Venture Creation and the Enterprising Individual: A Review and Synthesis

Venture creation is at the heart of entrepreneurship. Enterprising individuals or groups start new ventures and, thus, we must understand the role of individuals if we are to understand venture creation. In this article, we review and critique the venture creation literature that has examined the role of the individual, with an eye toward identifying under-researched topics and improving research designs. We then highlight individual judgment as a particularly important future direction for research on the role of enterprising individuals in venture creation. We also discuss techniques for accessing entrepreneurs and for evaluating entrepreneurial judgments.