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Professor Martin de Holan's polemical essay reflects a misreading of widespread educational practice in entrepreneurship, of the nature of entrepreneurship, and of the relationship between entrepreneurship and research.

Common teaching practice does focus on a relatively safe environment to learn - and to practice – the "practice" (as he calls it) of entrepreneurship. This is so whether the instructor uses (rather quickly done) business plans or the widely used business model canvas (augmented or otherwise), and regardless of the extent of iterative market validation in the educational process. The point is to help students learn to craft a venture that has some prospect of surviving long enough that larger opportunities can be discovered. I say this on the basis of three decades in the profession and current works such as Neck, Greene and Brush's recent book "Teaching Entrepreneurship."

This is a "discipline" (to use the term of that book) that requires consideration of the entire range of issues facing a business. It also requires the instructor to cope with ventures of myriad types, in terms of technology, industry, global scope and many other variables. It is extraordinarily unlikely that the range of knowledge – rather, practical knowhow and knowwho – that is needed will be found in academic writings. The same applies to any individual practitioner-instructor. Rather, a wide range of mentors and advisers is ultimately needed.

As instructors in entrepreneurship, we have to be a bit like entrepreneurs themselves, cobbling together bits and pieces of resources (knowledge, knowhow, connections, and insights) that help us to coach our students. Sometimes we do in fact find nuggets of value in the scholarly literature, and certainly we need to keep our eyes peeled for relevant findings and for overarching perspectives formed by reflection and experience. Moreover, we do (of course) need to teach at the doctoral level in a completely different and scholarly way.

However, the range of idiosyncratic issues involved – channels of distribution, intellectual property, cash flow planning, real estate decisions, team formation and on and on – is one reason to doubt that teaching entrepreneurship on the basis of scientific knowledge – as proposed by Professor Martin de Holan – is conceivable. Another reason is that many scholars, myself included, are more inclined to study and think about more general and less tactical concerns. Another is that many of the idiosyncratic issues in startups just do not lend themselves to scholarly study. In this regard entrepreneurship is like accounting, in which instruction is highly practical and specific to that profession, but scholarly writing takes the form of behavioral, financial or other disciplinary work. Another reason is that entrepreneurs are looking for underserved and unrecognized opportunities, often in dynamic environments, whereas we scholars have a hard time taking an opportunistic, forward-looking approach. To quote Hegel, when philosophy paints its grey on grey, then has a world of life grown old. Thus, some may hope that one day we could compile a compendium of research findings and profess on that basis to would-be entrepreneurs. I am skeptical. We are not organic chemists (who themselves as doctoral practitioners innovate often at the edges of disciplines – a skill that is, like entrepreneurship, learned as a practice).

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