Exceptionality in entrepreneurship: Systematically investigating outlier outcomes

Daniel R. Clark, G. Christopher Crawford and Robert J. Pidduck

Journal of Business Venturing Insights, 2023, vol. 20, issue C

Abstract: Entrepreneurship is the study of ordinary people doing extraordinary things: outliers in society, seeing and enacting new venture opportunities, while most others do not. Historically, the field of entrepreneurship has been dominated by competing homogeneity and heterogeneity perspectives. Extending current heterogeneity trends in the domain, this article builds the case for the benefits of examining the exceptional of the exceptional: entrepreneurs that produce extraordinary results. We argue that outlier entrepreneurs are not aberrations or empirical nuisances to be explained away or “fixed” through statistical wizardry. Rather, in most entrepreneurship phenomenon, those extremely high performing and disproportionately influential cases are “the goal” of entrepreneurship, and exactly where valuable theory-building potential lies. Building on several growing conversations in entrepreneurship research, we introduce why some phenomenological domains share characteristic potential for generating important insights using an outlier approach and present a set of methodological tools to tackle them.

Keywords: Entrepreneurship; Exceptionalism; Outliers; Power law perspective; Star performers (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2023
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Citations: View citations in EconPapers (4)

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Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:eee:jobuve:v:20:y:2023:i:c:s2352673423000513

DOI: 10.1016/j.jbvi.2023.e00422

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