SUGGESTIONS FOR ENTREPRENEURSHIP RESEARCH
Less Physics Envy
– We need to suppress our physics envy and cultivate more independence in our research methods. Physicists examine nature by remorselessly isolating the parts from the whole.
Fewer Theoretical Models; More Empirical Models
– Entrepreneurship, as an emerging paradigm, is in the pre-theory stage. It is rather like biology before Darwin's natural selection theory or nuclear physics before Rutherford's model.
Less Concern with Sophisticated Statistical Analyses
– Poincare, that prince of mathematicians, said that while physicists had subject-matter,
sociologists were engaged almost entirely in considering their methods.
More Field Research
– Entrepreneurship is a process of becoming rather than a state of being. It is not a steady state phenomenon. Nor does it change smoothly. It changes in quantum jumps. No amount of regression analysis will help us understand what triggers the quantum jump or what happens during the quantum jump.
More Longitudinal Studies
– Entrepreneurship is a process that evolves with time. If we do only cross-sectional studies, we lose much of the richness that comes from longitudinal studies. Longitudinal field studies are time consuming and costly. But surely we ought to be able to get funding for longitudinal studies of entrepreneurs in view of their importance to the economy, and hence society as a whole.
Dedicated Researchers
– We need better quality empirical research. It should be exploratory or grounded. We need much more field work. Of course that is laborious; and the output in terms of number of publications may be very small compared to data base research. But let us learn from other fields. Where in entrepreneurship among our young scholars are the likes of Charles Darwin, Jane Goodall, and Edmund Halley?
Original Field-Derived Data Bases
– We should gather our own data sets as thoroughly as those great natural scientists gathered theirs. In our field, there have been too many data bases that were produced with mailings of self-reported subjective questionnaires or that were generated by others for a purpose other than entrepreneurship research. It is difficult to do valid research on data bases that comparative strangers have built because one does not know where the pitfalls lie. It is essential to be able to dig out suspect records and check the reliability of the original raw data.
Less Obsession with Revolutionary Science
– Meticulous empirical research is painstaking, none more so than detailed field work. But all excellent empirical research is very exacting. There are no short cuts on the road to mastery of a scientific discipline.
CONCLUDING COMMENTS
A paradigm in the pre-theory stage is like a jig-saw puzzle with a framework but with most of the pieces missing. We must first find the pieces before we see how they are connected together. At this stage we should be carefully finding those pieces with meticulous research. With enough pieces, we will start to see patterns emerge. From those patterns, we can start to build partial theories. Maybe one day someone will build a great theory of entrepreneurship from those partial theories. But I doubt that will happen in my lifetime.
William D. Bygrave, (1989). The Entrepreneurship Paradigm (I): A Philosophical Look at Its Research Methodologies, ENTREPRENEURSHIP THEORY and PRACTICE, 14(1), 7-26.
