Nascent Entrepreneurship: Empirical Studies and Developments

The key ideas behind the empirical study of 'nascent entrepreneurship' are that the research aims to identify a statistically representative sample of on-going venture start-up efforts and that these start-up efforts are subsequently followed over time so that insights can be gained also into process issues and determinants of outcomes. The purpose of this paper is to take stock of the developments of 'nascent entrepreneur' - or 'firm gestation' - research so far, and to suggest directions for future research efforts along those lines. For this purpose a review has been made of some 75 journal articles, various book chapters, conference papers and research reports. The review shows that the current approach to capturing on-going start-up efforts and studying their concurrent development longitudinally is a basically sound, workable approach that has opened up a new and very promising avenue for entrepreneurship research. While many interesting results have already been reported and while considerable improvements on both the method and theory sides of research have been made, there is still room and need for further improvements. A set of 17 specific propositions is developed towards that end.