Making contributions: personal reflections from the co-creative evolution of entrepreneurship research

Abstract

This essay reflects on the last few decades’ evolution of Ideas, Evidence, Concepts, and Methods in the multidisciplinary, multi-level, and multi-methodological field of entrepreneurship research. Using illustrations from my own career and how prior recipients of the Global Award for Entrepreneurship Research guided and inspired them, I describe the journey from early empirical exploration to understand the nature of the phenomenon to more recent, endogenous theory-development and -testing, heralding each as an indispensable steppingstone in meaningful knowledge development. The essay ends with an ode to the collective, co-creating nature of our knowledge-building enterprise.