Insight

Handbook of research on entrepreneurship- what we know and what we need to know is a book edited by Alain Fayolle and it consists a collaboration of 24 highly rated researchers, who provide intel on the future of study in entrepreneurship. The book shows that there is a need to redesign the research in the field, and to offer new ways to find intel and theorems and so gain success to your own possible entrepreneur lifestyle. I gained a lot of knowledge from this book and especially I learned a lot of new point of views when I look at entrepreneurship now. Through different writers and different perspectives in this book it offers a massive amount of knowledge about what entrepreneurship actually is.

Redesigning entrepreneurship research

Organizing entrepreneurship research is basically defining entrepreneurship to organizing emergence, which means situations when a project develops from one state to other and within that development there is a process in which the project becomes more organized. This organizing emergence shows in our lives at team academy every day. This way of research which happens through doing a project and is a main thing in our unit.

Bengt Johannisson delivers an excellent point of view in entrepreneurship in his chapter “Entrepreneurship: Theory, Art and Practice.” He sees entrepreneurship as as a collective phenomenon, which combines all three disciplines. The life of an entrepreneur incorporates certain world views which feed theories, as well as everyday interactions reflecting practice, and dramatized events what we see as art. This way to research is very effective to me, as you don’t defy the intel just to theories, but to interactions and art as well. It can be really civilizing to see the art with the theorems and combining the art and theorems in interaction with other people can be effective and inspiring. This can be used in making a good first impression, which is one of the most important things in entrepreneurship.

Helle Neergaard shows in her chapter “The landscape of qualitative methods in entrepreneurship” that qualitative research had grown exponentially in the management field. Qualitative research means exploratory research which focuses on reasons, opinions and motivations what lay underneath the skin. It is crucial to observe other people´s actions and do research about them all the time. With qualitative research you can see something you wouldn´t see on quantitative research, which focuses on numbers and numerical data. Qualitative research is especially important when meeting with clients and observing them to know what their true needs or motivations are.

Crossing the Fields

As the fields in entrepreneurship have become more united on recent times, the are still visible. To achieve maximum research efficiency, we need to cross the lines between those fields and see what things look like on other side. Entrepreneurship has several fields, like social media consulting, PR and marketing, software and cloud services, online business etc. So how can we find research on all of these? By knowing theory, practicing and art. Theory meaning that we read and study some theories these different fields consist, practice by using these theorems when meeting entrepreneurs who work on the other field and art by using qualitative research and seeing the art in their work through their own eyes, and what they value in their own work. By applying these ways to research we have good amount of knowledge and data to go on and start possible cooperation with those entrepreneurs.

But as James Hayton and Gabriella Cacciotti state in their chapter “Culture and Entrepreneurship”, sometimes the field is far wider when it comes to different cultures. Entrepreneurship has a massive cultural difference, for example in Finland street shops are not that big thing, and in Mexico they employ a lot bigger part of the population. For research intention in this subject we have “Collective cultural values” which divides the intel to entrepreneurial cognitions, entrepreneurial intentions and entrepreneurial traits & motives. By finding out these answers about what the persons think about their corporations, what their intentions are and what his/hers motives or traits are, we have a good research platform to start negotiations for possible partnership, regardless of their culture.

Embedding knowledge in concepts and domains

Entrepreneurial orientation is a good example of embedding knowledge in a concept. EO is important to understand, as it is a main method of strategic orientation in many organizations. EO is the combination of innovativeness, proactiveness and risk-taking. Innovativeness means creativity, proactiveness means entering new markets and pursuing new ways to achieve competitive advantage, and risk-taking speaks for itself. EO and how well the organization is capable to stick in it is a strong predictor of organization´s performance, which is why it is being researched so much. We can practically use EO to predict strategic moves made by an organization, to some point at least. Researchers say that EO as a theorem has gaps in it, but mostly it is effective.

Other good example is given in Kelly Shaver´s chapter “Psychology in entrepreneurial behaviour.” It gathers the psychological information and economical information and gathers it in the Psychological approaching concept. It focuses on psychological reasons behind risky economic moves or safe economic moves or just economic moves as whole. We are capable to use qualitative research combined to person´s backstory knowledge to somehow predict how a person acts when he/she has to make economic decision, and why he/she made that decision. In psychological approach we focus on questions “What do people think”, What do they do”, and “Why do they do it?” Researching answers to those questions we are capable to talk to a person with a right perspective. Again that is really effective way in meetings and negotiations.

Exploring new research topics

We still have many topics in entrepreneurship, which aren´t being researched as much as others. We have loads of knowledge to achieve on those fields, which may help us on our own field as well. On Gerard McElwee´s and Robert Smith´s chapter they focus on rural enterprises, as those are pretty unfamiliar to many. Researching rural enterprises offers a lot of information for example on geographic variations and agriculture. Rural literature gives us intel on economy in agriculture and variables what are needed to know to work on that field of entrepreneurship. By studying these we can widen up the projects also to rural enterprises, we can achieve good results on the field which is quite dark to many.

Sarfraz Mian focuses on business incubation and incubator mechanisms. Business incubation means unique and flexible mix of organized company development processes that enable new and small startup businesses to develop. Incubation is divided to three phases, pre-incubation (idea producing and development), incubation (acceleration in formation) and post-incubation (consolidation and growth). Researching these more can offer us an effective way to start new projects and through them achieve economic growth in our company. There is written literature about business incubation theory, and I could find those fascinating to read.