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This article is an introduction to the focused issue on entrepreneurship. It provides motivation for greater scholarly investigation of the phenomenon of entrepreneurship, explains the evolution of the focused issue, offers an overview of the seven papers in the issue, and offers the editor's thoughts on the relationship of the papers in the focused issue to research on entrepreneurship in general.
Introduction
Entrepreneurship is an important part of the world economic system. In most capitalist economies, large numbers of people engage in entrepreneurial activity, whether by founding new firms; creating new businesses on behalf of large, public corporations; purchasing franchises; or licensing newly invented pieces of technology. In fact, recent data suggests that in the United States, approximately 10% of the population aged 18-64, or 18 million people, were engaged in starting or managing a new firm in 2004; and estimates of the total amount of formal and informal financing of new businesses in the United States in 2003 exceeded $125 billion (Reynolds 2005). Moreover, the United States falls only in the top third of countries on measures of the propensity of the population to engage in entrepreneurial activity, with some countries (e.g., Peru) showing close to 40% of the population aged 18-64 engaged in starting or managing a new firm in 2004 (Acs et al. 2005).
Despite the high level of entrepreneurial activity in the world economy, and a corresponding focus of business schools on teaching in this area, scholarly research in entrepreneurship remains quite limited. Although the number of researchers who have investigated this phenomenon has increased in recent years, the quality of their theoretical and empirical contributions has been relatively poor, with few studies meeting the standards of leading academic journals, such as Management Science. As a result, scholars have a limited understanding of this important topic.
Recently, scholars from a variety of different management fields and social science disciplines have begun to study entrepreneurship. Their efforts have produced research that meets the scholarly standards of leading academic journals and have provided a valuable boost to our collective body of knowledge in this field. However, these scholars have examined entrepreneurship through the theoretical lens of their fields, using the empirical tools and techniques common in their disciplines. The disconnected, multidisciplinary nature...