The impact of entrepreneurship research on other academic fields.

The remarkable ascent of entrepreneurship witnessed as a scientific field over the last 4 decades has been made possible by entrepreneurship's ability to absorb theories, paradigms, and methods from other fields such as economics, psychology, sociology, geography, and even biology. The respectability of entrepreneurship as an academic discipline is now evidenced by many other fields starting to borrow from the entrepreneurship view. In the present paper, seven examples are given from this "pay back" development. These examples were first presented during a seminar at the Erasmus Entrepreneurship Event called what has the entrepreneurship view to offer to other academic fields? This article elaborates on the core ideas of these presentations and focuses on the overarching question of how entrepreneurship research impacts the development of other academic fields. We found that entrepreneurship research questions the core assumptions of other academic fields and provides new insights into the antecedents, mechanisms, and consequences of their respective core phenomena. Moreover, entrepreneurship research helps to legitimize other academic fields both practically and academically.

Entrepreneurship research questions the core assumptions of other academic fields and legitimizes them both practically and academically. Since the 1980s, entrepreneurship research has seen tremendous growth and development, establishing itself as an academic field. Entrepreneurship is also taught extensively in leading business schools around the world. Indeed, few business schools do not address entrepreneurship in their curriculum. This represents a sea change: although entrepreneurs and new ventures had a remarkable impact on society, academia barely noticed it in the 1980s. Simply put: economics and business students rarely, if ever, encountered any mention of entrepreneurship during their studies. While entrepreneurship research has now developed its own methodological toolbox, it has extensively borrowed perspectives, theories, and methods from other fields. In the 2020s, we now find that entrepreneurship scholars are sharing its toolbox with other academic fields, questioning the core assumptions of other academic fields and providing new insights into the antecedents, mechanisms, and consequences of their respective core phenomena. Moreover, entrepreneurship research helps to legitimize other academic fields both practically and academically. Hence, entrepreneurship research now plays not just an important role in entrepreneurship education, practice, and policy but also throughout many other research fields.

Closing the gender gap in entrepreneurship: The importance of skill variety.

Given that skill variety is widely regarded a key component of entrepreneurial human capital, gender differences in entrepreneurship could be rooted in the formation of such skill variety. Analyzing 12-year longitudinal data following 1,321 Finnish adolescents into adulthood, we study whether gender differences in skill variety open up early in the vocational development of entrepreneurs vs. non-entrepreneurs, thereby contributing to the persisting gender gap in entrepreneurship in adulthood. Specifically, structural equation modeling was used to test and compare the mediating effect of early skill variety in adolescence vs. education- and work-related skill variety in early adulthood on the gender gap in entrepreneurial intentions in adulthood. We find that education- and work-related skill variety indeed operate as an obstacle for women entrepreneurship, despite women outperforming men in early skill variety in adolescence. Hence, we identify a critical turning point in early adulthood where women fall behind in their development of entrepreneurial human capital.

The Best of Both Worlds: The Benefits of Open-specialized and Closed-diverse Syndication Networks for New Ventures' Success.

Open networks give actors non-redundant information that is diverse, while closed networks offer redundant information that is easier to interpret. Integrating arguments about network structure and the similarity of actors' knowledge, we propose two types of network configurations that combine diversity and ease of interpretation. Closed-diverse networks offer diversity in actors' knowledge domains and shared third-party ties to help in interpreting that knowledge. In open-specialized networks, structural holes offer diversity, while shared interpretive schema and overlap between received information and actors' prior knowledge help in interpreting new information without the help of third parties. In contrast, actors in open-diverse networks suffer from information overload due to the lack of shared schema or overlapping prior knowledge for the interpretation of diverse information, and actors in closed-specialized networks suffer from overembeddedness because they cannot access diverse information. Using CrunchBase data on early-stage venture capital investments in the U.S. information technology sector, we test the effect of investors' social capital on the success of their portfolio ventures. We find that ventures have the highest chances of success if their syndicating investors have either open-specialized or closed-diverse networks. These effects are manifested beyond the direct effects of ventures' or investors' quality and are robust to controlling for the possibility that certain investors could have chosen more promising ventures at the time of first funding.