Management Decision

Emerald Article: Entrepreneurship research

David Audretsch

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Entrepreneurship
Entrepreneurship research research
David Audretsch
School of Public and Environmental Affairs – Institute of Developmental Studies,
Indiana University, Bloomington, Indiana, USA
755
Abstract
Purpose – With the rapid emergence of scholarly thinking and analysis about entrepreneurship has
come a multiplicity of approaches, emanating from different academic traditions. This has resulted in
an academic field that is complex and heterogeneous with respect to approaches, methodologies and
even the understanding about what exactly constitutes entrepreneurship. The purpose of this paper is
to try to reconcile the different approaches and views about entrepreneurship that are prevalent in the
literature.
Design/methodology/approach – The paper takes the form of a literature review.
Findings – The paper finds that while such heterogeneity can be the source of a nuanced and at
times contractor research field, it is also the source of richness and diversity that has contributed to
making the emerging field so dynamic.
Practical implications – The field of entrepreneurship should remain committed to a diversity of
approaches, understandings and methodologies about what constitutes entrepreneurial activity.
Originality/value – The value of the paper is that it presents a coherent framework that reconciles
disparate approaches and understandings about what actually constitutes entrepreneurship.
Keywords Entrepreneurship, Opportunity, Innovation, Growth, Research, Entrepreneurialism
Paper type Literature review

1. Introduction
There is a long tradition in scholarly thinking about entrepreneurship. Hebert and Link
(1989) point to three distinct intellectual traditions in the development of the
entrepreneurship literature – the German Tradition, based on von Thuenen and
Schumpeter, the Chicago Tradition, based on Knight and Schultz, and the Austrian
Tradition, based on von Mises, Kirzner and Shackle.
However, a generation ago, scholarly research on entrepreneurship was sparse and
virtually non-existent. There was very little concern in the research community about
entrepreneurship in any form or context. Scholarly concern with entrepreneurship lay
dormant. As Baumol (1968) pointed out, “The theoretical firm is entrepreneurless – the
Prince of Denmark has been expunged from the discussion of Hamlet”. According to
Baumol (1968), “There is one residual and rather curious role left to the entrepreneur in
the neoclassical model. He is the invisible and non-replicable input that accounts for the
U-shaped cost curve of a firm whose production function is linear and homogeneous.”
More recently, entrepreneurship has emerged as one of the most dynamic fields. As
Wiklund et al. (2011) point out, entrepreneurship has grown to rank among the larger
divisions of the Academy of Management, “The field has emerged as one of the most
vital, dynamic and relevant in management and the social sciences. The
Entrepreneurship Division increased its membership by 230 percent – more than
any other established division – and with over 2,700 members it now ranks among the Management Decision
Vol. 50 No. 5, 2012
largest in the Academy of Management. Entrepreneurship research has gained pp. 755-764
q Emerald Group Publishing Limited
considerable prominence in leading disciplinary and mainstream management 0025-1747
journals. As a case in point, the best cited – by far – article of the decade in the DOI 10.1108/00251741211227384
MD Academy of Management Review was the agenda-setting (and debated) piece by Shane
50,5 and Venkataraman (2001). At the same time the number of dedicated entrepreneurship
journals listed by the Social Science Citation Index increased from one to more than
half a dozen; the leading among them achieving impact factors in the same range as
highly respected management and social science journals. Most importantly,
entrepreneurship research has become more theory-driven and coalesced around a
756 central core of themes, issues, methodologies and debates.”
However, with the rapid emergence of scholarly thinking and analysis about
entrepreneurship has come a multiplicity of approaches, emanating from different
academic traditions. This has resulted in an academic field that is complex and
heterogeneous with respect to approaches, methodologies and even the understanding
about what exactly constitutes entrepreneurship. The purpose of this paper is to try to
reconcile the different approaches and views about entrepreneurship that are prevalent
in the literature.
The following section considers the view of entrepreneurship that focuses on the
organizational context as the distinguishing feature of entrepreneurial activity. Section
three examines the view of entrepreneurship that focuses on a performance criterion.
The fourth section is concerned with entrepreneurial behavior. A summary and
conclusions are provided in the final section.

2. Entrepreneurship as organizational context

The first main approach to entrepreneurship in the research literature considers what
constitutes entrepreneurship on the basis of the organizational context. It is this
organizational context per se that renders it to be considered or classified as
entrepreneurial. It does not matter what type of behavior is being practiced, nor does it
matter about the performance or anticipated performance in the consideration of
whether the organization is entrepreneurial. The sole criterion is on an organizational
basis.
In fact, various strands of literature assign different organizational criteria as
constituting entrepreneurship. Each of these strands of literature is deep, and has
exhibited a rich robustness and propensity to evolve. What exactly constitutes
entrepreneurship has been based on organizational criteria such as the size of the
organization (small business or small and medium-sized enterprises), its age, whether it
is owned by an individual (self employment or nascent) or a family (family ownership),
or whether it has the status of constituting a legal status. It should be emphasized that
these are not at all consistent criteria and, in some cases, contain glaring contradictions
across the criteria.
For example, based on the size criterion, a firm can be small but also established for
many years, so that is too old to be considered entrepreneurial according to the age
criterion. This would also hold for the self-employment criterion, as well as the
business ownership criterion and the family business criterion, where age is clearly not
a consideration of what constitutes entrepreneurship.
Still, what these different views of what constitutes entrepreneurship have in
common is a criterion that is based on an organizational status. Even though the type
of organizational status is quite different and in many cases contradictory to the others,
they all classify what constitutes entrepreneurship on the basis of organizational
status.
 Many studies classify entrepreneurship on a size criterion. These studies typically Entrepreneurship
distinguish one type of business from others on the basis of the size of the business, research
most typically a firm. The criterion suggests that firms below a certain size threshold
are considered to be entrepreneurial, in that they are small, or in some cases small and
medium. These firms are typically being contrasted to their larger counterparts (Acs
and Audretsch, 1990).
Using size as a criterion for entrepreneurship has its theoretical roots that date back 757
at least to Schumpeter (1911), who in his early work suggested that it would be small
firms that facilitated the creative destruction which he saw as constituting the essential
entrepreneurial function. According to Schumpeter, it is the entrepreneur, who serves
as an agent of change in the economic system. According to Schumpeter, the
entrepreneur was the driving force for innovation, which in turn on which economic
development, growth and progress rested. Scholars have typically interpreted
Schumpeter (1911) as suggesting that such an entrepreneurial function takes place
outside of the large incumbent firms and in small firms.
The size approach to entrepreneurship is clearly influenced by measurement issues,
suggesting that it is most prevalent in and lends itself to empirical analyses, typically
based on large comprehensive databases.
For example, one of the most influential studies grabbing the attention of both
scholars and policy makers alike concerning the important policy implications for
entrepreneurship was by David Birch (1981), who contrasted the employment creation
performance of small firms with that of their larger counterparts, and found empirical
evidence that 8 percent of job creation is in small business. Birch’s study triggered a
minor industry of scholars using a size criteria to contrast small with large enterprises.
While the focus of this literature was on comparing the employment performance, it
should be emphasized that the criterion for distinguishing between different types of
firms was based on the size. Thus, Birch, along with most of the subsequent studies
extending his work, used a size criterion to classify the type of firm and then compared
the employment creation across between small and large businesses.
The size criterion is similarly used to compare other types of performance criteria
between small and large firms, such as innovative activity (Acs and Audretsch, 1990),
growth or profitability. In addition, the resource acquisition process is compared
between large and small firms, with again, the size feature being the distinguishing
characteristic.
The age of the firm is a very different organizational criterion for classifying
entrepreneurship. The most prevalent age criterion that is used is that the firm be
considered to be new, or a startup. Firms that can be identified and distinguished from
their older and more mature counterparts are considered to be entrepreneurial. In some
studies, the age criterion is extended from solely considering startups to also
considering firms at an early age, or during their life cycle just subsequent to their
startup (Audretsch et al., 2006; Audretsch and Keilbach, 2007).
The organizational context of being a new firm as the criterion for what constitutes
entrepreneurship certainly seems to be consistent with the Schumpeterian view of
entrepreneurship. In his 1911 classic treatise, Theorie der wirtschaftlichen Entwicklung,
Schumpeter proposed a theory of creative destruction, where he was unambiguous
about the organizational structure most conducive to entrepreneurs – new firms
infused with entrepreneurial spirit would displace the tired old incumbents, ultimately
MD leading to vigorous innovative activity which in turn would generate a higher degree of
50,5 economic growth.
As is the case for the size criterion, the age criterion is conducive both to measure
and empirical analyses using large comprehensive databases. Nothing else needs to be
known about the organization rather than it was new and started in the relevant time
period, enabling relatively easy measurement and classification.
758 One of the best data sources available to analyze the cognitive process triggering
the entrepreneurial decision is provided by the Panel Study of Entrepreneurial
Dynamics (PSED), which consists of a longitudinal survey study on 830 individuals
that were identified while they were in the process of starting a new business. The
unique feature of the database is that it provides information on how the
entrepreneurial opportunity and action was conceived and operationalized (Gartner
et al., 2010). Aldrich and Martinez (2010) use the PSED to test the theory that access to
resources, in the form of financial resources, such as household income and wealth, and
human capital, in the form of education, prior work experience, entrepreneurial
experience, and influence from family and friends, affect the decision to become an
entrepreneur.
A very different organizational criterion involves an individual who is classified,
most typically for tax reasons, as being self-employed. A slight variant of the
self-employment criterion involves business ownership, where entrepreneurship is
considered as having the organizational status as legally owning a business (Thurik
et al., 2008; Parker, 2009).
The organizational context of self-employment and business ownership do not
reflect the age of the organization. Rather, the status of being an entrepreneur comes
solely from the legal status of being self-employed or being a business owner.
The theoretical basis for this organizational criterion comes from labor economics,
where the model of entrepreneurial choice has formulated the decision by individuals
whether to work for a wage in an incumbent organization or start their own new firm.
The decision is framed around the wage that the individual would earn as an employee
compared to the expected profits she would earn as an entrepreneur.
Measures of self employment and business ownership are conducive to the analysis
of large comprehensive data bases over long periods of time, since they have been a
part of official government statistics for decades in most (OECD) countries. A
particular focus of much of the literature has been to link the propensity of an
individual to be self-employed or a business owner to the personal characteristics of
that individual, such as age, gender, experience, educational attainment, and
occupation of parents. Thus, much of this literature has focused on the question of
what differentiates entrepreneurs from non-entrepreneurs, or wage workers.
The prevalent theoretical framework has been the general model of income choice,
which has been at times referred to as the general model of entrepreneurial choice
(Parker, 2009). The model of income or entrepreneurial choice dates back at least to
Knight (1921). In its most basic rendition, individuals are confronted with a choice of
earning their income either from wages earned through employment in an incumbent
enterprise or else from profits accrued by starting a new firm.
Like the organizational contexts of self-employment and business ownership, the
organizational context of nascent entrepreneurship also has a focus on the individual.
Unlike the other two, however, nascent entrepreneurship involves individuals who Entrepreneurship
have not actually started a business but are considering doing so or planning to do so. research
A second distinction between nascent entrepreneurship and both self-employment
and business organization is that while all three share a focus on the organizational
context of the individual, nascent entrepreneurship does not involve any particular
legal or tax status, while both self-employment and business ownership are derived
from a legal status. 759
Nascent entrepreneurship has a strong commonality with the age dimension of
entrepreneurship. Nascent entrepreneurs are defined by their intensions, as opposed to
previous actions, which involves an age of less than zero for the nascent
entrepreneurial activity.
Because it does not involve a legal, tax status or externally visible characteristic, it
can be ascertained only through surveys and interviews. Nascent entrepreneurship is
the cornerstone of the Global Entrepreneurship Monitor (GEM), which has gained
considerable prominence and attention by measuring and analyzing entrepreneurship
across countries.

3. Entrepreneurship based on performance criteria

A very different view towards entrepreneurship focuses on a performance criterion.
The performance criteria put a greater on the outcomes of activity, so that only those
types of organizations, firms, or individuals generating a sufficiently high level of
performance are deemed to be entrepreneurial.
Firms, other organizations, and individuals are considered to be entrepreneurial.
The literature has generally focused on two types of performance criteria. The first is
innovative. The second is growth. The focus on performance or outcomes as the
entrepreneurial criteria suggests a more literal interpretation of Schumpeter (1911,
1942).
Schumpeter Not only did Schumpeter identify a new force, in terms of economic
thinking – creative destruction – that was pivotal for the functioning of capitalism
and consequently economic development, he also identified the mechanism on which
creative destruction rested – the entrepreneur, who served as an agent of change in the
economic system. According to Schumpeter, the entrepreneur was the driving force for
innovation, which in turn on which economic development, growth and progress
rested. Schumpeter (1942, p. 13) argued that what made the entrepreneur different from
other agents in the economy was his willingness to pursue innovative activity, “The
function of entrepreneurs is to reform or revolutionize the pattern of production by
exploiting an invention, or more generally, an untried technological possibility for
producing a new commodity or producing an old one in a new way [. . .] To undertake
such new things is difficult and constitutes a distinct economic function, first because
they lie outside of the routine tasks which everybody understands, and secondly,
because the environment resists in many ways.” Without the entrepreneur new ideas
would not be implemented and pursued. The status quo would tend to be preserved at
an opportunity cost of forgone innovative activity, growth and economic development.
The interpretation of Schumpeter placing primacy on innovation generally also
appeals to the contribution of such activity to competitiveness and growth. Innovative
firms are viewed as being more desirable, from a policy point of view.
MD According to this interpretation of Schumpeter, the actual type of organization, or
50,5 the different types of organizational criteria discussed in the previous section are not
relevant. Innovative activity and the ensuing creating destruction can take place in any
type of organization, rendering the organizational context as the entrepreneurial basis
either irrelevant or incorrect. Rather, the sole relevant criterion is the innovative
performance.
760 A number of studies have considered innovative activity to be the decisive factor in
entrepreneurship (Acs and Audretsch, 1990). Most typically, innovation has been
measured as research and development expenditures, number of inventions registered
at a patent office, new products and processes introduced, and the share of sales
accounted for by innovative products. Linking entrepreneurship to innovative activity,
independent of organizational context, places the distinguishing feature on the
performance criterion of innovative activity.
A different performance criterion for entrepreneurship involves growth, most
typically firm, venture or organizational growth. The growth criterion is used, in some
ways, as a proxy for innovation, which is difficult to measure. Measuring innovative
activity is fraught with challenges, qualifications and concerns, especially when it
involves types of innovative activity other than product innovation, such as
organizational innovation or process innovation. As Krugman (1991) pointed out, such
innovative activity “leaves no paper trail.”
Growth, however, is considered to be a manifestation of innovative activity, which
is considerably more straightforward and lends itself to measurement and therefore
identification. Growth is typically measured in terms of change in employment, sales or
assets over a period of time.
A literature identifying and analyzing what has been termed by David Birch as
constituting gazelles has identified exactly which firms are gazelles, where they are
located, as well as their overall contribution to the overall employment growth of the
economy. Other scholars have been quick to point out that it is the few firms classified
as gazelles who generate an over representative amount of the employment growth).
A somewhat different type of performance based criterion for entrepreneurship
involves the source by which the firm is financed, and in particular, venture capital
financed. This criterion, which strictly speaking is based on the source of finance, could
be interpreted as an anticipated performance criterion.
Firms financed with venture capital have a high failure rate. However, those firms
that do survive tend to exhibit higher rates of growth and innovative activity, which
are exactly the two main performance criteria for entrepreneurship.
A number of studies refer to entrepreneurship and analyze data sets which are
restricted only to venture capital financed firms. The assumption, either implicit or
explicit, is that these firms have been selected by venture capitalists as having the
potential to be highly innovative and generate high rates of growth.
A recent literature has emerged with a markedly different performance criterion for
entrepreneurship. According to that literature, a social entrepreneur makes a social
contribution that is not driven by profit concerns alone. While the intent to make a
social contribution also plays a role, the major focus is the outcome from the
entrepreneurial activities, which must have a social dimension to be considered to
constitute social entrepreneurship.
4. Entrepreneurship as behavior Entrepreneurship
A considerably different view of entrepreneurship focuses on the behavior as the research
decisive criterion. Entrepreneurial behavior is generally linked to the Schumpeterian
notion of an entrepreneur. There are two key elements to entrepreneurial behavior. The
first is the ability to recognize an opportunity. A variant of opportunity recognition is
the ability to create an opportunity (Alvarez et al., 2010).
The second element to entrepreneurial behavior involves the exploitation or 761
commercialization of the opportunity. Taken together, the core of entrepreneurial
behavior combines entrepreneurial discover or creation with exploitation.
A key characteristic of the behavioral approach to entrepreneurship is a neutrality
towards the organizational context. Entrepreneurial behavior can appear in any type of
organizational context, ranging from small business to large corporation, from new
startup to established company, from non-profit organization to government agency.
The focus is more on the characteristics of the individuals and organizations that
exhibit entrepreneurial behavior.
The methodology involving the behavioral approach to entrepreneurship typically
does not involve large-scale comprehensive data sets. This is because of the inability of
such data sets to measure constructs such as opportunity recognition, opportunity
creation and opportunity exploitation in a systematic manner from large databases.
Rather, the experimental methodology, both in the laboratory as well as in the field,
offers a viable way to identify and analyze entrepreneurial behavior. Such laboratory
and field experiments enable scholars to directly observe and analyze entrepreneurial
behavior.
The behavioral view of entreprneeurshiprevolves around the recognition of
opportunities and the pursuit of those opportunities (Venkataraman, 1997). Much of the
more contemporary thinking about entrepreneurship has focused on the cognitive
process by which individuals reach the decision to.
According to Sarasvanthy et al. (2003), p. 142), “An entrepreurial opportunity
consists of a set of ideas, beliefs and actions that enable the creation of future goods
and services in the absence of current markets for them”. Sarasvanthy et al. (2003)
provide a typology of entrepreneurial opportunities as consisting of opportunity
recognition, opportunity discovery and opportunity creation.
In asking the question of why some do it, while others don’t, scholars have focused
on differences across individuals (Stevenson and Jarillo, 1990). As Krueger and Day
(2010a) observes, “The heart of entrepreneurship is an orientation toward seeing
opportunities,” which frames the research questions, “What is the nature of
entrepreneurial thinking and What cognitive phenomena are associated with seeing
and acting on opportunities?” The traditional approach to entrepreneurship essentially
holds the context constant and then asks how the cognitive process inherent in the
entrepreneurial decision varies across different individual characteristics and
attributes (McClelland, 1961; Shaver, 2010). As Shane and Eckhardt (2010, p. 50)
summarize this literature in introducing the individual-opportunity nexus, “We
discussed the process of opportunity discovery and explained why some actors are
more likely to discover a given opportunity than others.” Some of these differences
involve the willingness to incur risk, others involve the preference for autonomy and
self-direction, while still others involve differential access to scarce and expensive
resources, such as financial capital, human capital, social capital and experiential
MD capital. This approach focusing on individual cognition in the entrepreneurial process
50,5 has generated a number of important and valuable insights, such as the contribution
made by social networks, education and training, and familial influence.“
Stevenson and Jarillo (1990) assume that entrepreneurship is an orientation towards
opportunity recognition. Central to this research agenda are the questions, “How do
entrepreneurs perceive opportunities and how do these opportunities manifest
762 themselves as being credible versus being an illusion?”. Krueger and Day (2010b)
examines the nature of entrepreneurial thinking and the cognitive process associated
with opportunity identification and the decision to undertake entrepreneurial action.
The focal point of this research is on the cognitive process identifying the
entrepreneurial opportunity along with the decision to start a new firm. Thus, a
perceived opportunity and intent to pursue that opportunity are the necessary and
sufficient conditions for entrepreneurial activity to take place. The perception of an
opportunity is shaped by a sense of the anticipated rewards accruing from and costs of
becoming an entrepreneur. Some of the research focuses on the role of personal
attitudes and characteristics, such as self efficacy (the individual’s sense of
competence), collective efficacy, and social norms. Shane (2000) has identified how
prior experience and the ability to apply specific skills influence the perception of
future opportunities. The concept of the entrepreneurial decision resulting from the
cognitive processes of opportunity recognition and ensuing action is introduced by
Shane and Eckhardt (2010) and Shane and Venkataraman (2001). They suggest that an
equilibrium view of entrepreneurship stems from the assumption of perfect
information. By contrast, imperfect information generates divergences in perceived
opportunities across different people. The sources of heterogeneity across individuals
include different access to information, as well cognitive abilities, psychological
differences, and access to financial and social capital.

5. Conclusions
This paper has shown that diversity is abundant in the field of entrepreneurship.
Understanding of the basic construct, entrepreneurship, is anything but unified and
singular. Rather, the way that entrepreneurship is understood and operationalized in
scholarly research is heterogeneous and differentiated.
Some entrepreneurship scholars respond to these underlying differences and
approach to entrepreneurship research in an alarmed and defensive manner. Their
concern is that the lack of a singular view of entrepreneurship and the ensuing
diversity of methodological approaches weakens the field.
These concerns overlook the inherent strengths emanating from a view of
entrepreneurship that is specific to different contexts. Rather than being a source of
weakness, the diversity and heterogeneity contributes to a rapidly emerging field that
is rich and dynamic, and appeals to theory, practice and policy.

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764 Further reading

Audretsch, D.B. (1995), Innovation and Industry Evolution, MIT Press, Cambridge, MA.
Audretsch, D.B. (2007), The Entrepreneurial Society, Oxford University Press, New York, NY.
Shane, S. (2001), “Technological opportunities and new firm creation”, Management Science,
Vol. 47, pp. 205-20.

About the author

David Audretsch is a Distinguished Professor and Ameritech Chair of Economic Development at
Indiana University, where is also serves as Director of the Institute for Development Strategies.
He also is an Honorary Professor of Industrial Economics and Entrepreneurship at the
WHU-Otto Beisheim School of Management in Germany. In addition, he serves as a Visiting
Professor at the King Saud University in Saudi Arabia and as an External Director of Research at
the Kiel Institute for the World Economics, Honorary Professor at the Friedrich Schiller
University of Jena in Germany, and is a Research Fellow of the Centre for Economic Policy
Research in London. Audretsch’s research has focused on the links between entrepreneurship,
government policy, innovation, economic development and global competitiveness. His research
has been published in over 100 scholarly articles in leading academic journals. His books include
Entrepreneurship and Economic Growth (Oxford University Press, 2006) and The
Entrepreneurial Society (Oxford University Press, 2007). He is co-founder and co-editor of
Small Business Economics: An Entrepreneurship Journal. He was awarded the 2001 Global
Award for Entrepreneurship Research by the Swedish Foundation for Small Business Research.
In 2008, he received an honorary doctorate degree from the University of Augsburg, and in
September, 2010 he received an honorary doctorate degree from Jönköping University. He is a
member of the Advisory Board to a number of international research and policy institutes,
including the Deutsches Institut für Wirtschaftsforschung (German Institute for Economic
Analysis), the Basque Institute for Competitiveness, and the Swedish Entrepreneurship Forum.
David Audretsch can be contacted at: daudrets@indiana.edu

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