Precision without accuracy: why entrepreneurial research must be done in real time to create valid teaching materials.

Research in the science based methodologies has identified and managed sources of error in their data collection and analysis processes as part of their core skills. Errors are not only in the actual measurement of observations but also inherent in the observational approaches themselves. Work done in many business research activities does not as a matter of course consider error sources as a starting point of designing the research. Research in business cannot avoid Heisenberg's Uncertainty Principle which dictates that measurement changes the state of what was measured for ever. We contend that real-time entrepreneurial experiences cannot be translated into practical theories from entrepreneurs stories to introduce discursive approaches to entrepreneurial learning. The study demonstrates that practitioners accounts can differ between real time observations and traditional post fact interviews and the successful management of errors requires a real time investigation rather than data collection well after the event.