Progress in understanding entrepreneurial behavior

• Date: 01 November 2007
• DOI: http://doi.org/10.1002/sej.5
• Author: Lowell W. Busenitz
• Published date: 01 November 2007

Copyright © 2007 Strategic Management Society

Strategic Entrepreneurship Journal

Strat. Entrepreneurship J., 1: 183–185 (2007)

Published online 21 November 2007 in Wiley InterScience (www.interscience.wiley.com). DOI: 10.1002/sej.5

DISCUSSANT COMMENTS

PROGRESS IN UNDERSTANDING

ENTREPRENEURIAL BEHAVIOR

LOWELL W. BUSENITZ*

Price College of Business, University of Oklahoma, Norman, Oklahoma, U.S.A.

In pursuit of a better understanding on entrepre-

neurship, researchers are probing issues related

to the emergence of specifi c technologies to the

development of new ventures; from the evolving of

new industries to the understanding of why some

countries are more entrepreneurial than others. In

his overview of the fi eld, Baron (2004) noted three

research questions that are central to the fi eld of

entrepreneurship. They are:

• Why do some persons but not others choose to

become entrepreneurs?

• Why do some persons but not others recognize

opportunities for new products or services that

can be profi tably exploited?

• Why are some entrepreneurs so much more

successful than others?

As these questions indicate, probing entrepreneur-

ship phenomena from just an economic perspec-

tive leaves us less than complete. Issues such as

competitive analysis, utilization of resources and

the attraction/allocation that have been found to be

quite appropriate with larger more mature fi rms can

also be constructive with entrepreneurial ventures.

However, the explanations typically used with larger

fi rms in mainline strategic management research

invariably come up short in explaining the emer-

gence of new and innovative ventures. The research

questions mentioned above cannot be adequately

addressed just with mainline strategy tools. The

issue of individual entrepreneurs and how they differ

from other economic actors was of central concern

to early theorists. For example, Schumpeter posited

entrepreneurs have a ‘will to compete’ and a ‘delight

in ventures’ that provides them the impetus for intro-

ducing market-breaking innovations through entre-

preneurial effort (Schumpeter, 1934: 93). In his

seminal work on risk and uncertainty, Knight saw

entrepreneurs as a class of individuals who took

on higher risk and had the ‘disposition to act’ in

spite of the uncertain context in which they oper-

ated (Knight, 1921: 269). Kirzner (1979) also talked

about entrepreneurs utilizing their intuitive hunches

through entrepreneurial alertness to move markets

back towards equilibrium.

With these conjectures came a substantial amount

of research probing psychological traits in the 1960s

through the early 1980s. Unfortunately, this research

yielded equivocal fi ndings due to a variety of issues.

After years of little to no work on understanding

individual entrepreneurs in the 1980s and 1990s, the

cognitive approach to understanding entrepreneurs

has emerged and seems to have fallen on fertile

ground. It has become evident that our understand-

ing of the entrepreneurship process is going to be

signifi cantly handicapped if we do not take into

account the individual entrepreneur (Mitchell et al.,

2007; Shane and Venkatraman, 2000). The impor-

tance of the thinking of those individuals involved

with the startup and innovation process is refl ected

in numerous articles included in the inaugural issues

of the Strategic Entrepreneurship Journal. Article

*Correspondence to: Lowell W. Busenitz, Price College of

Business, University of Oklahoma, Norman, OK 73019-4006,

U.S.A.

E-mail: busenitz@ou.edu