Book review: Dean A. Shepherd and Holger Patzelt (Eds.),Trailblazing in Entrepreneurship: Creating New Paths for Understanding the Field

Trailblazing in Entrepreneurship: Creating New Paths for Understanding the Field by two eminent entrepreneurship researchers; Dean Shepherd of Indiana University, USA and Holger Patzelt of The Technical University of Munich, Germany, highlights current status and future directions of entrepreneurship research.

There are many challenges for research in a multidisciplinary field. Growth of knowledge in each related individual discipline is dynamic. Thus, there are chances that an individual researcher could have either a very narrow or a broad focus. When there is a lack of consensus among researchers, the efforts would either get concentrated or too diversified, without making substantial progress. Risks of conceptual and methodological myopia would stymie such progress. In such a scenario an aerial overview of a research field brings clarity and direction; it brings conceptual clarity, redirects research efforts and prevents overspending of efforts in narrow areas.

Entrepreneurship research focuses on different processes involved within it. Intention, opportunity recognition, opportunity exploitation, innovation, new venture creation, initial operations, financing, sustainability and failures are some of the recurring themes in entrepreneurship research. Decision heuristics remain the umbrella process for all the above processes of entrepreneurship; many of these processes, however, remain to be explored. The contexts in which an individual attempts venture creation vary. To this extent, the authors of this book take the pragmatic perspective which argues that truth can never be truly found; what is revealed is the temporary and the current best opinion (Haskel, 1984; Seixas, 1993). They have also called upon other researchers to remain entrepreneurial in their research effort and methodology (Shepherd, 2015).

In this scenario, the book proves helpful in bringing about clarity and further granularity to research questions in the entrepreneurship domain. The book has seven chapters with different themes such as Generation, Refinement and Exploitation of Potential Opportunities; Entrepreneurial Failures, Intersection of Innovation, Operations Management and Entrepreneurship; Entrepreneurship’s Role in Sustainable Development; Intersection of Family Business and Entrepreneurship; Inter-relationship of Health and Entrepreneurship; and Entrepreneurial Decision-making. Each of these chapters has provided numerous references including their own research, on the specific themes and presented diagrams illustrating research questions from which hypotheses could be formed.

The book challenges researchers to investigate the reversible, bi-directional or the helical nature of relationships that exist in the processes (e.g., tasks and emotions, health and stress, etc.). Intention is considered to be the first step towards entrepreneurship which triggers opportunity seeking behaviour. This book underlines the process of conversion of third person opportunity to first person opportunity as one of the important focus areas for research. Authors indicate that the present research focus on self-employment as a onetime decision is more likely to be a series of career decisions. It also points that the non-economic motivation for entrepreneurial intention is much less studied compared to economic motivation. Role of compassionate behaviour on a host of entrepreneurial activities, including new firm formation, is not investigated enough.

Many research efforts model entrepreneurial innovation as a stage-gate process; however, alternate paradigms have to be scrutinised. Innovation remains a cornerstone of entrepreneurship. But how do entrepreneurs separate the signal from noise in innovation? The outcomes of a stage gate process do not completely explain entrepreneurial behaviours such as persistence and inherent helical nature of decision-making. Along with these concepts, the rationale, sequences and the role of doubts in decision processes of new venture creations remain to be explored further. Similarly, the role of different ‘community of enquiry’ and its influence on ‘opportunity belief’ is not understood adequately. It is a complex process in which opportunity belief undergoes transformation quite unrelated to the initial one.

The book calls for deeper investigations and insights into psychological aspects related to entrepreneurship. For example, emotional endowments of the entrepreneur or the entrepreneurial team, assessment of such endowments to understand the self-knowledge, changes to such knowledge due to entrepreneurial activities and subsequent impacts remain to be looked into. Emotional endowments of entrepreneurial organisations seem to vary across organisations; this variation is expected to influence conflicts and their resolution processes in organisations. Entrepreneurship also creates ambivalence related to simultaneous, multiple emotions. How such ambivalence is reconciled? Is there any optimality of stress? How negative emotions such as fear and anxiety influence decisions and activities of an entrepreneur? How the entrepreneur’s self-emotion interacts with feedback from others to maintain positivity? The book indicates these questions to be important for entrepreneurship research. Collective mind also needs to be investigated to develop comprehensive understanding.

The role of family or entrepreneurial team in developing collective opportunity beliefs as compared to single individual is much less understood. Similarly, the book indicates that there is higher level of consumption flexibility in entrepreneurial households which helps in capital formation, thereby promoting entrepreneurship. It also calls for a differentiation of earning and wealth, whereby even though the earning is less, the wealth increases.

The book also points out that the theory of effectuation (Sarasvathy, 2001) explains the reasons for entrepreneurship, but, at the same time, effectuation itself changes due to the entrepreneurial process; this dichotomy requires explanation. Similarly, it is believed that the process of business planning helps entrepreneurship. However, there are also constraints because of business plans; this contradiction needs resolution. Recent innovation of crowd sourcing as a mechanism of financing, as compared to bootstrapping, and the speed of venture creation also merits investigation. In the absence of a proven superior capability in decision-making, how biases and heuristics help entrepreneurs in decision-making requires deeper understanding for the benefit of future entrepreneurship.

Lack of sufficient research focus on entrepreneurial exit is surprising, considering the fact that failures are more common. There seems a definitional confusion about failures or exit, more so, when ‘exit’ is not final. Along with economical outcomes, the emotional outcomes of exit, how failure of business influence existing relationships and impact on health need to be given due importance in research.

On the methodology front, this book, calls upon researchers to identify various experimental approaches, conjoint approach, hierarchical nested decision process approach, etc. The book discusses the units of analysis for different areas of research in entrepreneurship.

In sum, this book is expected to guide entrepreneurship scholars by setting the research direction and effort across the world. It will help in the formation of nuanced research questions to extend the knowledge in the field of entrepreneurship.