Keywords

This chapter focuses on future entrepreneurial theorizing that will contribute to the knowledge of entrepreneurial phenomena based on our prior work (Shepherd et al., 2021). In particular, we put forth me-search as an approach scholars can take to produce streams of entrepreneurial theorizing that they are both able and driven to pursue and that have the highest chances of offering something new and valuable to the field. This approach directs scholarly attention toward the future based on one’s personal experiences (see Wiklund, 2016). More specifically, me-search is useful for generating research opportunities that one has idiosyncratic knowledge about and is motivated to persist with until publication. While we have not always taken this approach, me-search has led to research outcomes for which we are most proud.

For instance, Dean Shepherd harnessed his father’s experience of business failure to generate a research stream on the role of grief in learning from failure. Similarly, he used his Auntie Shirley’s experience of losing her house to a bushfire to generate a research stream on compassion organizing and resilience. He also used his coauthors’ experiences to investigate their me-search on veterans disabled in combat, Palestinian refugees in Lebanon, people living in the slums of India, expedition cruise ships in Norway, the refugee crisis and terrorist attacks in Germany, inclusive growth in rural India, and so on.

As another example, Johan Wiklund’s experience with mental health issues motivated him to explore entrepreneurship’s connection to psychiatric diagnoses, mental well-being, and diversity. Johan began this work nearly a decade ago and has maintained it as his main research focus since. This me-search has resulted not only in numerous fruitful working relationships in which scholars, entrepreneurs, and students have shared their experiences and built new knowledge but in a new research stream at the intersection of entrepreneurship and clinical psychology.

For Dimo Dimov, the shifts, serendipity, and unpredictability of his life experiences have continually highlighted entrepreneurship as a route to a different future. Reflecting on his past selves with the clarity of hindsight—a schoolboy studying diligently to become a diplomat, a young professional establishing a career in the hospitality industry, a hotel finance director attending a Ph.D. program induction with scant knowledge of what academia entailed—Dimov has centered his research on the forward-looking, hopeful stances from which entrepreneurs construct futures that did not formerly exist.

Finally, Holger Patzelt has been interested in nature and the sciences since childhood, which drove him to study chemistry and earn a Ph.D. in molecular biology before beginning his academic career in entrepreneurship. When he began his research on entrepreneurial ventures, he focused on alliance building in the biotechnology industry, a topic that benefited from his understanding of these ventures’ strategies and the ways the features of their underlying technologies affected those strategies. Holger’s me-search has also involved exploring other topics with coauthors, such as the refugee crisis in his hometown of Munich.

As our experiences reveal, including me-search (and coauthors’ me-search) in one’s research portfolio can produce novel and useful contributions to the field of entrepreneurship. However, we also acknowledge some difficulties with conducting me-search. First, one principle of me-search is that scholars can mobilize their idiosyncratic knowledge to offer unique insights into a phenomenon and then conduct and publish research to explain that phenomenon. However, scholars must find a balance between the personal nature and universality of the experience at hand. For example, conducting me-search related to the COVID-19 pandemic is challenging because most people throughout the world, including most scholars, have some experience with the pandemic. As a result, scholars who write about COVID-19 may have difficulty convincing reviewers and editors that their perspective is relevant. Second, in the case of significant ubiquitous events, scholars should be wary of jumping on the bandwagon of a popular subject that may quickly abate. Returning to our example, as of June 2021, researchers have inundated journals with COVID-19 papers. Finally, the practical and theoretical importance of research may be short term. For instance, even if a COVID-19 paper is accepted for publication, its longevity may be short as (a new) normality returns after the pandemic. For example, in one paper (Shepherd & Williams, 2022), we highlighted Peloton as a resilient organization yet that same organization is now struggling.

Although challenging, none of these difficulties are new. Indeed, scholars confront these challenges when contemplating a new research stream, especially one related to a popular topic. We do not highlight these issues to deter research; rather, we hope to encourage scholars to me-search important life events by providing recommendations to overcome (or minimize) these research difficulties. Our recommendations in this chapter involve problematizing, abstracting, (re)combining, inducting, abducting, and contextualizing. In the remainder of this chapter, we explain these recommendations in more detail and propose a research agenda that considers where the community of entrepreneurship scholars has been as well as productive paths forward.

Me-Search and Problematizing the Entrepreneurship Literature for Entrepreneurial Theorizing

Problematization is a “methodology for identifying and challenging assumptions that underlie existing theories and, based on that, generating research questions that lead to the development of more interesting and influential theories within management studies” (Alvesson & Sandberg, 2011: 248). Scholars can harness me-search as a useful tool to problematize the entrepreneurship literature and associated theories to formulate research questions that are interlaced with their personal motivation, the foundation for a contribution, and their focal audience. While problematizing the literature using me-search can enable scholars to question weakly held assumptions, it can also lead to research questions that challenge people’s strongly held assumptions. Challenging strongly held assumptions in this way is a more difficult path to publication because readers, who include editors and reviewers, are often reluctant to let go of such assumptions. Instead, scholars need to seek the Goldilocks position—namely, seek interesting topics falling somewhere between the obvious and the absurd (Davis, 1971). Our goal is not to dissuade scholars from challenging firmly held assumptions; we merely wish to provide a realistic understanding of the challenges associated with doing so.

For example, using his experience with the failure of his father’s business, Dean Shepherd problematized the literature on learning from failure to challenge the weakly held assumption that learning from failure occurs immediately and automatically. He found that failure generates grief and that in response, entrepreneurs must undergo a process of recovery before learning from the experience. Similarly, using his bushfire experience (that took Auntie Shirley’s house), Dean and Trent Williams problematized the venture emergence literature and challenged the assumption that it takes time (months or years) for ventures to emerge. Their me-search led them to theorize about the rapid formation of new ventures (within hours or days) motivated by individuals’ compassion. Johan Wiklund used me-search and his experience to problematize the entrepreneurship literature on human capital and capabilities and much of the psychology literature and challenge the assumption that ADHD is a disability. Through his work, he demonstrated that ADHD can be a resource that creates advantages in certain entrepreneurial contexts. Dimo Dimov’s me-search led him to problematize the relationship between scholar and entrepreneur—moving from subject-object to subject-subject. His work revealed that just as one’s past self is not a simple object of explanation for one’s future self, an entrepreneur is not an anonymous object that can be defined or validated through observation. Thus, instead of looking at entrepreneurs, scholars can look with entrepreneurs to offer alternative perspectives on entrepreneurship scholarship and entrepreneurial phenomena. Finally, Holger Patzelt problematized the literature exploring entrepreneurial resource acquisitions based on his experience observing prosocial ventures that provided aid to refugees in his hometown. After a series of terrorist attacks that were purportedly committed by refugees, these ventures confronted an abrupt decrease in the legitimacy of their aid activities, a finding that challenged the assumption in the literature that such ventures operate under relatively stable resource conditions. Each of these examples shows how scholars can use me-search to problematize a literature or theory to formulate and explore salient research questions. Based on the above, we offer the following:

Recommendation 1

Use me-search to problematize entrepreneurship theories in the literature to formulate research questions that challenge scholars’ weakly (and potentially firmly) held assumptions.

Abstracting from Me-Search for Entrepreneurial Theorizing

Me-search is based on oneself because scholars are typically interested in their own experiences, which also likely applies to readers: “I am interested in reading about you if I can learn something about myself.” At the same time, scholars are interested in generalizing explanations and models beyond single individuals’ experiences, so me-search confronts a challenge similar to inductive research based on a single case. With both approaches, a researcher must abstract from raw data to generate aggregate theoretical constructs and then link those aggregate constructs to form a more generalizable or easily transferable model. Establishing such generalizability can be especially difficult with me-search because the experiences this approach draws on are deeply personal, and it is often challenging to elicit the general from the specific and personal. However, scholars can take me-search and abstract it to wider constructs and relationships by systematically comparing how their unique personal experiences relate to more general ideas and theories. In turn, readers will be able to more readily contextualize scholars’ abstract theorizing and apply it to their personal or research experiences. For instance, Shepherd (2003: 320) describes his personal experience of his father’s reaction to the failure of his family business:

When our family business died, my father exhibited a number of worrying emotions. There were numbness and disbelief that this business he had created twenty odd years ago was no longer “alive.” There was some anger toward the economy, competitors, and debtors. A stronger emotion than anger was that of guilt and self-blame: he felt guilty that he had caused the failure of the business, that it could no longer be passed on to my brother, and that, as a result, he had failed not only as a businessperson but also as a father. These feelings caused him distress and anxiety. He felt the situation was hopeless and became withdrawn and, at times, depressed.

In the rest of the article, however, he theorizes more abstractly about grief, emotion regulation, learning, and motivation in the context of failure.

Similarly, Wiklund et al. (2016) conducted interviews with entrepreneurs diagnosed with ADHD and then used the data to develop a conceptual model that relates ADHD symptoms to entrepreneurial decision-making, action, and outcomes. Although the model was expressly constructed from empirical observations and interviews, the findings substantiate the authors’ personal experiences with decision-making, action, and outcomes in similar situations. As all of these examples highlight, a tangible set of experiences can be collected, analyzed, and then abstracted to offer a more generalizable or transferable theory. Accordingly, we offer the following:

Recommendation 2

Abstract from me-search to develop theoretical constructs and relationships that are more generalizable or transferable.

Combining Me-Search with Knowledge Elements at Hand for Entrepreneurial Theorizing

Scholars generally begin their me-search with a personal experience or with a phenomenon. They must then determine how to approach this phenomenon. Namely, me-searchers can typically apply numerous theoretical lenses to provide a perspective of and explain a phenomenon, but how can they determine the best theoretical lens(es) to adopt? When me-searching a phenomenon, the first step is to reflect on the theories and literatures (constructs and relationships) with which one is most familiar, as the focal me-searcher likely resonates with this material on a personal level. As a result, there is likely an inherent fit between the phenomenon and the theory, with the me-searcher serving as a bridge between the two. The same is likely true for the methods, existing data, and set of coauthors the me-searcher is most familiar with. Me-search thus entails the focal scholar considering the resources and capabilities he or she has at hand and then combining and recombining them with personal experience(s) to create a research opportunity and a plausible theoretical story of the phenomenon under exploration. This process is similar to how entrepreneurs engage in bricolage (Baker & Nelson, 2005) to “assemble various knowledge elements into new organizational theories” (Boxenbaum & Rouleau, 2011: 273). Accordingly, we propose that me-search highlights some of the knowledge elements researchers have at hand and can facilitate experimentation (perhaps as thought experiments) with different (re-)combinations of these knowledge elements to build a conceivable theoretical model.

Indeed, me-search can anchor disciplined imagination (Weick, 1989) to enable researchers to (re-) combine different knowledge elements to build a theoretical model. In other words, scholars can explore whether a particular combination of knowledge elements (e.g., from a thought experiment) seems plausible given their personal experiences with a phenomenon. Through this highly creative and relatively costless process, researchers are likely to identify a research opportunity that they are already somewhat capable of undertaking and motivated to pursue. For instance, both Shepherd and Williams (2014), Williams and Shepherd (2016) and Mittermaier et al. (2021, 2022) used their me-search to help people in need by combining it with their existing knowledge elements on startups, entrepreneurial action, and cognition to generate research opportunities on compassionate venturing, resilience, and resource acquisition. This approach to identifying a research opportunity also shed light on other knowledge elements these authors needed to obtain to develop and communicate conceivable theoretical models—a process that continues today.

Similarly, ADHD is a collection of traits that are visible (and frequently diagnosed) in childhood. These traits and the lived experiences associated with them tend to influence individuals with the disorder throughout their entire lives. Their insight into how early ADHD potentially impacts individuals’ outcomes decades later triggered Wiklund’s and coauthors’ curiosity about how other features of childhood may shape adult life in the entrepreneurial context. Combining this curiosity with their knowledge elements drove them to explore the impact of childhood adversity on entrepreneurial outcomes.

Finally, Dimov reflected on the open-ended nature of the entrepreneurial journey with the acting entrepreneur as the focal point to explore new perspectives and expressive language, thereby going beyond the familiarity of his Ph.D. training. By investigating complexity science, design science, and the philosophy of mind and language, he uncovered new ways of seeing and comprehending the entrepreneurial experience. While entrepreneurial opportunities have been his primary research theme over time, he has continuously refreshed the topic with each new perspective.

As these examples illustrate, me-search provides knowledge elements that me-searchers can then combine with other at-hand knowledge elements to create research opportunities that they find interesting and have the ability to exploit. Accordingly, we offer the following recommendation

Recommendation 3

Use me-search to uncover knowledge elements that can be combined and recombined with other at-hand knowledge elements to develop a plausible theoretical model.

Inducting from Me-Search for Entrepreneurial Theorizing

When a researcher has difficulty combining their me-search knowledge elements with those from prior literature (e.g., the research is so unique or novel that it is relatively distant from prior literature) or the research question resulting from me-search challenges people’s firmly held assumptions, the scholar may need to draw upon inductive research methods to pursue the me-search opportunity. Taking an inductive approach will require some scholars to learn a new research method, which in turn opens new paths for “seeing” and “constructing” research opportunities. However, while it adds a new tool to the focal scholar’s toolbox and offers another research lens to view the world, such learning is not risk free.

Like all researchers, inductive researchers have certain expectations for constructing and communicating inductive papers (with different “camps” within this broad method). As a result, it will take time for a scholar new to the inductive approach to learn a new method and the nuances of publishing these studies. We offer simple advice to help facilitate this process: find exemplars of inductive studies, study them, and follow their idiosyncrasies in constructing and communicating inductive theory. For instance, Mike Haynie (a former captain in the Air Force) was an instructor at the Airforce Academy, an experience that made him realize he had trained people to go to war but not to come home. To rectify this situation, he developed an entrepreneurial boot camp for military veterans who were injured in combat in Afghanistan and Iraq (me-teaching and me-service). Haynie and Shepherd (2011) decided to me-search it. They soon realized an inductive approach was the only way they could explore the research questions that interested them, but they were inexperienced with inductive methods. Thus, to overcome their lack of knowledge, they read different texts on inductive methods and compared and contrasted various inductive approaches (Eisenhardt studies, Gioia studies, and Langley studies). Although this learning took extensive effort, the process and outcomes were highly rewarding, and the experience opened Shepherd’s eyes to the promising nature of this method for pursuing other me-search opportunities. Therefore, we offer the following based on the above reasoning:

Recommendation 4

Employ inductive research methods and alternate data sources to construct a plausible theory from me-search that is highly novel.

Abducting from Me-Search for Entrepreneurial Theorizing

Me-search can result in a hunch or the feeling that something else is going on than what appears on the surface, that conditions have changed, or that an anomaly has arisen that existing theories cannot explain. In turn, a hunch can initiate a process of inquiry called abduction—namely, “the creative act of constructing explanations to account for surprising observations in the course of experience (hypothesis generation)” (Hansen, 2008: 457). As a process of inquiry, abduction begins with a guess and then uses doubt to stimulate further inquiry (Locke et al., 2008; Shepherd & Sutcliffe, 2011). However, because guesses can lead to many dead ends before a complete path is found, finding a plausible theoretical explanation for the phenomenon at hand can be a slow process. Moreover, as of yet, most journals do not fully accept abductive research (except the Academy of Management Discoveries). Shepherd and Suddaby (2017: 59) attempt to make abduction more palatable by offering pragmatic empirical theorizing as “an approach that uses quantitative empirical findings to stimulate theorizing.” This form of empirical theorizing enables me-searchers to “scratch an itch” by investigating a hunch empirically and then theorizing to offer a reasonable explanation of the resulting empirical findings. As discussed in Chapter 1, this approach to communicating exploratory research is transparent about how the research was conducted. If it becomes accepted and mainstream, this approach to theorizing should eradicate the unethical practice of hypothesizing after results are known (i.e., HARKing).

For instance, due to his work with entrepreneurship policy in various capacities, Johan Wiklund is interested in entrepreneurial ecosystems as well as whether and how large-scale government spending on supporting entrepreneurship leads to intended benefits. Because these ecosystems are complex and the government spending question is broad, generating narrow hypotheses to address this topic is particularly challenging. Thus, rather than proposing hypotheses and conducting traditional regression analyses, he and his colleagues performed exploratory bivariate analyses to explore how a specific national entrepreneurship support program panned out. They then used the resulting findings as a basis for attempting to build a plausible theory.

Abduction represents a major thinking logic for design science and can use theory to look into the future (Romme & Dimov, 2021). Accordingly, the very act of studying entrepreneurship can be seen as a design process to produce knowledge that helps entrepreneurs think forward and consider their experiences. By framing entrepreneurship as an open-ended, iterative journey in which opportunities are seen as design artifacts that entrepreneurs articulate and convey using language, scholars can bring theory and practice into better alignment. Accordingly, we offer the following:

Recommendation 5

Use pragmatic empirical theorizing to investigate a hunch, an anomaly, or anything that inspires a guess of personal interest.

Me-Search to Contextualize Entrepreneurship Research for Entrepreneurial Theorizing

By using me-search, scholars can also gain insights into the role of context to extend the boundaries of established theories or add context to prior models. Context refers to “situational or environmental stimuli that impinge upon focal actors and are often located at a different level of analysis from those actors” (Johns, 2018: 22). According to Welter (2011), a significant portion of entrepreneurship research lacks consideration of context, so future work needs to be more contextualized. Entrepreneurship scholars can thus use me-search to gain a deeper understanding of context and can then use that contextualization to create new research opportunities. For example, a me-searcher could apply an existing theory originally developed in another context to the entrepreneurship context, which is often more extreme. Johan Wiklund, for instance, studied ADHD and other cognitive conditions frequently considered liabilities in the conventional work context and then theorized how they can become beneficial in certain entrepreneurial contexts. Not only did his me-search into these cognitive conditions open up an important research stream on neurodiversity, but it also shifted our assumptions from the normal work context to specific entrepreneurial contexts, which differ in important ways.

Me-search can also reveal the contexts in which theories do not apply. For example, if a current theory seems to explain one’s thoughts, feelings, or actions, it can be valuable to ask, “When doesn’t this theory apply to me?” Exploring when a theory does not apply via me-search can add a boundary condition to or extend a theory by adding a moderator or mediator to the associated model. Therefore, research can facilitate theorizing by infusing context into models, but it is necessary to keep in mind our earlier point about the importance of abstracting me-search. Balancing contextualizing through me-search and abstracting from the me-search is thus essential. Based on this reasoning, we offer the following:

Recommendation 6

Use me-search to include context as a moderator or mediator to create boundary conditions or extend existing theories.

Now that we have introduced me-search as a useful way to generate interesting and useful future research, we turn to the future research opportunities offered by prominent scholars in the field (and us).

A Research Agenda of Me-Search for Entrepreneurial Theorizing

In line with the model of me-search we presented above, in the following, we discuss an assortment of recent papers to propose a me-search-based research agenda for theorizing on entrepreneurial phenomena.

Shepherd and Gruber (2021) came to the idea for their paper from recognizing the popularity of the Lean Startup framework among practitioners and from Shepherd’s desire to teach the framework in class. Dean Shepherd generally strives to teach material that is grounded in academic literature, but he found inadequate scholarly attention on this important topic. Marc Gruber has a similar interest in this content and has written a practitioner text on opportunity navigation, so they realized there was an opportunity to expand the framework to the academic context. Together, they set out to build on the practitioner literature on the Lean Startup framework and put some scholarly heft behind some of the practitioner assertions. Focusing on the Lean Startup’s building blocks—navigating market opportunities, designing business models, validating learning, using minimum viable products, and pivoting versus persevering—Dean and Marc offered a research agenda for scholars with the belief (and hope) that this future research will help to close the academic-practice gap they initially recognized.

The foundation for George et al. (2021) was built on Gerry George’s interest in tackling grand challenges by focusing on the elements of two major trends. Specifically, these authors combined the trend of concern over the climate crisis and the trend of using digital technologies to investigate how digital technologies can help solve the climate crisis. They explained that although most management and entrepreneurship scholars have not given much attention to the climate crisis, practicing entrepreneurs have. As such, this study begins to close the gap between academia and practice on an important topic. In line with the me-search ideas outlined earlier, George and colleagues combined their personal interest in solving grand challenges and their knowledge of digital technologies and innovation with the climate crisis to abstract from their data. They ultimately revealed six managerial problems hampering sustainability and discussed how digital technologies can serve as the pathways and tools to address these problems.

Although the authors of the two previous studies looked to practice to inform scholarship with the ultimate goal of informing practice and reducing the academic-practice divide, Dimov et al. (2021) took a different approach. They viewed the academic-practice divide as a linguistic barrier stemming from different practical interests. In other words, these authors believed the disconnect between entrepreneurs and entrepreneurship scholars is due to a lack of talking. Specifically, entrepreneurs are concerned with what they should do and talk about their specific situations using the first person. Entrepreneurship scholars, on the other hand, observe entrepreneurs to explain what they do and talk about them to other scholars using the third person. Dimov and colleagues proposed a second-person approach to establish a unified “we” voice between the academic and practitioner spheres that would positively impact both and thus close the gap between them. To successfully use this second-person approach to talk with entrepreneurs, scholars need to balance passively observing entrepreneurs with actively engaging them to obtain insights into their thinking and their perceptions of important phenomena.

Sarasvathy (2021) challenged some commonly held assumptions in entrepreneurship research to in turn develop theoretical tools to address some of the wicked problems of the twenty-first century. In particular, she challenged two assumptions: (1) that entrepreneurs should pursue the goal of growing their ventures to become large organizations and (2) that the churn involved in creating many new ventures is best for an economy. Indeed, these assumptions may be firmly held, so it will be interesting to see how other scholars respond to the associated challenges. Countering these assumptions, Sarasvathy proposed the notion of a middle class of businesses—namely, new ventures that grow to medium size (but no larger) and persist over time. The author further suggested that these middle-class businesses can help co-create other strong businesses and communities that in turn produce improved well-being. Sarasvathy recommended future research focus on firm endurance as the dependent variable of entrepreneurship and explore intersubjectivity and education.

Conclusion

This chapter reflects the move from the need to project external legitimacy within academia (i.e., the old “distinct domain versus phenomenon” conversation) to the need to fulfill academia’s promise in terms of personal and societal impact. In other words, scholars have shifted from focusing on establishing legitimacy to reflecting the rich and complex social landscape within which entrepreneurship unfolds. Consistent with Ashby’s law of requisite variety (1956), which proclaims that addressing the diversity of problems in the world necessitates a repertoire of equal diversity, we have broadened our theoretical repertoire to acknowledge entrepreneurship as a juncture of questions of practice, technology, social context, economic geographies, and so on. We hope our guidance on conducting me-search provides scholars the tools and the nerve to capitalize on their own experiences to enhance their theorizing and reveal new insights into entrepreneurial phenomena. Moreover, we hope that leading scholars’ reflections on where the field of entrepreneurship has been and where it is going spark future interest and work.