they create “iPhone”-like or rather “Netscape”-like moments (The Economist, 2021 ). Falling out of the sky in the mid-1990s, the Netscape web browser was a revolution that connected people to whatever they wanted. For the next big moment, we need invention and innovation to explode. In addition, for that to occur, we need herds of nerds surrounded by entrepreneurial vibrancy. Otherwise, the decarbonizing transition will not happen.

Large firms have considerable cash, vision, “Ausdauer,” and brains at their disposal. Will they contribute to decarbonizing with their commitments to invest time and pledges to invest money in “greeneries this, footprints that, responsibilities this, and net-zero that”? Their embedment in current technology may not be compatible with radical thinking. The herds of nerds showered by risk-tolerant venture capital and nurtured by public emotions of urgency may be a better route to creative destruction. Few people have an idea about the technologies of and behavior around decarbonizing. If we did have any idea, we would not need the herds of nerds doing crazy things.

There surely is more capital looking for brains than brains looking for capital. The world of capital fully understands that spreading risks by loaning to many technologically diverse firms is a better option than going with the understandable and recognizable flow and loaning to technologically similar firms. More importantly, it has been shown many times that the fruits of creative destruction can generate formidable profits.

Again, what is the catch word of the present decade? To entrepreneurship scholars, every decade can be connected to entrepreneurship in some way. With the grand challenges of climate change ahead of us, including the need for decarbonization and the probable consequence of increasing societal inequality, impact-driven entrepreneurship and innovation are needed more than ever. Deep technology will play an important role in this regard. Hence, we use the term “impact-driven deep tech entrepreneurship,” which points to entrepreneurial activities of a scientific, technical nature aimed at products—and hence markets—that do not yet exist and that not only create economic value but, even more importantly, have a strong impact on society with its many grand challenges.

This view on the crucial role of entrepreneurship in humankind’s survival leaves no room for the view that entrepreneurial society is over (Naude, 2022 ), that the domination of megafirms will surely increase, that entrepreneurial energy will fade in a world where the lowest caste consists of jobbers and freelancers, and that large government is returning. In other words, this view conflicts with those who maintain that Western democratic liberalism has become sclerotic (Audretsch and Moog, 2022 ).

Despite many attacks from both the right and the left, Western democratic liberalism is still in full swing, as is entrepreneurial society. We will need it to unleash “impact-driven deep tech entrepreneurship.” In other words, and in the terminology of democratic liberalism itself, we need to get out of the way while “impact-driven deep tech entrepreneurship” unleashes itself. Its much-needed successes will provide the oxygen for the next phase of Western democratic liberalism.

Table 1 shows 8 decades of entrepreneurship in public policy since the Second World War in terms of “catch” words.

2.7.4 Rising to the challenge

The policy priority has evolved from ignoring entrepreneurship to recognizing its role, from jobs to subsequently innovation, competitiveness, and growth, from firms to persons, from persons to ambitious persons and now, it can be hoped, from activities concerning existing to not yet existing markets. This change has been in sync with a growing awareness that entrepreneurship contributes to sustainability and the inclusion of socially excluded demographic groups and, most recently, a free and democratic society (Audretsch and Moog, 2022 ). The research community not only responded with a robust body of literature linking the most compelling issues of the “Zeitalter” to entrepreneurship, it often led the way to help society to adapt its awareness and policy to refocus. In other words, the research community was continuously linked to new policy goals and contributed to defining and evaluating them and influencing the “Zeitgeist.” Thus, entrepreneurship has emerged as a priority for public policy in rising to the challenge of a myriad of broad social and economic challenges.

This evolution of entrepreneurship policy can be viewed through the lens of equilibrating the overall policy approach with the underlying economic forces and challenges characterizing each period. In the 1950s, this involved recovery and reconstruction from the Second World War, with an emphasis on infrastructure, heavy manufacturing and rapid growth. The priority of high growth gave way to a more nuanced view that economic and social values encompass more than just growth in the 1960s, which in turn transitioned into an emphasis on distribution and “makeability” in the 1970s. Entrepreneurship was scarcely discussed and certainly not prioritized over this time span of more than 3 decades. However, by the 1980s, the discovery that small firms are drivers of job creation thrust them into a focal point of policy. As the driving force of economic growth shifted towards innovation in response to the onset of globalization in the 1990s, the policy priority again shifted to new and young firms. Thus, by the turn of the century, the contemporary policy focus on entrepreneurship emerged, which has more recently become refined by prioritizing ambitious entrepreneurship and “deep tech” entrepreneurship.

Thus, by staying relevant to society and providing policy solutions, entrepreneurship research has evolved from being a largely tangential and marginal field of inquiry to one of the most dynamic and robust fields in the social sciences, policy and management. The influential entrepreneurial ecosystem literature is one of the best examples of the crucial role of entrepreneurship in policy thinking both from a policy and scholarly perspective (Wurth et al., 2022 ). Without a strong and compelling body of literature, the mandate for public policy to ignite entrepreneurship to enable society to rise to the challenges posed by some of the most daunting and gripping problems would not have materialized. At the same time, it has been the ability of the scholarly field of entrepreneurship to address the most pressing societal problems that has no doubt fuelled its emergence as one of the most important fields of inquiry in management and the social sciences. This two-way traffic is sometimes documented but only implicitly so. See for instance Terjesen et al. ( 2016 ).

3 Synthesis of how entrepreneurship research impacts other fields

The goal of this article is to showcase how modern entrepreneurship research contributes to the development of other academic fields. This was achieved based on observations from a carefully selected group of interdisciplinary entrepreneurship scholars with a strong grounding in fields outside the core of entrepreneurship research. Based on these contributions, we identified five areas and ways in which entrepreneurship research had and still has an impact on the development of other disciplines.

Entrepreneurship research contributes to the development of other fields by providing new ideas for the consequences of phenomena that are already well studied in these fields. As explained in Section 2.1, ADHD has been studied in clinical psychology for decades. Entrepreneurship research has taken a different perspective and looked at how ADHD can actually be beneficial for starting an (entrepreneurial) career. This is a new perspective, as clinical psychology has traditionally only looked at the negative occupational aspects of ADHD. Entrepreneurship research has provided a fresh perspective on clinical psychology research on ADHD and spurred new empirical research with a whole range of new outcome variables ranging from entrepreneurship intention (Verheul et al., 2015 ) to entrepreneurial orientation (Wismans et al., 2020 ) and entrepreneurial performance or outcomes (Wiklund et al., 2016 ; Patel et al., 2021 ). A similar conclusion can be made about the relationship between entrepreneurship and occupational health research, as explained in Section 2.2. Entrepreneurship as an “extreme” work setting can enhance both ill- and well-being, which introduces a new trade-off that has thus far not been a focus of occupational health research. Again, entrepreneurship research inspired a discipline far away from entrepreneurship research to investigate a consequence that was not the focus of occupational health research. Future clinical psychology and occupational health research can build on these ideas and apply them to other phenomena studied in their respective disciplines. For example, occupational health research could analyze the ill- and well-being trade-off that exists with extreme sports athletes, artists, and managers of large firms. Clinical psychology research could study the relationship between entrepreneurship and dyslexia, autism, and narcissism (e.g., Leung et al., 2021 ). Similar situations or opportunities also exist with other fields. For example, family or educational sociology could analyze the impact of familial (Aldrich and Cliff, 2003 ) or educational socialization on entrepreneurship-related outcome variables. Another recent example is existentialism: entrepreneurs tend to view their business as the center of their existence. Three concepts have been introduced to show the link between existentialism and mental and physical health: subordination, suffering, and “salutogenesis” (Torrès et al., 2022 ). The eco-systems literature developed a focus on the role of entrepreneurship (Wurth et al., 2022 ) with policy and scholarly perspectives. A last example is the field of spirituality and religion that has looked at how religion and spiritual beliefs influence entrepreneurship processes and outcomes. For a summary, see Block et al. ( 2020 ).

Context has emerged as being crucial for the scholarly field of entrepreneurship. An important finding in the present study is that for other research fields, entrepreneurship is the context. Entrepreneurship is for other fields an interesting, unique and extreme context in which to analyze relationships that are already analyzed in a “normal” context. For example, research on the relationship between work demands and well-being can benefit from using an entrepreneurship context. With innovative entrepreneurship, for example, uncertainty is often particularly high, and evidence about the relationship between entrepreneurial work demands and entrepreneurial well-being can help to explain how work demands impact well-being in a setting of high uncertainty. In this way, entrepreneurship research contributes to the core literature on occupational health. A similar argument exists with genetic epidemiology (see Section 2.3), which is concerned with how particular combinations of genes influence individual behavior. Entrepreneurship, which is associated with high uncertainty and risk, can be used as a unique context to analyze how genetic dispositions impact uncertainty tolerance or risk aversion. Alternatively, entrepreneurship can be used as a contextual moderator explaining the relationship between two variables of interest outside the scope of entrepreneurship research. For example, educational science might be interested in learning about the effect of education on earnings or job satisfaction. Using innovative entrepreneurship as a unique and extreme context may help to explain how education impacts earnings or job satisfaction in a dynamic environment characterized by high environmental uncertainty.

Entrepreneurship can also be an antecedent that explains phenomena of interest in other fields. For example, as illustrated above in Section 2.4, entrepreneurship—in particular high-impact successful entrepreneurship—has the power to shape societal culture, leading to an entrepreneurial society. A good example would be to analyze how Silicon Valley entrepreneurship and/or the German Mittelstand entrepreneurship model (Pahnke and Welter, 2019 ) shape societal values about individualism and power distance. A related example would be to analyze how entrepreneurship impacts societal or regional inequality (Halvarrsson et al., 2018 ; Lippman et al., 2005 ), which is at the core of disciplines such as sociology and political science. This argument holds not only for the soft sciences but also for the hard sciences. If one wants to understand why certain technologies diffuse in the market and become technological standards and others do not, entrepreneurship research provides a fresh perspective. Entrepreneurs can be change agents introducing new technologies and innovations into the market, impacting technology diffusion and competition (Block et al., 2017 ; Block et al. in press; Miller and Garnsey, 2000 ; Schumpeter, 1911 ). In this way, entrepreneurship research contributes to technology research but also to an understanding of industrial structures, which is at the core of competition and industrial organization research (see Section 2.5).

Sometimes, entrepreneurship research challenges the fundamental assumptions of other disciplines, contributing to a more realistic and empirically grounded micro-level underpinning of theoretical models. As described above in Sections 2.5 and 2.6, the empirical findings from entrepreneurship research can be seen as a game changer of industrial organization and macro-economic theory, which have for years largely ignored the role of the entrepreneurs managing young and innovative firms that bring innovation to the market and destroy existing market equilibria. A similar comment can be made about (corporate) finance research, which is influenced by theorems such as the Modigliani-Miller theorem (Modigliani and Miller, 1958 ) stating that the market value of a company does not depend on its capital structure and that it does not matter whether a firm finances its growth through debt or equity or through internal or external sources of finance. Entrepreneurship research has shown that this assumption and statement does not hold for innovative, high-growth, and high-impact firms facing high levels of uncertainty. The result is the emergence of entrepreneurial finance as an important and fast-growing research area at the intersection of entrepreneurship and finance research, investigating how innovative firms use venture capital, business angel money, crowdfunding, initial coin offering and other entrepreneurial financing players and tools to finance innovation and growth (Block et al., 2018 ). The case of crowdfunding research clearly illustrates the important role of entrepreneurship research as a catalyst for finance research on crowdfunding, as many of the early influential papers on crowdfunding appeared in the leading entrepreneurship, and not finance, journals (e.g., Belleflamme et al., 2014 ; Mollick, 2014 ). The example of entrepreneurial finance, however, also illustrates that, sometimes, parallel universes can exist where two disciplines analyze the same set of questions while largely ignoring developments in the other discipline.

Entrepreneurship research provides other disciplines with the opportunity to show that their research matters from a practical perspective. As described above, it changed the perspective of policy research explaining what it takes to build an entrepreneurial society and economy. Policy-makers around the world were fast to jump on this train and grab the terminology of entrepreneurship (research), such as start(ing)-up, scale-up, entrepreneurial society, (corporate) venturing, or seizing opportunities. By analyzing entrepreneurship variables as outcome variables, neighboring disciplines took the chance to gain legitimacy in the practical world of business and policy decision-makers and research funders. There is hardly any contemporary research funding agency that does not emphasize the third mission of universities: knowledge transfer and the practical impact of the funded research. Entrepreneurship through new ventures or existing organizations has become the prevalent mode for the commercialization of university research and knowledge. Relatedly, scholarly societies such as the Strategic Management Society took the chance to create journals such as the Strategic Entrepreneurship Journal at the interface of their own and the entrepreneurship field. It remains to be seen what this means for the core leading entrepreneurship journals. Thus far, it seems that these journals benefit from this development given the steady rise of their impact factors, which are now even higher than those of some of the established and general management and economics journals.

Table 2 below summarizes the above discussion and provides an overview of how entrepreneurship research has an impact on other fields.

What explains the success of entrepreneurship research having an impact on other fields? What are the mechanisms behind the two-way traffic? It is hard to give a definite answer but it surely helped that many of the early entrepreneurship research scholars had a disciplinary grounding outside the field of entrepreneurship research which facilitated the communication and led to many entrepreneurship publications outside the core entrepreneurship journals. Footnote 4 It also resulted in joint conferences, workshops, and entrepreneurship sessions in conferences of other disciplines giving visibility for entrepreneurship research Footnote 5 and leading to multidisciplinary research teams. Footnote 6

4 Conclusion and outlook

Our article shows that entrepreneurship research indeed influences other academic fields. It questions core assumptions of other fields and provides new insights about the antecedents, mechanisms, and consequences of important phenomena. Moreover, entrepreneurship research helps legitimize other fields in the practical world.

Given that entrepreneurship research seems to impact other fields, what does this mean for the field of entrepreneurship research itself? First , it underscores the need for (theoretical and empirical) sophistication as the impact of entrepreneurship research goes beyond its own discipline. Yet, too much sophistication may be “too-much-of-a-good-thing” and reduce the impact of entrepreneurship research on other fields and (even more) on public policy. There is a fine line between scientific sophistication and relevance of entrepreneurship research for other fields and policy-makers. Second , given the ability of entrepreneurship research to establish a two-way traffic between fields, a danger looms of losing its own identity and becoming unfocused and eclectic. Entrepreneurship research should avoid this and keep its own theoretical and empirical concepts, measurements, and grounding. Footnote 7 Third , the two-way traffic also has implications for the evaluation of the quality of entrepreneurship research and its makers. It is not enough to measure only the scholarly impact in entrepreneurship research or the broader fields of management and economics. Our study shows that the entire social sciences could be included as well as some fields from the hard sciences.

How will the relationship between entrepreneurship and other fields evolve? The spectrum of possibilities seems endless. It ranges from entrepreneurship research becoming so mainstream and ubiquitous that it loses its identity and meaning, eventually disappearing, to entrepreneurship research further developing its own identity and agenda constantly bringing its methods, tools and questions into other fields, inspiring them to come up with new answers to the important questions in these fields. Surely, the future will tell us which direction entrepreneurship research as a discipline will take. A host of new challenges, including environmental sustainability, social inclusion and income equality, confront a bewildered society. If the past is indeed prelude to the future, we can look to the promise of entrepreneurship research to continue its influence in shaping thinking and ideas across a broad spectrum of academic disciplines and fields.

We took all journals in the management- and business-related categories from the SSCI and ranked them by the 2021 impact factor (IF). The respective journals listed under the top 100 are Journal of Business Venturing (IF: 13.12), Entrepreneurship Theory and Practice (IF: 9.99), Small Business Economics (IF: 7.10), Journal of Small Business Management (IF: 6.88), International Small Business Journal (IF: 6.41), Entrepreneurship and Regional Development (IF: 6.41), International Journal of Entrepreneurial Behavior and Research (IF: 6.30), International Entrepreneurship and Management Journal (IF: 6.15), and Strategic Entrepreneurship Journal (IF: 5.76).

Cases could clearly be made for economic geography, sociology and health in the sense that these fields may have benefitted from the entrepreneurship view. Geography journals such as Regional Studies, Economic Geography, Journal of Economic Geography and European Planning Studies report many entrepreneurship articles. Already in 2008, the interactions between sociology and entrepreneurship have been dealt with by Sorensen and Stuart (2008).

The present paper focuses on research, but clearly the “academic field of entrepreneurship” is bigger than that. It also plays a role in areas such as teaching and the institutional infrastructure from incubation centers to entire eco-systems. For instance, entrepreneurship research has had an impact on educational methods such as challenge-based learning and a competence-based approach to teaching which again influenced research on entrepreneurship education. The two-way traffic between entrepreneurship and the eco-systems literature is an even better example of links not just research based but also having solid policy underpinnings. See the transdisciplinary entrepreneurial ecosystem research program proposed in Wurth et al. ( 2022 ).

Zoltan Acs and David Audretsch moved over from the field of industrial economics, Roy Thurik from marketing, David Story from geography, just to name a few.

Experimental entrepreneurship sessions during the American Economic Association meetings, the European Association for Research in Industrial Economics meetings and the Dutch Ecozoek meetings of the late 1980s come to mind as examples of how entrepreneurship discovered itself as some subfield within platforms aimed at a broader field.

Publications such as Van der Loos et al. ( 2013 ) and Obschonka et al. ( 2015 ) are examples of multidisciplinary teams aiming to connect entrepreneurship to genetics and culture, respectively.

Also, here there is fine line between the identity of entrepreneurship and the ability to connect to other disciplines. The relevance to other disciplines is sometimes hampered by ambiguous definitions of entrepreneurship, business owners, self-employment, ecosystems or whatever. The use of multiple proxies for a theoretical concept is permitted of course but only if they are clearly defined. See also the section on macro-economics above.

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Acknowledgements

The article is the result of the seminar “What has the entrepreneurship view to offer to other academic fields?” The seminar was initiated by Roy Thurik and organized by Jörn Block and Andrew Burke. In the seminar, several scholars were invited to present their views on how entrepreneurship research has influenced their particular field: David Audretsch (Public Policy), Martin Carree (Industrial Organization), Marcus Dejardin (Culture), Cornelius Rietveld (Genetic Epidemiology), Mark Sanders (Macro-Economics), Ute Stephan (Occupational Health), and Johan Wiklund (Clinical Psychology). We thank the Erasmus School of Economics, and in particular the department of Applied Economics, for financing the Erasmus Entrepreneurship Event that took place in Rotterdam on November 26, 2021. The event included the above seminar and Roy Thurik’s valedictory address called Entrepreneurship , knowledge creation , and more .

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Thurik, A.R., Audretsch, D.B., Block, J.H. et al. The impact of entrepreneurship research on other academic fields. Small Bus Econ 62 , 727–751 (2024). https://doi.org/10.1007/s11187-023-00781-3

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DOI : https://doi.org/10.1007/s11187-023-00781-3

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The entrepreneur is the head of the firm and coordinates the factors of production; introduces new methods, processes, and products and creates opportunities for economic growth; bears the risks connected with his or her activities; and, enjoys power and high status in capitalist market societies. Entrepreneurs predate capitalism and do exist in socialist and other alternative economic systems, but are especially associated with that economic system more than any other.

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The term entrepreneur is only one of the concepts used to designate leadership in business and overlaps with others, such as capitalist, employer, investor, owner, manager, producer, chief executive, bourgeois, investor, work-giver, profit-maker, boss, businessman, and businesswoman. Each of these labels stresses one aspect of leadership in business institutions and of the relations with a variety of stakeholders, but the concept ‘entrepreneur’ seems the most encompassing and rigorously defined.

The very origin of the word ‘entrepreneur’ must be traced to the realm of war rather than of economic competition, although in a war for gain rather than for power or honor. The first references to the word appeared in sixteenth-century France, where it defined the fortune captain who hired mercenary soldiers to serve princes, leagues, or towns for pay. It was only later, in the eighteenth century that the concept applied to ‘peaceful’ economic actors who either undertook contracts for public works, or introduced new agricultural techniques in their land, or risked their own capital in industry.

The first theoretical accounts of the entrepreneurial function appeared in the second half of the eighteenth century with Cantillon and Turgot, who stressed the willingness to accept the risk and uncertainty inherent in economic activity as the key distinctive feature, a concept which was later developed by Knight in the twentieth century. Adam Smith and mainstream economics did not emphasize the specific role of the entrepreneur—with the notable exceptions of Jean Baptiste Say—who defined the entrepreneur as the person who combines the factors of production for profit, putting himself at the center of several relations among capitalists, workers, technicians, merchants, and consumers—and John Stuart Mill—who separated the entrepreneurial function (the payment for which is profit) from that of providing capital (the payment for which is interest). It was, however, Joseph Schumpeter, who above all, conceptualized entrepreneurship as innovativeness, thus giving it a dynamic quality lacking in earlier formulations.

Contemporary economics assumes that entrepreneurial services are highly elastic and that failures in entrepreneurship are due to maladjustments to external market conditions and to lack of economic incentives. Only a few economists analyze more deeply the concept of the entrepreneur, conceiving him or her as a middleperson between markets, or a gap-filler alert to new opportunities. The study of entrepreneurship is thus more developed within other disciplines: sociology, business history, psychology, and anthropology.

1. The Classical Theories

The classical interpretations of entrepreneurship by Marx, Weber, and Schumpeter are framed into broad, ambitious studies of economic dynamics and cultural change which, although sometimes not convincing and in need of empirical verification and substantial revision, generally avoid the pitfalls of comparative static models and often ask the right kind of questions.

Marx’s contribution to the study of entrepreneurship does not lie so much in Das Kapital’s (1867) abstract model of the capitalist mode of production, as in the analysis of the capitalist labor market and factory system, and in the historical sketch on ‘primitive accumulation,’ where he traces the processes of disenfranchising of labor from feudal and corporate ties and the transformation of land, merchant, and money capital into industrial capital; as well as in the accounts of the events of 1848 and 1870 in France, where the different strategies of the various components of the bourgeoisie, such as industrial and financial capital, are analyzed. On the whole, in spite of its methodological errors—first of all the reifying of its economic model into more or less universal laws— Marx’s analysis of the rise and the internal dynamics of capitalism played an important role in future works by Weber, Sombart, Schumpeter, and many others (both Marxists like Dobb, Sweezy, the ‘dependencia’ theorists, and non-Marxists like Polanyi and Barrington Moore), by identifying a set of basic structural conditions of a capitalist economy, where entrepreneurship can develop.

Weber’s study of entrepreneurship is couched in his analysis of the interplay between religious ethos and modern rationalization in the rise of capitalism. The entrepreneur is clearly distinguished from his historical predecessors in traditional economies by virtue of his rational and systematic pursuit of economic gain, reliance on calculation measured in relation to this economic criterion, the extension of trust through credit, and the subordination of consumption in the interest of accumulation. These are the elements of the rational economic actor’s ‘instrumental rationality’ (Zweckrationalitat), by which he or she establishes a systematic relationship between preferred goals and the most suitable means to achieve them. In his ponderous essays on the economic ethics of great world religions published in the Archi fur Sozialwissenschaft und Sozialpolitik and in his major work Wirtschaft und Gesellschaft on the relations between economy and society, Weber argued that the advent of ascetic Protestantism provided an especially fruitful breeding ground for the mentality of economic rationality, since through a complex process material success is a sign of ascetic realization.

Weber’s analysis has been variously and sometimes convincingly criticized; but his most significant and lasting contribution lies, as Brigitte Berger (1991) puts it, in ‘his ability to show how the expansion of ‘‘instrumental rationality’’ characteristic of the modern entrepreneurial phenomenon also impelled—slowly and incrementally, through the efforts of individuals and groups in their everyday activities and practices— the formation of distinctly modern institutions in all spheres of life, the public as well as the private.’ The degree to which the forces of rationalization responsible for dislodging individuals from their embeddedness in nature, religion, and tradition continue to shape contemporary and future developments is the study of some current researchers, particularly those influenced by Kellner.

The classical interpretations of Marx and Weber are relevant, but Schumpeter is the theorist of entrepreneurship ‘par excellence,’ who provides the most thorough analysis of the entrepreneurial function. The analysis of entrepreneurship is at the center of Schumpeter’s theoretical system. The entrepreneurial function is the key variable in his theory of development. He defined it as innovation, the introduction of a new combination of the factors of production (land and labor) that, when combined with credit, breaks into the static equilibrium of the circular flow of economic life and raises it to a new level. The entrepreneur changes the conditions of supply, combines existing resources in new ways, and thereby sets up a new production function. Entrepreneurship does not imply the requisite of property, is not based on the assumption of risk, and does not require belonging to a business organization. Schumpeter stressed the revolutionary character of the entrepreneur (and sometimes portrayed him with the same unilateral admiration as Marx showed for the revolutionary proletariat). But the conception of entrepreneurship as ‘the function of innovation’ opens the door to the critique that he exaggerates the importance of a function that seems potentially open to every person in business. To counteract this critique, Schumpeter drew on a range of sociological and psychological insights to demonstrate the entrepreneur’s exceptional role and qualities.

Entrepreneurship, he argues, calls for a specific type of personality and conduct, which differs from the economic man. The entrepreneur takes advantage of rationally based components of his or her environment, such as money, science, and individual freedom, and he or she orients his or her conduct to rational values, but he or she is not the average product of bourgeois culture, which defines rationality from the narrower viewpoint of calculating one’s short-term advantage. The entrepreneur acts on the basis of an autonomous drive to conquest and struggle, to achieve and create for its own sake, and also to establish a family dynasty. He or she is a bold leader, capable of thinking the new and grasping the essential, willing to act quickly, to understand by intuition, and to forgo the psychological resistances and social criticisms that always arise when new and innovative behavior is regarded as deviant and dangerous. This sets him off from the routine manager. While having some elements in common with religious and military leaders of the past, the entrepreneur is, however, the leader of a rational and antiheroic culture, and as a result does not excite the charismatic feelings and collective enthusiasm of those who make or defend whole civilizations.

Entrepreneurship is a specific historical phenomenon, which rests on the premise of a separate economic sphere differentiated from others. In previous epochs, the entrepreneurial function was fused with others in the actions of religious, political, and social leaders. In any historical society there is leadership, defined as the capacity to conceive and lead the making of innovations. What changes in the different historical contexts is the privileged sphere where leadership is applied, the one that is related to the core function for the survival and development of that given society. Entrepreneurship is the specific historical form that leadership assumes in capitalism, its distinctive (and even essential) feature, closely linked to the bourgeois class. The bourgeoisie is the leading class, because bourgeois families have performed the innovating and leadership role in the economy and because they acquire, consolidate, and transfer prestige, power, and wealth to future generations.

The fate of entrepreneurship is closely linked to those of the bourgeoisie and capitalism. The conception of entrepreneurial innovation as the key element of capitalism implies that the weakening of the role of the innovative entrepreneur is seen as a basic factor—along with the fading away of bourgeois institutions—of the crisis of capitalism. Schumpeter predicted the progressive decay of the entrepreneurial function by virtue of the routinization of innovation in large oligopolies, which would render the entrepreneurial function superfluous and undermine the basis for continued bourgeois dominance. It is the very success of the capitalist firm that undermines the system.

Schumpeter’s identification of the fate of the nineteenth-century entrepreneur with that of capitalism is largely responsible for his faulty prediction of the collapse of this system. In reality, capitalism has proved capable of fundamental transformations through that process of ‘creative destruction’ that Schumpeter had clearly perceived, but underestimated. Several different brands of capitalism exist, which proved compatible with the existence of very large firms and with state intervention and control of the economy.

In spite of his limitations, Schumpeter is the most influential scholar of entrepreneurship. Although often in a rather sketchy way, he asked the most relevant questions and provided important theoretical insights.

2. The Multidisciplinary Approach To The Study Of Entrepreneurship

In recent decades entrepreneurship has been studied by various disciplines and through different approaches that were influenced by the classical studies, and particularly by Schumpeter’s theory. For most economists—with notable exceptions from Schumpeter to Kirzner—the question of entrepreneurship is not problematic; entrepreneurial activities will emerge more or less spontaneously, as an instance of rational profit maximization, whenever economic conditions are favorable, such as availability of capital, labor, and technology, factor mobility, and access to markets. Other social scientists, mostly sociologists, social-psychologists, business historians, and anthropologists, tend to see entrepreneurship as a more problematic phenomenon, deeply embedded in societies and cultures; they focus on the influence of, and the mutual interplay among noneconomic factors, such as cultural norms and beliefs, class relations and collective action, state intervention and control, organizational structures, bounded solidarity and trust, deviant behavior and marginality status, and motivations for achievement. They also study how different historical and geographical settings may call for markedly dissimilar forms of entrepreneurship. Economic historians have pointed out that the personality type and behavior characteristics of last-century business leaders bears little resemblance to their counterparts of today. Comparative sociologists have shown strong differences in entrepreneurial roles and styles across countries and with regard to the firm’s size and to the stages in the firm’s life cycle.

Different disciplinary paradigms provide a first basis for classifying major approaches to the studies of entrepreneurship and management. Underlying these different approaches are the two fundamental dimensions of: (a) system variables versus actor variables (or, in different terms, macro analytical models versus micro analytical models), and (b) structural versus cultural variables.

Metaphorically we can say that for entrepreneurship to emerge it is necessary that the ‘seed’ should find the appropriate ‘ground.’ Certain scholars focus on the seed, i.e., either on specific psychological traits of entrepreneurial personalities or on their social characteristics. Other scholars focus on the breeding ground, which is analyzed either in its structural factors (types of markets, factors of production, class and ethnic relations, state planning, etc.) or cultural factors (business ethics, social approval of economic activity, etc.). Others, still, emphasize the specific relation between the actor and the situation.

3. The Entrepreneurial Personality

Schumpeter argued that entrepreneurship calls for a specific type of personality and conduct, which differs from the simple rational conduct of the economic person. Psychological and sociopsychological studies focus on the distinctive traits of entrepreneurial behavior and personality. McClelland’s comparative study tries to answer the question of why some societies are more likely to produce entrepreneurs than others. His major conclusion is that childhood experiences create in certain individuals a particular psychological factor, what he calls ‘the need for achievement,’ which is responsible for economic growth and decline. The inculcation of the achievement motive is due to child-rearing practices that stress standard for excellence, self-reliance training, maternal warmth, and low father dominance. In Western industrialized nations children internalize in family socialization attitudes and symbols which favor a higher need for achievement than do children raised elsewhere, and many of the high achievers have become entrepreneurs. In underdeveloped countries McClelland finds fewer people with a high need for achievement; besides, of this smaller number, most go into fields other than business and industry. This interpretation of the motivational structure of entrepreneurship has rather overt normative implications; governments interested in economic growth should produce more high achievers by breaking traditional patterns and emphasizing other-directedness and should motivate the high achievers to enter business and industry. McClelland’s need for achievement theory raises serious methodological problems and risks to be tautological; yet, because it is easily testable, it has fostered a large number of empirical researches.

In general, psychological approaches are questionable since they either tend to make economic activity too much a function of personality, underplaying the role of contextual influences, or to establish too simple a correlation between micro (personality) variables and macro (economic and sociological) variables. Gerschenkron (1962) criticizes this type of theory, arguing that the normal variation in child-rearing practices and in IQ will produce enough potential entrepreneurs in every society; the critical questions are the institutional factors that are available for entrepreneurial action.

A more sophisticated theory of the relation between socialization and entrepreneurial personality is that of Hagen (1962), who tries to answer both the questions of who the entrepreneurs are and why they come more often from certain social groups. Hagen’s model combines a psychoanalytical interpretation of the entrepreneurial personality with an analysis of his or her condition as a member of a group that is deviant from the cultural norms of the larger society. According to Hagen, entrepreneurs tend to come from groups that suffered from withdrawal of status respect (i.e., groups who perceive that their purposes and values in life are not respected by other groups in society whom they respect and whose esteem they value). The loss of status by the social group leads to the breakdown of the family authority and is the trigger mechanism for changes in personality formation. However, the outcomes can be very different. Status withdrawal may only lead to sentiments of anger and anxiety and to retreatism. Or, in situations where the mother rejects the husband-father and shows an attitude of protective nurturance to her child, she may foster individualism and the development of a creative and self-reliant personality. Several generations are required to overcome social blockage, but then entrepreneurs can emerge.

The weakest point of Hagen’s theory is that his attempts at verification are limited to a few historical cases. Yet, at least for the part based on status withdrawal, his model can rely on empirical evidence of disadvantaged minorities in complex national societies that contributed disproportionately to entrepreneurial activity and economic development (like the Jews and the Protestants in Europe, the Samurais in Japan, the Parsees in India). Hagen’s model is in some way the trait-d’union between the psychological and the sociological approach; he considers macrosociological variables, such as status withdrawal and social marginality, but only insofar as they influence personality development.

4. The Social Context Of Entrepreneurship: Marginal Or Privileged Status?

The context where entrepreneurship emerges has been studied with regard to: either the social position of the entrepreneurs (marginal deviant or privileged), or the cultural values and attitudes that can favor it, or the structure of risks and opportunities. Sociological conceptions of entrepreneurship in terms of deviance and marginality status have a longstanding tradition. In Der Moderne Kapitalismus (1916–27, 1987), Sombart remarks that the creativity and the ability to break traditional values and patterns which characterize the capitalist entrepreneur can be found in all peoples, social groups, and religions, but that they are more frequent among the members of certain minorities, such as the heretics, the strangers, and the Jews. These groups are not completely accepted in the societies in which they live; they can therefore avoid more easily than others the traditional values and norms that regulated economic behavior in premodern Europe. Because of their minority status— both tolerated and oppressed—they tend to develop specific skills in the commercial and financial activities they are allowed to practice; and because of their acute sense of diversity, they maintain a strong group solidarity, which favors trust and therefore credit among the members of the group.

Building on both Sombart and Schumpeter, Hoselitz (1963) argues that entrepreneurs are deviant because of their ambiguous social position. Marginal groups such as the Jews and Greeks in medieval Europe, the Chinese in Southeast Asia, and Indians in East Africa, are peculiarly suited to make creative adjustments in situations of change and to develop genuine innovations in social behavior, because they act in a hostile social milieu, where prevailing attitudes are against innovation; they are excluded from political power so they concentrate on business; and being left outside the dominant value system, they are subjected to lesser sanctions for their deviant behavior.

More recent works on ethnic communities (Ward and Jenkins 1984, Waldinger et al. 1985) and women (Goffee and Scase 1985) follow a similar ‘positional’ approach. Structural factors within the larger society, such as racism, sexism, and credentialism, through processes of exclusionary closure create ‘outsiders’; but some of these people form ‘feeder groups’ from which new entrepreneurs emerge, as in the case of South African Indians who, embedded in organic networks and communities, were remarkably successful in circumventing the massive legal and political constraints of apartheid.

In their study (1992) of how Dominican and other immigrants ‘made it’ in the American economy Portes and Min Zho emphasize bounded solidarity and enforceable trust as sources of social capital, which do not stem from shared value orientations, but from the position of the ethnic minorities in the wider social structure. Citizens of China, Korea, or Cuba do not display any exceptional solidarity or bienfeasance in economic transactions when they are in their native countries. Such benefits stem from their being the members of an identifiable social minority in the host country. Bounded solidarity is created among immigrant customers, workers, and investors because they are treated as foreigners, and have a heightened awareness of the symbols of common nationhood. Enforceable trust is based on the ostracism of violators, cutting them off from sources of credit and opportunity in the ethnic economy.

The social marginality approach can be challenged on two grounds: on structural grounds, by those who argue that dominant classes in society can produce entrepreneurs more than marginal groups can, because of their access to economic, political, and social resources; and on cultural grounds, by those who stress core values and social approval as requisites of entrepreneurship. Social marginality and ethnic solidarity certainly play a role in the formation of entrepreneurship. But historical and comparative research on developed countries—both early industrializing countries (like Great Britain and France) and ‘latecomers’ (like Germany, Italy, and Japan)—show that most new entrepreneurs come from the already ‘privileged’ status groups of preindustrial societies, such as merchants, landowners, and wealthy artisans, who possess both the material and intellectual resources for economic achievement. Dobb’s thesis of the revolutionary role played by yeomen and independent artisans (1946), Pirenne’s analysis of the role of merchants in the formation of the urban bourgeoisie (1914), and Brentano’s view of the acquisitive aristocracy as a protocapitalist class (1916), are all instances of the importance of social groups that occupied well-established positions in the ‘traditional’ societies and which paid a key modernizing role. Although in different ways, studies of modernization and of the world economy by Barrington Moore (1966), Bendix (1978), Wallerstein (1979), and others, show the importance of socially established classes in entrepreneurial formation and consolidation.

Even in a more open society as the United States, the contribution of immigrants and lower classes to the formation of entrepreneurship has been exaggerated. Scholars as different as Mills (1945) and the business historians of the Harvard Center for Entrepreneurial History (Miller 1952) found a rather stable recruitment pattern: most of the business elite in the period of the great American industrialization (1870– 1910) came from landowning or entrepreneurial families, whereas lower classes contributed between 10 and 20 percent of the membership. A similar critique of the popular origins of entrepreneurs in industrialized countries comes also from major studies in social mobility (Lipset and Bendix 1959).

More recent studies of the relationship between entrepreneurship and social stratification focus on the social and cultural specificities of women entrepreneurs (Goffee and Scase 1985); and stress the importance of the middle classes as a breeding ground for small entrepreneurs. Martin and Norman (1970) argue that small entrepreneurs are particularly suited to contemporary society, because of facilitating conditions both on the supply side of entrepreneurial talents, and on the demand side of services requiring new market niches. And Bechhofer and Elliot (1981), see them as the true custodians of the traditional values upon which the capitalist social order was built (passionate individualism and independence, the moral evaluation of work, laissez faire competition, and the belief that inequality is the result of differential distribution of talent and effort).

5. Entrepreneurship And Culture

Studies stressing cultural context variables are indebted both to Weber and Schumpeter. The classical expose is Weber’s comparative analysis of religious ethics and economic action in the rise of capitalism. Schumpeter inspired the historical research of the Harvard Center for Entrepreneurial History. Neo-Weberian research focuses on the degree to which the forces of rationalization responsible for dislodging individuals from their embeddedness in nature, religion, and tradition continue to shape economic growth and social modernization. Following Weber and Parsons (and in a similar vein to Marshall Berman’s perceptive study of modernity, 1982), scholars like Peter Berger, Brigitte Berger, and Kellner (Berger et al. 1973), stress the typical cognitive style that distinguishes modern consciousness, such as instrumental rationality and the propensity to combine and recombine activities for the achievement of calculated ends. Brigitte Berger’s cultural approach to entrepreneurship argues that economic growth develops from the ‘bottom up,’ not from ‘top down’: ordinary individuals, competing with one another for achieving a variety of goals (including economic profit and self-advancement), create in their everyday activities, practices, habits, and ideas the basis for other distinctly modern institutions to emerge that may mediate between them and distant, large-scale structures of society.

Evidence for this cultural approach is found in various empirical researches, including: Martin’s (1990) analysis of the role of Protestant sects in generating a dynamic process among segments of the urban poor in contemporary Latin American cities that fosters entrepreneurial activities; Redding’s study of the relation between basic aspects of Chinese culture—such as Confucian ethic and family attitudes—and the entrepreneurial behavior among overseas Chinese (1990); Landa’s thesis of the entrepreneurial success of ethnically homogeneous middlemen groups in Africa and in Southeast Asia (1991).

These types of study can be challenged on various grounds. First, these studies often make some confusion between the hegemonic culture and marginal groups’ subcultures: sometimes it is the contrast with the core cultural values which is presented as a cause of entrepreneurial success; some other times it is the convergence with the core value of instrumental rationality. Second, the concept of culture is often stretched so far as to include social interaction in general and all sorts of social networks, without paying attention to structural variables like patterns of solidarity, class, status and power relations, legal norms, and state arrangements and policies, which fundamentally affect social interaction. Third, cultural explanations can be accused of having little predictive power since they are invoked only after a particular group has demonstrated its economic prowess; and of being ultimately tautological, since if a certain minority is successful, it must be because it originally had, or later acquired, the right values.

Another approach that is framed in the cultural paradigm is the social attitudes (or cultural legitimation) model, developed by the members of the Harvard Center for Entrepreneurial History, such as Landes (1951), Sawyer (1952), and Cochran (1949) and by sociologists such as Lipset (1967).Comparing the United States and Latin America, both Cochran and Lipset explain differences in economic development in terms of the degree of legitimation of entrepreneurship. Cultural norms, role expectations, and social sanctions can either favor or hinder innovation. Comparing France and the United States, both Landes and Sawyer maintain that the different pace and degree of economic development in the two countries were due to their different historical heritage; while in France the feudal heritage had left a consistent residual of social attitudes hostile to entrepreneurship that limited the recruitment of entrepreneurs, in the United States the absence of a feudal past had allowed the growth of a sociocultural context which was especially receptive for innovation and entrepreneurship.

In a well-known debate, Gerschenkron (1962) refutes Landes and Sawyer’s thesis by arguing that the error of giving too much importance to social attitudes lies in assuming the existence of a homogeneous and generalized value system in society. As counterevidence Gerschenkron brings the cases of eighteenth-century France’s fermiers generaux and of nineteenth-century Russia’s emancipated serfs, who became entrepreneurs in spite of an unfavorable cultural environment. Gerschenkron’s critique is framed in his theory of the different paths to economic development; according to him, different countries develop through a different mix of what he calls the ‘institutional agents’ of development, such as private entrepreneurs, merchant banks, and governments.

6. The Entrepreneur In The Structure Of Risks And Opportunities

Both nonmainstream economics and the situational approach to the study of entrepreneurship focus on markets as structures of risks and opportunities. Mainstream accounts of economics—like those by Knights and by post World War II development economists—assume economic actors to have knowledge of all the opportunities open to them and to behave in a fixed, rational, maximizing way, once appropriate incentives are introduced. But, when these assumptions are relaxed, and market segmentation, ignorance, impeded factor mobility, and pervasive administrative controls are taken into account, the ‘extraordinary’ role of the entrepreneur becomes apparent, as does the need to analyze more carefully the factors that can favor his or her formation. The most interesting contemporary interpretation of this kind is Kirzner’s approach.

Under the influence of Schumpeter, Mises, and Hayek, Kirzner (1973) points out that human action is meaningful only in relation to the purposes, plans, and expectations of the actor; it is partly guided by maximizing criteria, but alertness, creativity, and judgment—the typical features of the entrepreneur— also influence what we do. For the market process to emerge, an additional element is required that is not comprehensible within the narrow conceptual limits of economizing behavior, that is entrepreneurial action. This action is favored by an appropriate system of economic and social incentives, such as profit, fame, prestige, power. Entrepreneurial competition is a discovery procedure of profit opportunities, and the competitive system is a fundamentally social process, dependent on the free interplay of individuals.

Pushing Kirzner’s conception further, Lavoie (1991) argues that the theory of entrepreneurship could more fully account for economic change if it were built on the hermeneutical theory of language and culture. According to him, any individual interpretive process is embedded in culture and meaningful only in relation to culture. Lavoie adheres partially to methodological individualism, only insofar as it assumes that the social whole has no purpose, but is a complex resulting from the choices of the participating individuals. But he rejects its other assumption, shared by most economists, that the rational action of the isolated individual serves as the foundation of the analysis of markets. Individual minds are interdependent parts of an integral process of cultural dynamics; they could not exist in isolated, cultureless, brains devoid of language. With Lavoie, we come full circle, back to culture.

By the mid-1960s, scholars from diverse disciplines contributed to what is known as the situational (or social development) approach. Instead of looking at the institutional conditions of entrepreneurship, they asked themselves what actually an individual does when being an entrepreneur. Some, like Glade, and Greenfield and Strickon, give primacy to social action over structural context; others, like Gibb and Ritchie, stress structural context over social action.

Glade (1967) starts criticizing McClelland and Hagen’s models as instances of comparative statics, describing social behavior in two contrasting types of system, one underdeveloped and the other developed, which are both in a steady state; what they lack is a theory of change which explains the transition from one state to the other. Glade maintains that actors make choices and decisions within social settings that are opportunity structures changing over time. The integral features of any given situation are both an ‘objective’ structure of economic opportunity and a subjective capacity of participants to perceive and act upon such opportunities. Entrepreneurs are individuals who can recognize the new opportunities and take advantage of them, without losing them to others. Glade’s situational analysis to the study of entrepreneurship has been criticized and elaborated upon by Greenfield and Strickon (1986). They propose using Darwinian biology as a metaphor for the study of change; as Darwin rejected typological, essentialist biology, they reject fixed types of entrepreneurship— the analogue of the immutable species—and recognize existing diversity of behavior within specific human populations (or communities), which at its extremes encompasses innovation and novelty. These diverse behaviors interact with their environments, to produce outcomes that are evaluated both by the actor and others. Those innovations judged more advantageous in terms of the standard prevailing within the group may be selected, learned, and imitated, with the result being the establishment of a statistical pattern. Society, culture, religion, politics, and economics are not seen as entities with a reality of their own, but as statistical patterns abstracted from the variable behaviors of the members of specific communities.

An attempt to combine the situational approach with that of reference groups is the social development model exemplified by Gibb and Ritchie (1982). Entrepreneurs change continuously in terms of the situations they encounter and the social groups to which they relate. It is their interactions with specific social contexts and reference groups which produce distinctive ambitions and behavior. The wide range of influences and interactions makes it impossible to define a single entrepreneurial model, but it does not prevent the development of typologies of entrepreneurs, like the one they develop, where four types (‘improvisers,’ ‘revisionists,’ ‘superceders,’ and ‘reverters’) are identified as being at the center of different sets of influences.

7. An Integrated Approach To The Study Of Entrepreneurship

The conclusion we can draw from the state of the art of the research on entrepreneurship is that the most interesting studies are often located at the borders between disciplines, such as those by economists who reject simple rational models and recognize the influence of social interaction and culture, or by sociologists and anthropologists who reject over socialized conceptions of man and take into account the strategies of individual actors. The most convincing interpretations are those away from the extremes of the actor-system continuum, which dismiss oversimplified views of the interaction between the actor and the systemic context.

A recent example of this integrated approach, close to my own view, is that expressed by Aldrich and Waldinger in their essay on ethnic entrepreneurship (1990). It focuses on such diverse variables as structure of markets, access to ownership, state policies, group characteristics, predisposing factors, and resource mobilization. As for types of economic environments that might support new immigrant entrepreneurs, they identify core urban markets increasingly abandoned by large food retailers, markets where economies of scale are low, markets affected by instability or uncertainty, markets for exotic goods; as for access to ownership, the relevant conditions are the level of interethnic competition for jobs and businesses, patterns of residential segregation and succession, and state immigration and labor market policies; as for group characteristics, predisposing factors, and resource mobilization, they focus on selective migration trends, settlement patterns, culture and aspiration levels, ethnic social networks, and/or ganizing capacities. Although Aldrich and Waldinger’s preference is for structural and institutional variables (like market niches and group resource mobilization) over cultural variables (like group cultural heritage), they are willing to take into account all covariables which can reasonably affect entrepreneurial formation in ethnic communities.

What is needed in future research on entrepreneurship is a multidisciplinary comparative approach, capable of integrating the analysis of the context (market, social structure, culture) with a theory of the actor (both individual or collective) with his or her motives, values, attitudes, cognitive processes, and perceived interests.

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  • Weber M 1978 Economy and Society: An Outline of Interpretati e Sociology. University of California Press, Berkeley, CA

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  1. The impact of entrepreneurship on economic, social and ...

    The review of 102 publications reveals that the literature generally lacks research which (a) goes beyond the common measures of economic welfare, (b) examines the long-term impact of entrepreneurship and (c) focuses on emerging and developing countries.

  2. (PDF) Research on Entrepreneurship

    Research relating to entrepreneurship has been expanding rapidly and has touched upon a diverse range of issues including culture/ethnicity; economic growth; education/learning;...

  3. The Journal of Entrepreneurship: Sage Journals

    The Journal of Entrepreneurship is a multidisciplinary forum for the publication of articles and research and discussion of issues that bear upon and enfold the field of entrepreneurship. Topics appropriate and related to entrepreneurship include intrapreneurship, managership, organisational behaviour, leadership, motivation, training and ethical/ moral notions guiding entrepreneurial behaviour.

  4. Entrepreneurship: Definitions, opportunities, challenges, and future

    An example of the process definition is Elia et al. ( 2020 :3) who defined it as "process of identifying potential business opportunities and exploiting them through the recombination of existing resources or the creation of new ones to develop and commercialize new products and services."

  5. Corporate entrepreneurship: a systematic literature review and future

    35 Citations Explore all metrics Abstract This article analyzes the state of the art of the research on corporate entrepreneurship, develops a conceptual framework that connects its antecedents and consequences, and offers an agenda for future research.

  6. Advancing Qualitative Entrepreneurship Research: Leveraging

    Volume 46, Issue 1 https://doi.org/10.1177/1042258720943051 PDF / ePub More Abstract This editorial aims to advance the use of qualitative research methods when studying entrepreneurship. First, it outlines four characteristics of the domain of entrepreneurship that qualitative research is uniquely placed to address.

  7. The art of crafting a systematic literature review in entrepreneurship

    Especially in Entrepreneurship, there is often more than one keyword for the same topic. For example, "Corporate Entrepreneurship" and "Intrapreneurship" deal with more or less the same topic, but they are completely different keywords. ... While an SLR as a standalone paper allows to answer a research question, the main purpose of a ...

  8. PDF Appropriate Entrepreneurship? The Rise of China and the Developing World

    excellent research assistance. Peter Escher, Ted Chan, and Dan Cook were helpful in answering many ... For example, innovators may prioritize capital- or skill-intensive technologies that are less productive where capital and skilled labor are scarce. Frontier technologies can remain inappropriate in large parts of the world even ...

  9. Full article: Publishing entrepreneurship research: Strategies for

    Introduction. The Journal of Small Business Management (JSBM) publishes scholarly research articles in the fields of entrepreneurship and small business management. As the official journal of the International Council for Small Business (ICSB), JSBM is one of the many ways ICSB supports ongoing thought leadership and the free exchange of ideas.

  10. Charting the future of entrepreneurship: a roadmap for

    For example, 40.5% of small- and medium-sized enterprises (SMEs) in Korea were owned by women CEOs in 2020 (Ministry of SMEs ... Citation 2023). Moreover, transitional entrepreneurship research has evolved to encompass a diverse array of groups, including undocumented immigrant entrepreneurs from the Central America (Arteaga-Fonseca et al ...

  11. The Entrepreneurial Story and its Implications for Research

    The story told is primarily one of where an individual's entrepreneurship allows them to attain self-realization. As an example, consider the introduction to the already-influential special issue on entrepreneurship and well-being in the. provides an overview of this argument, including modal references.

  12. Social entrepreneurship research: A review and future research agenda

    Social Entrepreneurship (SE) is a popular area of research and practice. An analysis of the existing literature reviews on SE reveals a dearth of studies classifying the existing SE literature into multiple research themes and further presenting popular and less popular research themes. With the aim of bridging this gap, this study presents a ...

  13. Entrepreneurship Research Journal

    Published since January 1, 2011 Entrepreneurship Research Journal ISSN: 2157-5665 Edited by: Rania Labaki, Thomas Lyons, Chandra Mishra, Michael James Mustafa, Xiaoyu (Allen) Yu, Ramona K. Zachary, Martha Martinez-Firestone Submit manuscript About this journal Objective

  14. Entrepreneurial Research

    Research Categories. The following categories are helpful framing for entrepreneurial research. For a full description of each visit the research categories page.. Company Research - Financial information, brand histories, media attention, news, strategies, and company performance; Industry Research - Industry competition, target audiences, trends, finances, and statistical data

  15. A study on effect of entrepreneurship on entrepreneurial intention

    2. Research background 2.1 Concept of entrepreneurship. Since the dawn of the twenty-first century, the importance of entrepreneurship started to be recognized as an element of promoting economic growth so that the researches for finding how entrepreneurship contributes to the growth have become active.

  16. Factors affecting students' entrepreneurial intentions: a systematic

    Entrepreneurship has been viewed as a critical contributor and an economic engine in a country for creating new jobs and it is crucial for graduates to alter their mindset to become self-employed. Thus, it is necessary to synthesize the factors that impact the entrepreneurial intentions (EI) of students at tertiary level. The aim of this research is twofold; first to identify the factors which ...

  17. The entrepreneurship research in hospitality and tourism

    The purpose of this study is to review entrepreneurship research in hospitality and tourism (H&T), draw a map of the evolving domain, and propose a framework for future research. The entrepreneurship literature is categorized by identifying the antecedents and consequences in the context of H&T. The study findings suggest that entrepreneurship ...

  18. Entrepreneurship Research Papers

    Recent papers in Entrepreneurship Top Papers Most Cited Papers Most Downloaded Papers Newest Papers WEAK SIGNALS MANAGEMENT, ENTREPRENEURSHIP AND UNCERTAINTY: A RELATIONAL THEORETICAL ESSAY UNDER THE PERSPECTIVE OF INTELLIGENCE

  19. Entrepreneurship Theory and Practice

    Papers that seek to explain, exemplify, compare, calibrate, or otherwise discuss some method or methodological aspect commonly used or argued to be of potential importance to entrepreneurship research. 1.3 Writing your paper. The Sage Author Gateway has some general advice and on how to get published, plus links to further resources.

  20. Entrepreneurship Articles, Research, & Case Studies

    01 Aug 2023 Cold Call Podcast Can Business Transform Primary Health Care Across Africa? Re: Regina E. Herzlinger mPharma, headquartered in Ghana, is trying to create the largest pan-African health care company. Their mission is to provide primary care and a reliable and fairly priced supply of drugs in the nine African countries where they operate.

  21. (PDF) Entrepreneurship Education: A Students' Perspective

    Given the importance of creating an entrepreneurship education which encourages new ideas and approaches, this paper's main research objective is to illustrate the students' perceptions on how the ...

  22. Academic Entrepreneurship Ecosystems: Systematic Literature Review and

    Research on the entrepreneurship ecosystem, based on different data and scales, limits the acceptance of a single definition. This conceptual limitation and the still recent research and higher education institutions have come to be seen as ecosystems associated with entrepreneurship. The aim of this study is to contribute to the field of knowledge, identify current and emerging thematic areas ...

  23. 100 Entrepreneurship Research Paper Topics

    This page presents a comprehensive list of entrepreneurship research paper topics, divided into 10 categories with 10 topics in each. Additionally, it offers expert advice on how to choose from the multitude of entrepreneurship topics and how to write a successful entrepreneurship research paper.

  24. Entrepreneurship Research Paper Examples That Really Inspire

    In this free directory of Entrepreneurship Research Paper examples, you are granted a fascinating opportunity to explore meaningful topics, content structuring techniques, text flow, formatting styles, and other academically acclaimed writing practices.

  25. The impact of entrepreneurship research on other academic fields

    The case of crowdfunding research clearly illustrates the important role of entrepreneurship research as a catalyst for finance research on crowdfunding, as many of the early influential papers on crowdfunding appeared in the leading entrepreneurship, and not finance, journals (e.g., Belleflamme et al., 2014; Mollick, 2014). The example of ...

  26. Entrepreneurship Research Paper

    Sample Entrepreneurship Research Paper. Browse other research paper examples and check the list of research paper topics for more inspiration. If you need a research paper written according to all the academic standards, you can always turn to our experienced writers for help. This is how your paper can get an A!