Entrepreneurship knowledge: When East meets West

Abstract

In this editorial paper, we pinpoint that most of the entrepreneurship scholarship lags the phenomena and central issues by a fair amount and various theories of management and strategy have been applied incorrectly, namely, using them to "tell us what to see" rather than ask "where do our theories break" and "what is unique". Taken together, this is why the West has very little to say about what's happening in Asian entrepreneurship. This predicament is worsened by the dominant work on Asian entrepreneurship asserting underdeveloped institutions suppress entrepreneurial activity and hence directs attention to how entrepreneurs resolved those challenges as the central program of research for entrepreneurship in Asia. The central purpose of this editorial paper is to not only lift the entrepreneurship scholarship from the predicament but also to surpass existing narrow confinement of exploring pre-defined constructs to investigate potentially novel aspects of the Asian entrepreneurship context. Essentially, it is critical to use this uniqueness as a means to reveal the limitations and/or boundary conditions of received theory and to unlock new value.

Keywords: Asian Entreprenuership, East vs. West, New theory, New Value