Whither Entrepreneurship Scholarship?
The history of entrepreneurship as an academic discipline is very short. Whereas the study of entrepreneurship goes back to Richard Cantillon's
Essai written in 1730, thereby predating the field of economics by almost half a century, modern entrepreneurship scholarship tends to adopt Venkat's seminal "
The Distinctive Domain of Entrepreneurship Research" from 1997 as its starting point. The opportunity became the core phenomenon to entrepreneurship research that granted it raison d'être as a separate scholarly discipline.
Almost 30 years have passed since then and much has happened. Per common storytelling about our discipline, we first saw a consolidation around the entrepreneurial opportunity as a construct, then critiques that emanated in the "creation" opportunity of Alvarez and Barney (
2007), which started the "opportunity wars" that lasted some two decades. Today researchers have all but abandoned the opportunity construct and moved on to other approaches, theories, and measurements.
This raises the question: what is our scholarly field about? What is the distinctive domain of entrepreneurship as a field of research that has, so to speak, given up on the opportunity?
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|  | PER L BYLUND | Associate Professor Johnny D. Pope Chair School of Entrepreneurship 424 Business Building | Stillwater, OK 74078 405-744-4301 | per.bylund@okstate.edu business.okstate.edu |
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