The purpose and potential of entrepreneurship research

Abstract

In this essay, we argue that it is folly to stake the legitimacy and value of entrepreneurship research on the uniqueness of its theory. A better path is to orient around questions where we are uniquely positioned to create useful and important knowledge. To this end, we anchor on Venkataraman’s seminal definition and argue that entrepreneurship research should focus on understanding the outcomes of venture creation not just for founders, but also for other stakeholders and society as a whole. Moreover, we argue that generating robust insight into these questions requires contributions from multiple perspectives, and this makes our field’s theoretical diversity a great and under-appreciated asset. Drawing on the metaphor of “borderlands,” we argue that embracing and leveraging diversity can help to address important social and environmental problems while also laying a foundation for the unique identity so long sought by the members of our field.

Keywords

climate change entrepreneurship institutional entrepreneurship social movements startups topics and perspectives

What is the purpose of entrepreneurship research?

According to Venkataraman (1997: 120), the field is characterized by a focus on “. . . how opportunities to bring into existence ‘future’ goods and services are discovered, created, and exploited, by whom, and with what consequences” and exists to illuminate “. . . the economic, psychological, and social consequences of this pursuit of a future market not only for the pursuer, but also for the other stakeholders and society as a whole.”

This definition is useful insofar as it details the core questions and empirical contexts of entrepreneurship research. However, a wide variety of theoretical perspectives can be used to address these issues, and this has sparked concern that entrepreneurship is not a unique and cohesive research area, but rather a context where scholars from other domains apply their own theories and advance their own literatures. These concerns have led to calls for the development of native entrepreneurship theories that can form a coherent base for our field and distinguish it from others within the academy (Arend, 2020; Busenitz et al., 2003; McMullen et al., 2021; Zahra, 2005). Indeed, there is a contingent of scholars who believe that a core purpose of the entrepreneurship field should be to develop new and unique theory.

We are sympathetic to the concern that entrepreneurship is not a distinct field. After all, fields are defined in relation to each other, and crisp boundaries contribute to legitimation and identity-building that can attract dedicated adherents and resources (Wry et al., 2011). We also agree that it is worthwhile to develop theories that can explain processes and outcomes that are unique to our field (Shane and Venkataraman, 2000). We disagree, however, that native theory is required to generate this understanding or to validate entrepreneurship as a distinct research domain. Building theory for its own sake threatens to undermine the value of a field devoted to the study of real-world phenomena (Hambrick, 2007). Instead, we believe that scholars should anchor on Venkataraman’s (1997) definition and find shared purpose in studying the consequences of entrepreneurship not only for entrepreneurs but also for all stakeholders. Doing so would be faithful to the roots of our field while also responding to calls for management research to address societal grand challenges (George et al., 2016). Furthermore, we argue that this orientation has the potential to create pragmatically useful knowledge (James, 1907) that capitalizes on the theoretical diversity inherent to our field while avoiding fruitless debates about what qualifies as entrepreneurship theory and what does not.

No single perspective can explain how, when, and why entrepreneurship might address long-standing social and environmental problems. The inherent complexity of such phenomena requires a correspondingly diverse set of theoretical lenses (Leitch et al., 2010). By their very nature, individual theories offer partial insight into questions of interest by bringing specific processes and outcomes into focus. By corollary, developing a robust understanding of complex problems requires contributions from multiple perspectives. Indeed, we believe that embracing theoretical diversity is a promising way to fulfill the core purpose of entrepreneurship research insofar as it can uncover insights that speak to important, field-specific questions—and perhaps begin to answer them as well.

Our perspective takes inspiration from research on “borderlands” in economic geography, which are spaces where members of different cultural groups meet, clash, and grapple with each other over time (Pratt, 2007). Groups within a borderland may view each other with suspicion leading to competition and hostility, especially if the native population feels threatened by incursions from other groups. However, borderlands are also inherently sites of blending and hybridization (Lamont and Molnár, 2002), where contact generates new knowledge and new ways to address the challenges of collective interest—contributing to a unique identity for the borderland itself (Lauristin et al., 1997; Petersoo, 2007).

Extending the metaphor to entrepreneurship research, we conceive of the field as a borderland where scholars from economics, strategy, psychology, sociology, and others have the collective potential to generate meaningful understanding of entrepreneurial phenomenon while also contributing to the development of new and synthetic insights. None of this precludes the development of truly native theory; any insights that help to explain outcomes of interest are welcome. Still, we believe that theories are a means to an end, and the best way to continue building the entrepreneurship field is to embrace our position as a borderland. This innovative stance encourages creative, cross-disciplinary theorizing that speaks to a host of pressing critical outcomes. In the face of persistent inequities, global pandemics, environmental collapse, and a loss of societal cohesion, we see a bright future in studying how entrepreneurs can help to address these challenges. We also believe that a clear and distinct identity for the field can emerge as a natural by-product of this effort.

What makes entrepreneurship a legitimate research domain?

As with other management disciplines, entrepreneurship research germinated in the social sciences (Sorenson and Stuart, 2008), specifically with efforts to understand the root causes of sustained economic growth. Per the broader economics literature, early research tried to explain macro-level outcomes. This work was novel, though, insofar as it traced these outcomes to environmental shifts that created opportunities that actors could recognize and seize-upon to create profits at the expense of existing firms and technologies (e.g. Hayek, 1945, 1968; Knight, 1921; Schumpeter, 1934). The scale and wealth-creating potential of entrepreneurship proved to be a powerful attractor. Scholars from wide-ranging disciplines crowded in to study various aspects of venture creation and, in the process, generated a very broad and theoretically diverse literature.

Reflecting this diversity, entrepreneurship research has blossomed in many directions. Scholars continue to study foundational issues such as the nature and sources of opportunities, the macro-economic implications of entrepreneurship, and specific aspects of venture creation process (e.g. Baumol, 1990; Kirzner, 1979, 1997; Shane, 1996). This research includes inquiries into the traits associated with entrepreneurial intent and success (e.g. Azoulay et al., 2020; Ruef, 2000; Wiklund and Shepherd, 2005), as well as inquiries into venture creation inputs such as creativity, innovation, and opportunity recognition (e.g. Eckhardt and Shane, 2003; Kirzner, 1999; Rosenkopf and Nerkar, 2001; Sarasvathy, 2001). Other research has probed the cultural and economic factors that create variance in the number and types of ventures that emerge in different regions (e.g. Plummer and Acs, 2014; Vedula and Kim, 2019; Whittington et al., 2009) and the strategies that entrepreneurs use to secure resources (e.g. Lounsbury and Glynn, 2001; Zott and Huy, 2007), build teams (Jin et al., 2017), establish legitimacy (Aldrich and Fiol, 1994), and scale ventures (Gilbert et al., 2006).

Given the sheer array of topics covered, it is unsurprising that scholars have applied diverse theoretical lenses to study entrepreneurship. From a borderland perspective, this diversity is a strength of the field. Some perspectives are better suited than others to address certain questions, and no single theory can offer robust insight across such a diverse range of domains. For example, psychology is better suited than economics to study entrepreneurial motives, but it does not have much to say about startup ecosystems. In addition, different theories often offer complementary insights into the same phenomena. For instance, economists and sociologists both study the contextual enablers of entrepreneurship and have contributed to the emergence of complementary and well-rounded insights in this area (Zahra, 2007).

Still, for some, the diversity of perspectives in entrepreneurship is a cause for concern. This concern is particularly evident among self-identified entrepreneurship scholars who see a research domain that lacks the coherent theoretical base that they associate with distinct and legitimate fields (Arend, 2020; McMullen et al., 2021; Shane and Venkataraman, 2000; Zahra, 2005). For these scholars, building native theory is of the utmost importance and should be considered a key goal of entrepreneurship research. Illustrating this, Shane and Venkataraman (2000: 217) argued that entrepreneurship will continue to be viewed with skepticism by outsiders until it develops its own unique theoretical base, saying,

. . . many people have had trouble identifying the distinctive contribution of the field to the broader domain of business studies, undermining the field’s legitimacy. Researchers in other fields ask why entrepreneurship research is necessary if it does not explain or predict empirical phenomena beyond what is known from work in other fields.

Extending this logic, Zahra (2005: 257) argued that

We cannot be a scholarly field without having our own legitimate theories that define and explain distinctive phenomena in ways that theories from other disciplines cannot possibly articulate.

Recent papers by Arend (2020) and McMullen et al. (2021) suggest that this angst has not abated as the field continues to attract scholars from different disciplines and fragment into sub-areas such as corporate entrepreneurship (Phan et al., 2009), institutional entrepreneurship, social entrepreneurship (Mair and Martí, 2006), and environmental entrepreneurship (Vedula et al., 2022). Per these authors,

The current trend toward fragmentation within the field may suggest a lack of tenets that are universally applicable to all forms of entrepreneurship, thereby calling the existence of entrepreneurship as a distinct domain into question. (McMullen et al., 2021: 2)

Our field has no common ground to build theory upon. We display an astonishing inability to stake a claim for the field, or some significant piece of it, through a widely accepted definition and boundary of our phenomena from which to propose new and unique theory. (Arend, 2020: 6)

We agree that entrepreneurship—or any research field for that matter—benefits from the development of theories that offer new or deeper insight into phenomena of interest. We also agree that native theories can contribute to this goal and, indeed, see value in the field-specific frameworks and theories that have been developed by leading entrepreneurship scholars (e.g. McMullen et al., 2021; Shane and Venkataraman, 2000). However, we caution that it is not helpful to treat this type of theory development as intrinsically important, nor to hold it up as a key goal of the field. Theories are valuable when they offer useful and testable explanations for important outcomes, rather than when they are constructed as academic exercises. As Hambrick (2007: 1346) wrote, “theories are not ends in themselves”; treating them as such “actually retards our ability to achieve our end: understanding.” In this regard, the mandate of entrepreneurship research is clear to understand how new goods and services are discovered and exploited, by whom, and with what consequences (Venkataraman, 1997). It is unnecessarily reductive to suggest that scholars should apply a limited set of lenses when studying these questions.

We contend that entrepreneurship is and will continue to be a legitimate field, even if we do not reify unique theory as our goal. By definition, fields are communities of actors who “partake in a common meaning system and whose participants interact more frequently and fatefully with one another than with actors outside those settings” (Scott, 1995: 56). What qualifies as an academic field thus rests on the meanings that are shared among the researchers, subjects, and stakeholders who comprise its membership. Meanings may anchor on theoretical uniqueness, but this is not required for a field to be seen as unique and legitimate, nor to attract adherents (Wry et al., 2011). Even well-established research areas like strategy and organization theory draw heavily from the social sciences and are internally quite theoretically diverse (Sorenson and Stuart, 2008). These fields have a handful of natively applied theories, such as the resource-based view in strategy (Barney, 1991) and the institutional logics perspective in organization theory (Thornton et al., 2012), but arguably no more so than entrepreneurship. Indeed, these fields, like entrepreneurship, are mostly organized around common empirical questions and outcomes of interest.

Rather than focusing on theory development as an end, we believe that a worthy purpose would be to focus on questions where entrepreneurship research is uniquely positioned to add value. There are many avenues that such work might take, but we see great potential in focusing on how entrepreneurship can tackle social, environmental, and economic issues (Markman et al., 2019; Vedula et al., 2022). Research on these topics has the potential to create useful knowledge while rallying scholars from varied disciplinary backgrounds around an increasingly resonant cause. Yet this potential can only be realized if we embrace, rather than shun, entrepreneurship as a borderland where scholars apply diverse lenses to create knowledge around issues of common interest. If done correctly, such efforts can contribute not only useful, field-specific knowledge but also the unique theoretical identity that has so long been sought for the entrepreneurship field.

What important outcome(s) can entrepreneurship theory uniquely explain?

As Margolis and Walsh (2003: 268) noted, the “world cries out for repair . . . and calls go out to companies to help.” Almost 20 years later, it is unclear that mature firms—or the scholars who study them—are contributing useful solutions. There are thriving literatures on corporate social responsibility, philanthropy, and non-market strategy, but all focus as much (or more) on financial outcomes versus social or environmental ones (Barnett et al., 2020). The question of how firms can “do well by doing good” seems trite given the social, economic, and ecological challenges that we face. The reason, in part, is that not many mature firms seek to address social problems through their core productive activities and business models. There are exceptions, of course, but most social responsibility initiatives are peripheral and focus on harm reduction as opposed to creating social or environmental value (Battilana and Lee, 2014; Doering and Wry, 2022). And even within these limitations, actual practices often fall short of corporate rhetoric (Battilana and Casciaro, 2021; Raghunandan and Rajgopal, 2020).

None of this is surprising, nor is it inherently problematic. Mature firms have earnings pressures, business lines, inertia, and resource constraints that push them to focus on financial returns and make it difficult to deviate from existing models and practices (Wry et al., 2013). Most large firms also benefit from the industry status quo and do not have much incentive to pursue disruptive or radical change, especially if these changes do not offer clear financial benefits (Berchicci and King, 2021; McDonnell et al., 2015; Seo and Creed, 2002; Waldron et al., 2019). It also makes sense for scholars to study the link between prosocial endeavors and firm financial performance, both as a publishing strategy and to curry favor with corporate audiences and important donors.

In comparison, entrepreneurial firms are disruptors and innovators (Schumpeter, 1942). They are peripheral actors who are less embedded in and dependent upon existing institutional environments and are thus more likely to initiate change (Waldron et al., 2015; York and Lenox, 2014; York and Venkataraman, 2010). New ventures also are not bound by the same external constraints as established firms, and this allows founders to pursue personally important goals, even at the expense of profit maximization (Rindova et al., 2009; Wry and York, 2017). Reflecting this, founders are increasingly developing models that seek to generate profits through activities that directly address social and environmental issues (Santos et al., 2015). These efforts are also often coupled with attempts to rationalize and legitimate entirely new sectors, contributing to enhanced resource flows, scaling prospects, and additional organizational foundings (Aldrich and Fiol, 1994; Jones et al., 2019). In short, entrepreneurs are adept at creating, normalizing, and mobilizing commercial solutions to social and environmental problems, making them potentially key actors in efforts to tackle the most daunting challenges facing nations, communities, and societies (Markman et al., 2019).

How can entrepreneurship theory usefully explain societal impact?

Understanding how entrepreneurship can create social and environmental impact is a massive endeavor. The ultimate outcomes of interest (e.g. poverty alleviation, eliminated carbon emissions, and reduced inequity) sit at the end of a causal chain where entrepreneurs recognize or create impact opportunities, grapple with how to balance social and financial goals, assemble resources, create novel products or services, navigate tensions and trade-offs, and ultimately generate measurable non-economic impacts (Wry and Haugh, 2018). Furthermore, this process cannot be understood without considering the contexts where entrepreneurial activity takes place and the varied ecosystem players—governments, universities, social movements, accelerators, investors, and so on—that support and oppose such efforts. Addressing these complexities will require sustained effort from diverse scholars who are each contributing pieces to a large and very complicated puzzle. The good news is that entrepreneurship research already attracts productive contributions from theoretically diverse scholars. We believe that the field can capitalize on this diversity to develop novel and synthetic approaches to important phenomena in ways that are not possible in more theoretically homogeneous domains. This is the promise of a borderland.

Indeed, there is a general finding that, within borderlands, contact often sparks dynamic and creative processes that transform local culture, knowledge, and practices (Koschatzky, 2000; Pratt, 1992; Weidenfeld, 2013). Borderlands are sites of hybridization and creolization (Lamont and Molnár, 2002), where groups with different perspectives and problem-solving approaches converge around issues of common interest and collectively contribute to new, synthetic, and locally tailored solutions (Makkonen et al., 2017). Yet these outcomes are only achieved through positive and respectful interaction: segregation supports the status quo within each group and domination attempts foster suspicion and conflict. It is crucial to create mechanisms that enable the generative diffusion of knowledge across groups (Trippl, 2010). Thus, when viewed as a borderland, the theoretical diversity of entrepreneurship research should be read not as a threat, but rather as an undervalued asset to be mindfully harnessed and enhanced.

Still, embracing theoretical diversity to explore the impact of entrepreneurship on society raises important questions. How can this theoretical borderland contribute new synthetic insights and avoid becoming mired in stale, siloed conversations? How can we ensure that the field takes on dragons rather than tilting at windmills (e.g. by pursuing theoretical purity)? The key is to prioritize research that offers useful insight into important issues: if entrepreneurship scholars embrace this mantle, we should naturally welcome varied perspectives, support communities of practice, and celebrate scholarship that applies diverse lenses to offer fresh insight into questions that we collectively care about answering (Vedula et al., 2022; Wry and Haugh, 2018).

We propose that five orienting lenses—each related to different aspects of entrepreneurial value and informed by multiple theoretical perspectives—can be usefully harnessed to pursue this purpose. The five lenses—strategizing, organizing, contextualizing, mobilizing, and motivating—all support meaningful explanations on how entrepreneurship can generate societal impact. We briefly summarize the origins and focus of each, and then discuss how weaving a tapestry among them could support a collective identity for entrepreneurship research as a unique theoretical borderland.

Strategizing

Inspired by strategic management and economics’ interest in explaining differential firm performance, strategizing encompasses entrepreneurial efforts to form and enact a “central, integrated, externally oriented concept of how [a] business will achieve its objectives (Hambrick and Fredrickson, 2005: 52). Such efforts entail organizing new ventures (Alvarez and Barney, 2005), defining missions (Grimes, 2018), evolving goals (Sarasvathy, 2001), and scaling operations (Shepherd and Patzelt, 2022). Making “big-picture” decisions (Garg and Eisenhardt, 2017), navigating economic and political shifts (Rodrigues and Child, 2003), and mitigating dependencies (Santos and Eisenhardt, 2009) also factor into strategizing. Clearly if entrepreneurs are to have impact beyond economic wealth creation, they must indeed strategize to ensure economic viability.

Organizing

Inspired by organization theory’s interest in explaining organizational design, organizing deals with entrepreneurial decisions about venture structure, decision systems, and managerial practices (Burton et al., 2019). This work has addressed the genesis, evolution, and impact of physical design features, such as legal form (Wadhwani et al., 2020), hierarchy (Colombo and Grilli, 2013), formality (Colombo and Grilli, 2013), and ownership structure (Hellmann et al., 2019). Role formalization (Powell and Baker, 2017) and decision rights (Burton et al., 2019; Waldron et al., 2022) have also received consideration. Organizing as benefit corporations, certified B Corps, employee-owned cooperatives, and other unique legal structures all offer valuable organizing mechanisms for entrepreneurs to pursue social and environmental impact.

Contextualizing

Inspired by various sociological approaches, contextualizing deals with entrepreneurial efforts to position their new ventures favorably in external environments (Lounsbury and Glynn, 2001; Welter, 2011). Such efforts entail defining and distinguishing ventures from others socio-cognitively, such as by defining logics (Battilana and Lee, 2014), identities (Wry and York, 2017), and boundaries (Santos and Eisenhardt, 2009). They also aim to secure acceptance for organizational differentiators, which includes becoming legitimate (Elsbach and Sutton, 1992), creating new categories (Navis and Glynn, 2010), and forming market boundaries (Santos and Eisenhardt, 2009). Context clearly matters for the generation of non-economic outcomes, as the sociocultural environment will assist or inhibit that acceptance of such efforts.

Mobilizing

Inspired by sociological theories, mobilizing deals with entrepreneurial efforts to generate support for their offerings (Markman et al., 2019). From the perspective of venture development, such efforts entail finding, securing, and leveraging growth-enabling resources (e.g. cash and advice) from stakeholders (e.g. investors) (Clough et al., 2019). From the perspective of yielding more profound societal impact, mobilizing also involves motivating broader stakeholder participation in value-creation initiatives. For this purpose, entrepreneurs enlist communities (Lumpkin and Bacq, 2019), government bodies (Hiatt and Carlos, 2018), certifying agencies/organizations (Jones et al., 2019), non-governmental organizations (Soule, 2012), major corporations (Sarason and Dean, 2019), and even the public (Sarasvathy and Ramesh, 2019). For entrepreneurs to scale social and environmental impact beyond their venture, they must mobilize beyond the firm level to incorporate multiple stakeholder perspectives.

Motivating

Inspired by psychological theories, entrepreneurship scholars have long studied the role of entrepreneurs’ beliefs, psychological traits, and personal experiences in motivating venturing processes. For example, understanding the cognitive processes of deciding to pursue (Haynie et al., 2009; McMullen and Shepherd, 2006) and even create (Sarasvathy et al., 2005) opportunities is a critical consideration. Scholars have looked to the role of passion (Cardon et al., 2009) and other emotions (Cardon et al., 2012) in motivating the creation of new ventures. Much of this work anchors on the various identities that entrepreneurs hold (Murnieks et al., 2012). A rich literature indeed explores how social (Fauchart and Gruber, 2011; Gruber and MacMillan, 2017; Powell and Baker, 2017), role (Powell and Baker, 2014; Wry and York, 2019), and personal (O’Neil et al., 2022; Wry and York, 2017) identities motivate entrepreneurial goals and actions. Understanding the motives of founders and teams is essential for identifying pathways to social and environmental impacts.

How can the entrepreneurship field sharpen its identity?

Beyond generating novel, synthetic, and useful insights by encouraging contact among scholars with different perspectives, embracing our field’s position as a theoretical borderland has the potential to contribute to a unique identity and field-specific theory.

A key insight from research on borderlands is that novelty arising through contact naturally differentiates the borderland from the surrounding cultural groups, thus supporting the emergence of a unique identity for those who reside within. This work further emphasizes that borders are not sites where people are divided into separate spheres and opposing identities. Rather, they are sites where interactions between individuals from many backgrounds can lead to the emergence of new hybridized identities (Thelen, 1999). For example, research has shown that the United States’ southern border is a cultural interface that has produced a range of multiplex and transnational identities such as “Chicano,” “Latino,” and “Hispanic” that transcend the distinction between “Mexican” and “American” (Anzaldúa, 1987; Kearney, 1991).

Similarly, the Baltic states (Estonia, Latvia, and Lithuania) sit between—and at various times have been ruled by—Germany, Sweden, Denmark, Russia, and the Soviet Union. Ethnic communities from these nations continue to be a major presence in the region today, but this borderland position has resulted in distinctive identities where the Baltics consider themselves more Russian than their Nordic neighbors, more Scandinavian than eastern European nations, and more European than Russia or former Soviet bloc nations (Lauristin et al., 1997). Notably, Russians in these nations see themselves as culturally superior to Russians in Russia, suggesting that not only can borderlands support unique identities, but that hybridization has the potential to infuse value into these identities (Fein, 2005). We believe that the same hybridization, deployed toward understanding social, environmental, and economic impact, can create a more distinctive voice and identity for entrepreneurship research.

We next illustrate how the five orienting lenses reviewed above could be deployed to advance the understanding of how entrepreneurs generate multifaceted impact. This illustration centers on three general questions, each representative of a challenge that entrepreneurs face in producing such impact. For each question, we recap what we know and discuss what we could yet learn by applying strategizing, organizing, contextualizing, mobilizing, and/or motivating lenses to generate new insights. While clearly not intended to be dogmatic or exhaustive, our hope is to demonstrate the value of theoretical diversity in cultivating useful explanations for important outcomes and in defining entrepreneurship research’s identity.

How do entrepreneurs reconcile the multiple goals involved in creating impact?

A rich literature has studied ventures that pursue profits alongside social or environmental goals (Vedula et al., 2022). Drawing on an organizing lens, this work has focused on the tensions and trade-offs that firms encounter when they pursue these potentially competing goals (Battilana and Dorado, 2010; Battilana and Lee, 2014). This research has been theoretically generative, seeding new conversations around institutional complexity and intra-organizational plurality (Battilana et al., 2022) while offering a beachhead for a growing cadre of organizational scholars in the entrepreneurship field (Wry and Haugh, 2018). Predominantly, theories applied and developed in work on hybrid ventures focus on the conflicts that emerge at the intersection of different meaning systems, as embodied in institutional logics.

Other theoretical lenses could add useful insight by focusing on alternative aspects of hybrid ventures, moving beyond academic interest in the tension between different logics. For instance, strategizing and contextualizing lenses might usefully facilitate the study of economic, demographic, and policy environments that promote social and environmental entrepreneurship (Vedula and Kim, 2019). These lenses might also consider factors that contribute to the emergence of supportive ecosystems for such ventures, and how they can contribute to legitimating new models and impact sectors (Cobb et al., 2016; York et al., 2016). In comparison, motivating and strategizing lenses could help us to understand the unique motives of social and environmental entrepreneurs (O’Neil and Ucbasaran, 2016), as well as what makes entrepreneurs attentive to opportunities to create multiple forms of value (Wry and York, 2017).

Using multiple lenses that consider hybridity to be more than a source of tension, we submit that entrepreneurship scholars can make a larger contribution. Because entrepreneurship research is embedded in multiple contexts and theories, it has the potential to illuminate and inform current work on hybridization. More importantly, by focusing on the generative aspects of how seemingly conflicting logics come together through mobilizing and organizing, we believe entrepreneurship as a field can make a practical contribution. Only by bringing together such diverse perspectives can we learn how to advise entrepreneurs and their stakeholders about navigating trade-offs between economic, social, and environmental outcomes.

How do entrepreneurs scale impact?

Understanding the potential for entrepreneurial action to address social and environmental issues will require more focus on the outcomes that result from such action (Barnett et al., 2020). As Markman et al. (2019: 372) note, “Solely on their own, entrepreneurs lack the knowledge, skills, authority, and resources necessary to resolve grand challenges—in fact, these deficiencies, plus the absence of enforcing governance despite the scale of the challenges, should suppress their motivation to engage.” And, yet, these challenges entice action by entrepreneurs in concert with an array of similarly interested actors to bring about societal change (Sarasvathy and Ramesh, 2019).

Creating impact thus requires that entrepreneurs not only develop innovations that address social and environmental problems but also work to ensure their broader acceptance. In this regard, founders often find it difficult to legitimate their innovations. For instance, they must decide between protecting what they have created for private benefit versus commoditizing their creations for others to apply and use for widespread public benefit (Navis and Glynn, 2010). They must also gain acceptance from stakeholders, including dominant firms in their industries, who likely resist changes to the status quo that benefits them (Waldron et al., 2016).

Adopting a contextualizing lens, scholars have recognized that entrepreneurs demonstrate the viability, necessity, and inevitability of innovations by creating business models that ease incumbent adoption (Hockerts and Wustenhagen, 2010; Waldron et al., 2015). Through this process, innovations once thought to be radical become understood, accepted, and normalized (Pacheco et al., 2014; Sine et al., 2005). Entrepreneurs take on the initial costs of commercializing innovations and show that these are not only technically viable but also financially lucrative (Hargadon and Douglas, 2001; Lounsbury et al., 2003). Accordingly, entrepreneurs show that their innovations are better than extant options, and frame adoption as something that incumbents can do (York et al., 2016).

Opportunities abound for scholars to theorize about how entrepreneurs legitimate innovations at the societal level; a process for which understanding remains underdeveloped. From motivating and strategizing perspectives, why might entrepreneurs seek to normalize, spread, and ease access to their innovations, sacrificing the greater returns associated with privatizing and protecting their creations? From organizing and mobilizing perspectives, how do entrepreneurs perform this type of institutional work, and what are the most effective means of doing so? Such work consists of what entrepreneurs do to bring their products and services to market (Sine et al., 2005), as well as what they say to frame their innovations as normal and acceptable (Hargadon and Douglas, 2001). Entrepreneurial efforts to shape the meaning of their innovations for others will determine the extent to which these innovations gain traction in solving problems at the societal level (York et al., 2018).

Moreover, efforts to legitimize societally impactful innovations dovetail with efforts to mobilize resources that support their deployment. Adopting a mobilizing lens, scholars have recognized that, to increase their impact, entrepreneurs depend on collective action by “private agents (individuals, entrepreneurs, enterprises, nonprofits), public agencies (governments), and civil society (nongovernmental organizations (NGOs)) whose engagement aims to alleviate the market, social, or environmental failures that cause grand challenges” (Markman et al., 2019: 377). The nature of the collective and its composition depends on the scope of change desired (community, ecosystem, state, nation, etc.) but in all cases, the mobilization of diverse actors is required to overcome the constraints on individual entrepreneurial action (Weber et al., 2008).

Other theoretical lenses could complement and extend the understanding of the interfaces between entrepreneurs, collectives, and societal impact (Lee et al., 2017; Lounsbury, 2001). Research tells us that entrepreneurs can ride the wave of existing movements, as evidenced by efforts to leverage regulatory incentives and normative pressures to develop renewable energy technologies (Sine and Lee, 2009). They can also incite and orchestrate supportive movements through their very efforts to commercialize and legitimize innovations (Lounsbury et al., 2003). Motivating, strategizing, and organizing lenses could each facilitate richer accounts of why, when, and how entrepreneurs participate in, versus catalyze, movements to generate impact. Explaining variation in the nature and outcome of efforts to mobilize support from diverse stakeholders—economic, social, governmental, and so on—could also yield interesting insights. For instance, what role does professional investment play in scaling commercial and non-economic impact, as the expectation to “do good” spills into funding sectors?

How do entrepreneurs measure and sustain impact?

This question offers both an opportunity and a challenge to entrepreneurship research. Recent work reveals that we have a measurement problem when it comes to understanding how impact is sustained (Wry and Haugh, 2018). Reviewing the social entrepreneurship literature, Rawhouser et al. (2019) report that “despite extant research and practice demonstrating interest in creating and measuring social impact, standards for measuring this construct are underdeveloped.” Scanning across the sustainable, environmental, and social entrepreneurship streams, Vedula et al. (2022: 413) concur, observing,

Our analyses produced a strikingly consistent observation: almost none of the papers we reviewed actually measured ultimate social and environmental outcomes . . . The actual positive change and ultimate impact of (social entrepreneurship) SE, such as improved community living conditions, employee health, diversity or equality, or poverty reduction, has been implied but not made explicit or quantified. . .. these studies have not assessed the ultimate environmental impact (e.g., net emission reductions at an industry, city, or country level) attributable to actions of these environmental entrepreneurs.

There is clear opportunity to apply strategizing insights about ecosystems and ecosystem emergence and economists’ expertise to impact measurement (Ballesteros et al., 2017). Indeed, some of the earliest entrepreneurial research focused on macro-level economic indicators, and recent methodological advances have spurred a renaissance in economic impact measurement (Banerjee et al., 2015). These approaches have great promise to expand beyond measuring economic to social and environmental outcomes. Furthermore, by examining population dynamics between entrepreneurs entering diverse industries, impact could be measured by examining subsequent strategic shifts among incumbents. Measuring impact could also expand to include shifts that are driven within industries and unintended negative outcomes that result from attempts to do good.

Such shifts occur when organizing takes place. Measurement here could build from the literature on how different forms and power dynamics can enable the perseverance and success of new ventures. Entrepreneurs may not only create new ventures but also new movements, industries, and collectives. Furthermore, the adoption of new legal forms (e.g. Benefit Corporations) could be used as an exogenous shock to understand how other factors impact overall adoption of products and services that create societal and environmental impact.

Studies that engage in the contextualizing of impact efforts could move beyond the clear relationship between formal institutions and entrepreneurial impact. For example, rather than just examining how social movement framing can help entrepreneurs (e.g. Sine and Lee, 2009), one could look at how entrepreneurial efforts themselves shape the evolution and efficacy of policies and movements (e.g. Pacheco et al., 2014). Broadening out, this research might consider how entrepreneurial activity that seeks to address social or environmental aims can indirectly have a positive or negative effect on legitimizing new societal beliefs, norms, and logics (Eberhart et al., 2022).

Such studies would dovetail nicely with understanding the implications and impacts of mobilizing support for entrepreneurial impact. Yet, many important questions evade easy measurement. For instance, how do entrepreneurs act when they attempt to participate in and leverage an ongoing movement to do good? When attempting to catalyze movements, how do entrepreneurs contribute to the formation and progression of collectives, and what makes them successful or unsuccessful in such endeavors? Refining our measures of outcomes can help to expand the causal chain of our studies to address such questions.

Akin to institutional theorists, social movement theorists have long recognized the framing of desired outcomes as critical in building support for them. Scholars in this space have recognized that mobilizing support requires the social construction of collective identities and shared visions associated with bringing about desired change, as well as establishing why the change is necessary and what it entails. Frames (Benford and Snow, 2000), claims (Waldron et al., 2019), and other linguistic tools for sensemaking have been identified as critical for mobilizing collective action. How does mobilization by entrepreneurs (or lack thereof) moderate the impact they are able to have? Does mobilization enable entrepreneurs to survive (and even thrive)? Does effective countermobilization inhibit the impacts that entrepreneurs can have, and in what cases might it actually help them? All of these questions could be addressed by building from theories from within sociology and social movements.

Finally, motivating future entrepreneurs to broaden their impact would seem a particularly important aspect of measurement. After all, most researchers are also teachers, and students yearn to understand how they can contribute to solving our current crises. Therefore, psychological experimentation to understand how, why, and when non-economic identities become more salient in venturing process could hold great promise. One question we could reasonably ask is, to what extent does our research guide entrepreneurship students in achieving their ambitions? Beyond discovering and pursuing opportunities, it seems critical to understand the positive and negative consequences for individuals who seek to create impact ventures (Conger et al., 2018; O’Neil et al., 2022). By beginning with these foundational, individual elements, we can position the field to understand the outcomes for all stakeholders in new ventures, just as Venkataraman (1997) originally envisioned.

Conclusion

In this essay, we argued that it is folly to stake the legitimacy and value of a research field on the uniqueness of its theory. Fields reflect the shared consensus of their members, and there is no management discipline where these understandings anchor on a single, native theory. Rather, we argued that a better path for entrepreneurship scholars is to focus on questions that are unique to our field and generate useful explanations without worrying too much about the origins of any given theory. Building on the concept of borderlands, we emphasized the role of synthesis and diversity in the theory-building process and offered three related pathways. We believe that the uniqueness and usefulness of entrepreneurship research has been established by extant research. However, by focusing on the impacts and outcomes of entrepreneurship for societal well-being, we have the opportunity to simultaneously set apart and enhance entrepreneurship as a field.

Footnotes

Author contributions

All authors contributed equally to this article.

Funding

The author(s) received no financial support for the research, authorship, and/or publication of this article.

ORCID iDs

Tyler Wry

Jeffrey G York

Author biographies

Tyler Wry is an Associate Professor of Entrepreneurship at the University of Pennsylvania Wharton School. Tyler’s research focuses on topics related to social enterprise and hybrid ventures, with a special focus on how founders, investors, and other stakeholders conceptualize the relationship between social and financial aims. His research has been published in journals such as the Academy of Management Journal, the Academy of Management Review, Organization Science, and the Journal of Business Venturing. His work has also been widely featured in the popular press. Address: The Wharton School, University of Pennsylvania, Philadelphia, PA 19104, USA. [email: twry@wharton.upenn.edu]

Jeffrey G York is a Professor of Strategy and Entrepreneurship at the Leeds School of Business at the University of Colorado Boulder. He currently serves as the Chair of the Division of Social Responsibility and Sustainability (SRS) and Research Director for the Deming Center for Entrepreneurship. He received his PhD from the Darden School of Business at the University of Virginia. Professor York’s teaching and research are focused on environmental entrepreneurship, the simultaneous creation of ecological and economic goods. He is interested in how and why entrepreneurs create new products, services, and industries that reduce environmental degradation. Professor York has published research in journals such as the Academy of Management Journal, Academy of Management Review, Journal of Business Venturing, Organization Science, and Strategic Management Journal. Address: Leeds School of Business, University of Colorado Boulder, Boulder, CO 80309-0401, USA. [email: jeffrey.york@colorado.edu]

Theodore L Waldron is the Kent R. Hance Regents Endowed Chair in Entrepreneurship at Texas Tech University. His research, which has appeared in top management and entrepreneurship journals, deals with entrepreneurial actors’ efforts to resolve tensions associated with sustainable value creation. Leaning on diverse theoretical lenses and methods, particularly qualitative techniques, this work has touched on the dynamics between activist organizations and firms, social entrepreneurs and mainstream industry members, new ventures and mature firms, and entrepreneurs and investors. Address: Rawls College of Business, Texas Tech University, Lubbock, TX 79409, USA. [email: theodore.waldron@ttu.edu]

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