W. Edward McMullan

Finding Practical Knowledge in Entrepreneurship

Research in the pre–paradigmatic, applied scientific field of entrepreneurship is characterized mainly as exploratory. This article advocates for a considerable shift toward a more effective applied research agenda. An applied research program is proposed based on modifications to a Lakatosian research program. The agenda extends beyond typical calls for more replication work to include a focus on practical outcomes, practical significance, and surprising findings among other things. The intent is to produce substantially more practical knowledge—knowledge that is useful to entrepreneurs, policy makers, educators, and scholars.

In consideration of entrepreneurship theory

This study analyzes more than three decades of theory testing published in leading entrepreneurship journals. It uncovers the amount of theory testing; the extent to which theories are tested multiple times; and, the disciplinary origins of the theories that are tested. The analysis reveals that empirical researchers have increasingly responded to demands for more theory-driven knowledge over time through domestic theory creation and wholesale adoption of theories from other fields. It is observed that the most tested theories are borrowed from other scientific fields. The value of agency theory, the most popular one, is assessed via a foreign theory screening model. The result suggests that researchers cannot be too cautious when considering foreign theory for domestic knowledge development. Ultimately, researchers are strongly encouraged to consider testing the many domestic theories that have been specifically designed to answer the pressing, practical problems of the entrepreneurship discipline.

The Positivistic Social Science of Entrepreneurship

We may want to question the general usefulness of business tools and teaching for enhancing entrepreneurial performance, but what about the rest of entrepreneurial science – what does it have to offer? Entrepreneurship as a positivistic social science has been advancing our knowledge base, one piece at a time, on how to more successfully develop businesses. How difficult is it to tap this knowledge?

Entrepreneurial Work Experience

This chapter is concerned first of all with the nature of entrepreneurial work and with the cognition that may well underlie this type of work. By understanding the nature of entrepreneurial work it is argued that we better understand entrepreneurs – the problems they live with and the way they think about them.

Some Implications and Conclusions

So what are the implications of this general social science theory of entrepreneurship? How might it affect the behavior of entrepreneurs, education programming, research agendas, and the future redesign of the entrepreneurship discipline?

The Core Evidence

Now that we have formulated a modernized version of Schumpeter’s model, should we believe it? The next chapter is concerned with the empirical evidence and how it relates entrepreneurial creativity with venture development.

A General Theory and Its Explanatory Power

Now that we appreciate that entrepreneurial creativity might be relatively well supported as a potentially predictive theory by the empirical literature, other questions may occur to us. How well does this general scientific theory compare with other existing general scientific theories? To what extent does the theory of entrepreneurial creativity have broad explanatory power, explaining entrepreneurial success?

Small Business Entrepreneurship: Is a Caterpillar a Butterfly?

In Chap. 2 you may have been struck by the size of the challenge you likely will face if you want to be above the 75 % or so of the population who earn less overall as entrepreneurs than they would in comparable jobs. If you also want to make enough to cover the cost of capital invested, you will have to be better prepared than the next person. To get that edge many people will think of getting a business education. This chapter will give you a sense of the small advantages a business education will give you.

Modernizing Schumpeter: Toward a New General Theory of Entrepreneurship

In Chap. 2 we saw how important it is for a person to have an edge to succeed as an entrepreneur. In Chap. 3 we saw how formal knowledge of the business disciplines and/or even ideas around good business practice did not seem to offer much help to the would-be entrepreneur. In Chap. 4 we got some appreciation of the value to be had from the numerous atheoretical studies in the field of entrepreneurship, on the one hand, while on the other hand appreciating some of the problems with atheoretical findings in the form of many different and somewhat arbitrary propositions. At this point you should be ready to appreciate the value of a good theory. In the next chapter you will be introduced to the ideas of perhaps the greatest entrepreneurship theorist of the last century along with a number of suggestions for modernizing his ideas from nearly a hundred years ago.

Developing Entrepreneurial Creativity

By now you might be wondering how people become entrepreneurially creative. Is it simply a matter of taking a university course?