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Many of us, including yours truly, have appreciatingly quoted Bill Baumol (echoing Joseph Schumpeter) in his charge that contemporary economics, relying on formalized models in which no space is left for the entrepreneur, is like trying to understand "Hamlet without the Danish prince." Indeed, in modern buzzing economies, whether or not they are "developed," entrepreneurship has an obvious role - the main character, even - as the force behind change and progress. What could one possibly expect to understand about how economies work and evolve if one excludes entrepreneurship?

Entrepreneurship scholars certainly do not make this error: we study this very phenomenon that economists leave out. However, entrepreneurship research has over the past couple of decades increasingly adopted an approach that makes another error: studying the Danish prince without reference to the play. Perhaps a better analogy is that we study the queen in chess, the most powerful of pieces, and attempt to understand her moves and motivations without considering the rest of the board or the game itself.