Taking Stock and Moving Forward: Independence of Entrepreneurship as a Discipline and the Intellectual Structure of Entrepreneurship Research in Strategy Venue

Abstract

Entrepreneurship has grown into a full-fledged, vibrant discipline, not only drawing on but also spawning a spectrum of research streams with various theoretical perspectives and empirical evidence. However, strategy journals had traditionally been home to many earlier entrepreneurship research insights. How has the intellectual structure of the entrepreneurship research published in strategic outlets evolved, given the disciplinary maturity of entrepreneurship? To answer this question, we performed a visual bibliometric analysis on the full archive of 25 years’ research on entrepreneurship published in a leading strategy journal. Our results uncover the intellectual development trajectory around entrepreneurship research targeted at strategy venue, and reveal the key elements such as research methods, level of analysis, variables, and correlations about such a body of research. This study provides an important starting point for reflecting on the particularities of boundary-crossing entrepreneurship research, and for identifying further avenues of theoretical and empirical inquiries.