The Power of Synthesis: Literature Reviews in Entrepreneurship Research
journal contribution
posted on 2024-10-30, 10:41authored byAndres Felipe Cortes, Younggeun Lee, Siri Terjesen, Mathew Hughes
Entrepreneurship research continues to grow and bring valuable insights for aspiring entrepreneurs, new ventures, and small business managers. This outstanding progress leads to a diversity of constructs, theories, industries, business models, types of firms, and other topics of investigation in the entrepreneurship literature (Lee et al., 2024). As the entrepreneurship field progresses, there is an increasingly important need to bring order to this variety of emerging topics of interest, take stock of this rising knowledge, and highlight valuable opportunities for entrepreneurship scholars to continue the progress on these diverse topics. This high demand for a consolidation of extant knowledge is particularly important for rising research topics in which publications are relatively low (e.g., Cortes & Lee, 2021; Javadian et al., 2023). Thorough critical reviews of the literature will spark not only future research but also provide clear directions for meaningful contributions.
This special issue aimed to encourage authors to develop concise literature reviews that focus on synthesizing specific and emerging topics in entrepreneurship and providing clear guidance for future research. We solicited reviews on a diverse range of subjects, including emerging or established constructs, theories, contexts, research methodologies, themes, and frameworks, and received 36 submissions, from which we carefully selected three exemplary papers. The following section underscores the significance of literature reviews in entrepreneurship and provides valuable guidance for authors aspiring to contribute to the field.