New article published by Dr. Julia Binder

Abstract:

Experimental methods hold important advantages for advancing the theoretical and practical understanding of entrepreneurial action. The power of research experiments lies in their ability to yield convincing evidence supporting the causal effects of the factors they investigate. Unfortunately, entrepreneurship research experiments are often criticized for offering pale copies of both the realities they attempt to model and the theoretical constructs they aim to study. The entrepreneurial process and its related activities count many intertwined characteristics – such as radical uncertainty, temporal dynamics, high personal stakes and other constraints – that can prove difficult to integrate in experimental studies. Moreover, these characteristics' comingled relationships raise important tensions with experimental methods' core principle of surgically focusing on the causal effects of a few manipulated variables. As a result, entrepreneurship research must overcome a number of validity challenges and tradeoffs in order to successfully leverage experimental methods and offer findings that convincingly support the causality of their theoretical developments. By discussing these entrepreneurship-specific validity tradeoffs and combining that with an overview of strategies for addressing them, our study offers an entrepreneurship-centered synthesis that equips entrepreneurship researchers with the necessary tools for conducting experimental research that advances understanding of the causal effects supporting entrepreneurial action and its related phenomena.