Entrepreneurship News 2013: bridging research and practice

Abstract

ESU 2013 started with an outlook over the topic Bridging entrepreneurship research and practice (Caetano, 2013), focusing on the most significant findings in entrepreneurship research. This brought up to our research field a discussion that has been going on for more than 30 years in other disciplines: the academic-practitioner gap. To overcome this gap, the evidence-based movement has generated many ideas, propositions and possible solutions to narrow the gap, to bridge academics and practitioners. Also in entrepreneurship research, these questions must be raised. How does research influence practice? And how does practice influence research? Bridges have to be built between the main actors in the entrepreneurship process allowing scholars, educators, professionals (banks, business angles, etc.), policy makers and entrepreneurs to communicate, share ideas and conclusions from their work and actually talk in the same language. Multiple bridges have already been built and many of us have been doing efforts to improve them. However, as demonstrated in our study, academics and entrepreneurs still express uncertainty about both the relevance and quality of research performed in some topics of entrepreneurship. Strikingly, both academics and entrepreneurs expressed their uncertainty about the quality of the evidence that entrepreneurship research is currently relevant to the practice of entrepreneurship. A bridge needs to be built here, as entrepreneurs are not sure that research on entrepreneurship might be useful for them, as well as academics, aware of their own research, do not always see it as relevant for the practice of entrepreneurship. Therefore, there can be a misunderstanding in the language used by ones and others. Most probably, a translation is necessary to understand what academics are telling to the practice of entrepreneurship in such a way that entrepreneurs will find it significant for them. Following this idea, a challenge was launched to ESU 2013 participants, as a way to improve the bridges between research and practice: a translation exercise. The participants were asked to contribute with an article to the ESU Newspaper. What we see here is the effort of academic personnel (mainly PhD students) in describing their research to entrepreneurs and how it can help them in practice. They did this in a non-jargon language but as plain as in a newspaper article.