3 Review(s)

The birth and infancy of entrepreneurship was turned into a specific area of academic study and empirical research quite early. The field greatly evolved, and at the same time, a constant urge to deal with real problems existed, from firm creation to industrial growth, including firm strategy and economic policy. Economic, sociological, and managerial academics began to devise a detailed and interpretative framework for the study of entrepreneurship. Many people came from different fields, and there was a need to overcome the limitation of the standard neoclassical theory of entrepreneurship. New areas of research were embraced, thereby recognizing that powerful mechanisms are at work in entrepreneurship and require systematic analysis. Entrepreneurship, in a very broad sense, has always been at the heart of firm and industrial dynamics – extoling its influence on a macro level. Starting with the analysis of the specific properties and effects of entrepreneurship as an economic function, researchers then proceeded to the historical and normative analysis of resource allocation mechanisms in the field of entrepreneurship. More generally, they analysed the socio-economic institutions that could be relied upon to produce, mediate and favour entrepreneurship.