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DEAN A. SHEPHERD HOLGER PATZELT TRAILBLAZING IN ENTREPRENEURSHIP Creating New Paths for Understanding the Field Trailblazing in Entrepreneurship Dean A. Shepherd • Holger Patzelt Trailblazing in Entrepreneurship Creating New Paths for Understanding the Field Dean A. Shepherd Holger Patzelt Indiana University School of Management Bloomington, Indiana, USA Technical University of Munich School of Management München, Germany ISBN 978-3-319-48700-7 ISBN 978-3-319-48701-4 (eBook) DOI 10.1007/978-3-319-48701-4 Library of Congress Control Number: 2016956561 © The Editor(s) (if applicable) and The Author(s) 2017 Open Access This book is distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/), which permits use, duplication, adaptation, distribution and reproduction in any medium or format, as long as you give appropriate credit to the original author(s) and the source, provide a link to the Creative Commons license and indicate if changes were made. The images or other third party material in this chapter are included in the work’s Creative Commons license, unless indicated otherwise in the credit line; if such material is not included in the work’s Creative Commons license and the respective action is not permitted by statutory regulation, users will need to obtain permission from the license holder to duplicate, adapt or reproduce the material. The use of general descriptive names, registered names, trademarks, service marks, etc. in this publication does not imply, even in the absence of a specific statement, that such names are exempt from the relevant protective laws and regulations and therefore free for general use. The publisher, the authors and the editors are safe to assume that the advice and information in this book are believed to be true and accurate at the date of publication. Neither the pub- lisher nor the authors or the editors give a warranty, express or implied, with respect to the material contained herein or for any errors or omissions that may have been made. Cover illustration: © Digital Vision iii / Alamy Stock Photo; all rights reserved, used with permission. Printed on acid-free paper This Palgrave Macmillan imprint is published by Springer Nature The registered company is Springer International Publishing AG The registered company address is: Gewerbestrasse 11, 6330 Cham, Switzerland CONTENTS 1 The Importance of Trailblazing Scholarship for Understanding Entrepreneurship 1 2 Researching the Generation, Refinement, and Exploitation of Potential Opportunities 17 3 Researching Entrepreneurial Failures 63 4 Researching at the Intersection of Innovation, Operations Management, and Entrepreneurship 103 5 Researching Entrepreneurships’ Role in Sustainable Development 149 6 Researching at the Intersection of Family Business and Entrepreneurship 181 7 Researching the Inter-Relationship of Health and Entrepreneurship 209 v vi Contents 8 Researching Entrepreneurial Decision Making 257 9 Conclusion 287 Index 291 LIST OF FIGURES Fig. 1.1 A sketch of the topics of the book 10 Fig. 2.1 A sketch of a more interaction-based perspective of entrepreneurial opportunities 27 Fig. 2.2 A sketch of research that is more activity based as a micro-foundation of entrepreneurial action 33 Fig. 2.3 A sketch of a more cognitively hot perspective of the entrepreneurial process 41 Fig. 2.4 A sketch of entrepreneurial research that is more compassionate and more prosocial 49 Fig. 3.1 A sketch of a model of the implications of failure as part of the entrepreneurial process 89 Fig. 4.1 A sketch of absorptive capacity in the entrepreneurial process 112 Fig. 4.2 A sketch of a different stage-gate process for evaluating entrepreneurial projects 121 Fig. 4.3 A sketch of the role of operations management in the formation of opportunity beliefs 131 Fig. 5.1 A sketch of entrepreneurial action linking sustainability and development 162 Fig. 5.2 A sketch of entrepreneurial action linking scientific and user communities for sustainable development 169 Fig. 6.1 A sketch of an opportunity-based perspective of family business interactions 189 Fig. 6.2 A sketch of an emotion-based entrepreneurial process in a family business 195 Fig. 6.3 A sketch of a prosocially based entrepreneurial process in a family business 200 vii viii List of FiguRes Fig. 7.1 A sketch of the role of health in the pursuit of an entrepreneurial career 231 Fig. 7.2 A sketch of the role of entrepreneurial action in enhancing others’ health 239 Fig. 8.1 A sketch of a model of the nested nature of data captured by conjoint analysis (and other experimental techniques); cross-level effects in dashed arrows 276 CHAPTER 1 The Importance of Trailblazing Scholarship for Understanding Entrepreneurship “Do not go where the path may lead; go instead where there is no path and leave a trail.” —Ralph Waldo Emerson Recently, the co-authors of this book met in Blairgowrie, Australia. Dean Shepherd showed Holger Patzelt the Back Beach where he had spent much of his youth. Dean recalled his childhood taking the trek from his house along the path through the coastal reserve to the rock pool and surf: Although the path made the trip relatively quick, easy, and safe, it was a some- what boring walk. Sometimes my brother and I took a narrower path to see a less populated section of the beach, and other times, we created our own path—a route that no one else had taken. We called it “bushwhacking” because we had to beat our way through the dense tea-tree. We did this to explore. This new path was always slower than the normal route as well as less comfort- able (with branches scratching and long grasses poking) and less safe (with the chance of coming across poisonous snakes and/or spiders), but we did it anyway. We held out hope this new path would lead to a new sand dune we could tumble down, a new vista we could appreciate, a cave to hide in, or a rock pool within which we could dive and swim. But even when we did not find one of these desirable outcomes and spent hours walking only to find that we had returned to our original starting point, we had enjoyed every minute of it. © The Author(s) 2017 1 D.A. Shepherd, H. Patzelt, Trailblazing in Entrepreneurship, DOI 10.1007/978-3-319-48701-4_1 2 D.A. SHEPHERD AND H. PATZELT This description of bushwhacking is the Australian version of trailblaz- ing, and metaphorically, entrepreneurs can also be trailblazers—make a path through new or unsettled terrain upon which others may follow. That is, rather than follow the established path created by others, entrepreneurs often challenge the status quo by attempting to chart a new direction through the creation of new products, services, and/ or processes. However, this book is not about trailblazing in coastal reserves or in product markets but about trailblazing in the field of entrepreneurship. We believe that scholars can be trailblazers, and in doing so, they can create new knowledge that others can build on to create additional knowledge and inform practice. Although this trail- blazing may not have to deal with the poisonous snakes and spiders of Australia, it certainly has its fair share of obstacles, requires consider- able effort, and may also lead to dead ends. Along with the challenges of creating a new trail are the intrinsic rewards from the process and the extrinsic rewards from the outcomes of making substantial contri- butions to knowledge. For scholars traveling along a well-worn path or a semi-worn path, the research outcomes are replication and incre- mental research, whereas trailblazing creates new knowledge through more radical ideas. Important in trailblazing is knowing where to start and having some knowledge about the terrain to be covered, the tools to help clear the path, and the potential “gems” that might be encountered along the way. The purpose of this book is to provide some insights into where trailblazing may be best directed, how, and with what potential outcomes. Specifically, this book offers a series of frameworks from which or within which we believe important research will emerge—research that will have a substantial impact on our under- standing of an entrepreneurial phenomenon and, thus, on the way we progress with subsequent entrepreneurship research. We emphasize trailblazing (as opposed to taking existing paths) because we strongly believe that the future of the entrepreneurship field is promis- ing but only if our research itself continues to be entrepreneurial. That being said, continuing to be entrepreneurial in our research may be more difficult than it initially appears. The success we have had thus far may lead us into a competency trap (Levitt & March, 1988) that rewards us in the short term but is detrimental to the field in the long term. That is, entrepre- neurship researchers sometimes decide to “play it safe,” using “accepted” theories and methods to answer progressively narrower research questions THE IMPORTANCE OF TRAILBLAZING SCHOLARSHIP FOR UNDERSTANDING... 3 that are of interest to smaller and smaller audiences (i.e., taking the known path). By no means are we arguing that this type of incremental research does not make important contributions to the field. Rather, we are sug- gesting that if incremental research starts to dominate and overtake more trailblazing research, the field could begin to stagnate and lose the essence that makes it special—namely, the very real and pervasive willingness to accept substantial novelty in the way we question, theorize, and test ideas to develop new and stimulating insights.1 As we consider the entrepreneurship field’s future, our goal with this book is not to decry or replace Venkataraman’s (Shane & Venkataraman, 2000; Venkataraman, 1997) or others’ (e.g., Busenitz et al., 2003; Carlsson et al., 2013; Davidsson, 2003; Gartner, 1990; Wiklund, Davidsson, Audretsch, & Karlsson, 2011) description of entrepreneurship’s charac- teristic domain with our own; rather, our goal is to illuminate areas of unsettled terrain worthy of trailblazing work as a basis for the vitality of the field’s future.

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