Addressing Schumpeter's plea: critical realism in entrepreneurial history

Joseph Schumpeter's plea for the use of historical methods to understand the dynamic nature of entrepreneurship remains for the most part unsatisfied despite some 60 years of effort and it is argued that the absence of a suitable research framework is a contributing factor to the largely fragmented results to date. A critical realist approach is proposed as a suitable framework for addressing many aspects of Schumpeter’s plea. With its prioritisation of ontology, critical realism is more likely than the positivist/deductivist methods of mainstream economics to lead to the intellectually rigorous explanation of innovation, entrepreneurship and economic growth that Schumpeter was seeking.