Strategies for Dealing with Heterogeneity in Entrepreneurship Research

Abstract

Business ventures are started by individuals and teams with very different backgrounds and motivations, pursuing business ideas of very variable inherent quality in environments that also show tremendous variability. As a result it is difficult to arrive at broadly valid generalizations, and studies that include all the variance at once risk arriving at nothing but weak results and increased bewilderment. This paper discusses strategies for dealing with the entrepreneurship phenomenon’s inherent heterogeneity in research design, sampling, operationalization and analysis; i.e., strategies that may help individual entrepreneurship studies better contribute to knowledge accumulation. Specific instances of exemplary works that have employed these strategies are discussed throughout the paper.