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This paper attempts to renew interest in a line of research that largely has been ignored for two decades but which is critical to the study of entrepreneurial cognitions, intentions, and their conversion into entrepreneurial behaviors. That area is entrepreneurial motivation. This is not a comprehensive review of all areas of motivation research but rather a challenge a reinvigorate research efforts on an important aspect of the entrepreneurial process that has been examined only at the margins so far. It is an attempt to show how one very important topic, "entrepreneurial motivation," still needs more study if we are to address the question of "have we learned anything at all about entrepreneurs?"
Introduction and Brief History
The International Council for Small Business and its Journal of Small Business Management are a half a century old. Yet, few of us look at the long history of earlier research for topics that were abandoned without being fully explored. This is the case with entrepreneurial motivations, which seems to have been rejected, along with the study of unique personality traits of entrepreneurs. However, motivations are not the same as "uniquely entrepreneurial personality traits" and should not have suffered the same fate (Carsrud et al. 2009).
In the mid-1980s, two of the most influential volumes were the Art and Science in Entrepreneurship, edited by Sexton and Smilor (1986) and Managing Take-Off in Fast Growth Firms by Smilor and Kuhn (1986). These volumes include theory and empirical research on entrepreneurial motivations (Carsrud and Olm 1986; Carsrud, Olm, and Eddy 1986). A year later, the seminal work Job Creation in America: How Our Smallest Companies Put the Most people to Work (Birch 1987) was published with its very clear message: small entrepreneurial firms were the very engines of economies. Research attention moved rapidly toward understanding the entrepreneur, finding ways of discovering potential entrepreneurs, and fostering entrepreneurship. As a field of research, entrepreneurship was still in its infancy and closely associated with small business management. Neither research faculty nor courses in entrepreneurship existed in most universities.
Building on Other Disciplines
Fortunately, accumulated knowledge from social science disciplines could be built on, thus creating new knowledge specifically focusing on entrepreneurship. However, it seems entrepreneurship research borrowed, quite unsystematically and somewhat opportunistically, from...