Organizational and Management Theorizing Using Experiment-Based Entrepreneurship Research: Covered Terrain and New Frontiers

The entrepreneurship setting—an extreme organizational context—provides fertile ground for organizationally relevant theory testing and development. In this article, we propose that randomized experiments in the context of entrepreneurship have considerable potential to advance theory in entrepreneurship, as well as other areas of organization science, including organizational behavior and strategic management. We ground this proposition in a multipronged review of randomized experiments in entrepreneurship (REE). Based on this review of prior work and emerging trends, we provide illustrative examples of innovative theory-driven experiments and motivate future research to consider randomized experiments in the entrepreneurial context both for testing boundary conditions and enhancing organizational theorizing broadly.