What is Entrepreneurship? A Proposal for a Data-Based Methodology‪.‬

ABSTRACT Despite the growing importance of entrepreneurship as a subject, researchers and practitioners still do not agree about what precisely entrepreneurship is. Instead of offering another definition or taxonomy, we propose a data based methodology, grounded in principal components analysis, which seeks to clarify the issue by thinning out the field of existing theories. We suggest that our approach may be capable of identifying the salient aspects of entrepreneurship in an objective way by discarding those aspects that are not central to the concept. We briefly illustrate the methodology using a large sample of British survey data.