Dealing with heterogeneity in entrepreneurship research

It has been argued that entrepreneurship research has not 'come far enough, fast enough' (Low, 2001). Although the volume of research has grown dramatically, as has the number of specific subtopics covered, there are relatively few issues on which the entrepreneurship research community has arrived at a consensus. Arguably, one factor that hampers knowledge development in entrepreneurship is the heterogeneity of the phenomenon. 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, so that individual studies can contribute to knowledge accumulation rather than to increased confusion. Specific instances of exemplary, published works that have employed these strategies are discussed throughout the paper.