What is entrepreneurship?

A simple question, isn’t it? Well, as it turns out, this ‘simple’ question kept entrepreneurship researchers busy for decades. Let me unravel what is going on here by looking through different lenses. Spoiler alert: Entrepreneurship is not just about startups.

Since 1990, prominent literature on entrepreneurship conceptualizes it as a phenomenon[i], as a method[ii], as a research field[iii] or as a science of the artificial[iv]. These four lenses — phenomenon, method, research, science — heavily influence how entrepreneurship is seen. We might put them together like this: In order to make sense of the world, a science combines different streams of research that study phenomena, methods and how they interact.

Entrepreneurship as a phenomenon

To find out what entrepreneurship actually is, Gartner simply asked entrepreneurship researchers and business leaders how they define it. He is curious about all “different parts of the same phenomenon.”[v] Specifically, he finds two clusters of entrepreneurship definitions: ‘characteristics of entrepreneurship’ (the entrepreneur, innovation, growth, uniqueness), and ‘outcomes of entrepreneurship’ (creating value, for profit, owner-manager). Entrepreneurship as a phenomenon hence does not just seem to signify who entrepreneurs are and what they do, but also what entrepreneurs create in the longer run.

Entrepreneurship as a method

When entrepreneurship is conceptualized as method, it is viewed as a skill and a way of reasoning about the world. Sarasvathy and Venkataraman even claim that there is an entrepreneurial method analogous to the scientific method, which means that it’s teachable and learnable.[vi] In essence, they state that it “aims to generate and refine design principles” by using mechanisms that “involve action, interaction, reaction, transformation and co-creation”. Entrepreneurship as a method is a “way of tackling large and abiding problems of the heart of advancing our species.” Consequently, it provides an answer to a question like ‘how to make something that eases this particular challenge?’

Entrepreneurship as a field of research

Looking at entrepreneurship through a research-lens, scholars make sense of what knowledge the field has generated so far and express their views on what will be needed to push it forwards. Major threads of inquiry lie in opportunities, cognition, action, organizing, as well as performance and wider outcomes and how each of these threads relate to one another.[vii] In this way, entrepreneurship as a research field tries to understand what we might call the entrepreneurial process — from perceiving a challenge to creating positive and negative effects for stakeholders.

Entrepreneurship as a science

Lastly, Venkataraman, Sarasvathy, Dew and Forster view entrepreneurship as a science of the artificial that “is interested in phenomena that can be designed” such as opportunities, transformations and (inter)actions of entrepreneurs and their stakeholders.[viii] As such, entrepreneurship might help us to not only understand, but actually help “the design of new opportunities through application of an entrepreneurial method.” This notion gives it a larger, some might say more grandiose, outlook than entrepreneurship as a field of research, since entrepreneurship as a science calls us to study and even ‘make’ the world.[ix]

Entrepreneurship as a source of transformation

Let me leave you with a ‘good enough for now’ definition of entrepreneurship based on a recent study: Entrepreneurship is individual or collective agency. Entrepreneurship is made up of ability, motivation, an opportunity, immunization against discouraging institutions, and process skill. Entrepreneurship is the source of transformation.[x] If you want to learn more about entrepreneurship and how to use it as a method for transformation, I highly recommend Professor Saras Sarasvathy’s newest MOOC.

[i] William B. Gartner, “What Are We Talking about When We Talk about Entrepreneurship?,” Journal of Business Venturing 5, no. 1 (1990): 15–28, https://doi.org/10.1016/0883-9026(90)90023-M.

[ii] Saras D. Sarasvathy and Sankaran Venkataraman, “Entrepreneurship as Method: Open Questions for an Entrepreneurial Future,” Entrepreneurship Theory and Practice 35, no. 1 (January 2011): 113–35, https://doi.org/10.1111/j.1540-6520.2010.00425.x.

[iii] Scott Shane and S. Venkataraman, “The Promise of Enterpreneurship as a Field of Research,” The Academy of Management Review 25, no. 1 (January 2000): 217, https://doi.org/10.2307/259271; Dean A. Shepherd, “Party On! A Call for Entrepreneurship Research That Is More Interactive, Activity Based, Cognitively Hot, Compassionate, and Prosocial,” Journal of Business Venturing 30, no. 4 (July 2015): 489–507, https://doi.org/10.1016/j.jbusvent.2015.02.001; Sankaran Venkataraman, “The Distinctive Domain of Entrepreneurship Research,” ed. Jerome A. Katz and Andrew C. Corbet, vol. 3, Advances in Entrepreneurship, Firm Emergence and Growth (JAI Press Inc., 1997), 119–38, https://doi.org/10.1108/S1074-754020190000021009.

[iv] Saras D Sarasvathy, “Entrepreneurship as a Science of the Artificial,” Journal of Economic Psychology 24, no. 2 (April 2003): 203–20, https://doi.org/10.1016/S0167-4870(02)00203-9; Sankaran Venkataraman et al., “Reflections on the 2010 AMR Decade Award: Whither the Promise? Moving Forward with Entrepreneurship As a Science of the Artificial,” Academy of Management Review 37, no. 1 (January 2012): 21–33, https://doi.org/10.5465/amr.2011.0079.

[v] “What Are We Talking about When We Talk about Entrepreneurship?”

[vi] “Entrepreneurship as Method.”

[vii] Shane and Venkataraman, “The Promise of Enterpreneurship as a Field of Research”; Shepherd, “Party On! A Call for Entrepreneurship Research That Is More Interactive, Activity Based, Cognitively Hot, Compassionate, and Prosocial”; Venkataraman, “The Distinctive Domain of Entrepreneurship Research.”

[viii] “Reflections on the 2010 AMR Decade Award.”

[ix] Saras Sarasvathy, “Worldmaking,” in Advances in Entrepreneurship, Firm Emergence and Growth, ed. Andrew C. Corbett and Jerome A. Katz, vol. 14 (Emerald Group Publishing Limited, 2012), 1–24, https://doi.org/10.1108/S1074-7540(2012)0000014004.

[x] “What Makes an Entrepreneurship Study Entrepreneurial? Toward A Unified Theory of Entrepreneurial Agency,” Entrepreneurship Theory and Practice, May 26, 2020, 104225872092246, https://doi.org/10.1177/1042258720922460.