The multidisciplinary entrepreneurship scholar

Abstract

A scholar is a person who studies an academic subject and knows a lot about it. A great scholar in the academic subject of small business economics is David B. Audretsch. He even co-created small business economics as an academic subject! But David has also had an impact on a broad range of academic disciplines. A look at David's most highly cited publications (in Google Scholar and Web of Science) shows the broad disciplinary range of his high-impact publications. It is first and foremost economics (including the journals American Economic Review, European Economic Review, Review of Economics and Statistics). He is even the 20th most cited economist of the world according to Google Scholar. But his high-impact work can also be found in geography (Regional Studies, Annals of Regional Science), management (Journal of Management, Journal of Management Studies), entrepreneurship (Journal of Business Venturing, Entrepreneurship Theory and Practice), and innovation journals (Research Policy, Industry and Innovation, Journal of Technology Transfer). In his recent research he also endeavours into psychology (Welpe et al., Entrepreneurship Theory and Practice 36:69-96, 2012); (Obschonka et al., Social Psychological and Personality Science 7:95-104, 2016). The Small Business Economics Journal, just like David's research, is first and foremost economics, but is also very much a multidisciplinary endeavour. It is an endeavour to achieve a better understanding of entrepreneurship, firms and the economy at large, informing and improving public policy to stimulate entrepreneurship and economic growth, not by coincidence the name of the unit David founded and led at the Max Planck Institute of Economics in Jena. In this essay I will discuss the value of multidisciplinary scholarship, in general and in particular for economics, and use David as an exemplar scholar in that respect.