Prerequisites
Participants are expected to have basic knowledge of entrepreneurship, innovation theory, economics, and quantitative research methods such as econometrics and experiments. A basic understanding of core theories of organizations, strategic management, and the economic theory of the firm will be helpful but not mandatory. This is one of the specialized courses offered to SI doctoral students at CBS and is open to all Ph.D. students outside the department.

Aim
The main goal of the course is to increase familiarity with and develop an in-depth understanding of the key themes and empirical research methods of entrepreneurship. Emphasis will be put on empirical applications to test theories. Most of the course will be devoted to teaching how to do empirical research in the domain of entrepreneurship, broadly defined. Focus will be on the contributions making use of quantitative methods and data including experiments. Theories, frameworks, concepts, and controversies that collectively form the foundation for entrepreneurship research will be discussed. 

The course will aim to build capabilities in critically discussing and developing research questions/projects in entrepreneurship. Students will get acquainted with various methodological approaches employed in the field and learn to analytically review and evaluate academic articles from a diverse body of literature relevant to entrepreneurship research.

Course content
Entrepreneurship is a multidisciplinary research area with contributions from economics, psychology, sociology, geography, and management, just to mention a few. No other subject has attracted more scholarly, managerial, and policy attention than the phenomenon of entrepreneurship in recent years. From macro- and microeconomics to demography and organizational sociology, from finance and business studies to cognitive psychology, the quest for understanding its antecedents, sources, processes, and consequences has produced a large, vibrant, eclectic field. And with the growing advent of cross-disciplinary, multi-level work employing specialized panel data sets and more rigorous econometric techniques, initial concerns that the field lacked “a professional identity defined by a unifying theory” have abated.

The magnitude of academic interest in entrepreneurship is not surprising given its centrality for several key outcomes. Entrepreneurship has long been considered an engine of economic growth and regional development. Entrepreneurs have been shown to destroy established organizational competencies, shape evolutionary trajectories of technologies, cause substantial regulatory changes and create, enact and obliterate social topologies, organizational forms, markets, and industries. They have been placed at the heart of the theories of income inequality, social mobility, social welfare, and ethnic absorption, and they have been acknowledged to be a critical driver of the flow and distribution of resources across physical space. Research has also associated entrepreneurial acts with firm growth and performance, organizational revival, and global corporate expansion.

Foundations of Entrepreneurship is designed to offer an integrative view of how to do research to better understand why only some individuals but not others choose to become entrepreneurs, why only some persons but not others discover opportunities and exploit them, and why and how eventually only some ventures succeed and have a positive impact in society. The course has a focus on quantitative methodologies, including methods for analyzing large administrative datasets, publicly available business registers, and experimental methods.

Teaching style
Lectures, student presentations, paper discussions, literature critiques.

The course will be taught in a concentrated format from March 10 - March 13 with one session in the morning and another in the afternoon. At the end of the course, students will prepare a term paper that will be presented and discussed in a workshop to take place on April 7. This final workshop will be held in a hybrid format, so that students who are not in the Copenhagen area may participate remotely.