Entrepreneurship research and practice : toward a taxonomy at the interface of science and design

Key notions such as ‘theory’ and ‘testing’ are highly disputed in the literature on entrepreneurship and business venturing, as a result of an intellectual stasis. Thus, the lack of agreement on core ideas and notions undermines any progress toward developing a coherent body of knowledge on entrepreneurship. To go beyond this stasis, we draw on the discourse regarding design science that has been emerging in the past few decades, informed by Simon’s seminal "The Sciences of the Artificial". First, we provide a map of the ‘design science’ territory, by distinguishing a broad range of research outputs (i.e. values, constructs, models, principles, instantiations) as well as a discovery-validation cycle of research activities. We then illustrate how entrepreneurship research at the interface of science and design serves to connect ideas and findings (from disparate literatures and practices) that otherwise would remain unconnected. A key method at this interface is mechanism-based review and synthesis. In this respect, the notion of social/generative mechanisms is central to rigorous descriptive-explanatory work as well as to impactful creative-practical work.