Paul D. Reynolds: Entrepreneurship Research Innovator, Coordinator, and Disseminator

Abstract

Paul Davidson Reynolds is the 2004 winner of the International Award for Entrepreneurship and Small Business Research. In this article Professor Reynolds’ contributions are summarized in terms of four sets of triplets. The first is as innovator, coordinator and disseminator of novel and important empirical research studies. The second triplet concerns the main areas of his contributions: regional variations in entrepreneurial activity, nascent entrepreneurship and firms in gestation and international comparisons of the prevalence of entrepreneurial activity. The third set of triplets concerns what aspects of the research process he has contributed to: development of new empirical methods to research entrepreneurship; coining of new concepts that now permeate this field of research, and provision of important empirical results. The final set of triplets concerns the audiences to which Reynolds’ research appeal: researchers, policy-makers and business practitioners. It is concluded that although his contributions are many and of different kinds, the single most important one is that his research has made it increasingly unreasonable to theorize and design research as if the economy essentially consisted of a relatively stable core of large, established firms and entry and exit of new firms were relatively infrequent, marginal and insignificant.