Evidence-based Entrepreneurship Cumulative Science, Action Principles, and Bridging the Gap Between Science and Practice

Evidence-based Entrepreneurship introduces the concept of evidence-based entrepreneurship (EBE), discuss the implications of EBE, and sketches out its opportunities and limitations. The users of EBE can be the scientists themselves, professionals who deal with entrepreneurs, policy makers whose policies affect entrepreneurs, students of entrepreneurship, and last but not least the entrepreneurs themselves. Much of the review is related to the idea of meta-analysis -- a quantitative review of the scientific literature -- to help determine how strong certain relationships are, how often a relationship consistently appears across studies, and how much we can trust the methodological rigor of the research. A meta-analysis provides the best available type of evidence because it goes beyond one methodology, one study, and one researcher. Evidence-based Entrepreneurship provides a great opportunity that is relevant for practice and policy while strengthening the empirical and theoretical bases of entrepreneurship research. Practice can never be fully based on evidence; therefore, we talk about evidence-informed practice and evidence-based research suggestions. Both management and entrepreneurship show a gap between knowledge and practice - the knowledge-doing gap. Managers as well as entrepreneurs or professionals who deal with entrepreneurs often fail to take note of scientific evidence when making decisions and empirical research has shown that managers often take actions that are uninformed and sometimes even diametrically opposed to empirical evidence. In the area of entrepreneurship, one can often hear open disdain for scholarly work because professors have not yet "made their first million" - the foremost argument seems to be that only experience counts. The authors suggest that professionals who deal with entrepreneurs can profit from evidence-informed practice.