This book offers a critique of social justice theory and its impact on entrepreneurship scholarship. It traces its deep roots in postmodernism by positioning entrepreneurship within these new intellectual, social, and economic environments. It highlights current philosophical assumptions, with implications for boundary conditions that we apply as scientists. Science depends on theoretical assumptions and boundary conditions. Unfortunately, a glaring weakness in entrepreneurship research has been its general failure to identify these premises. No theory is universally applicable, so its assumptions and boundary conditions are what give it analytical power. Where do they come from? Simply stated, they come from a theory's philosophy of science. However, even more rare than stating assumptions and boundary conditions is to discuss a study's governing philosophy. In fact, no known research published in entrepreneurship has discussed a study's philosophical orientation. This provocative work details postmodern concerns related to critical theory, their origins, their status, and specifically how they impact entrepreneurship and those who are not designated as either the victimized or part of the white patriarchy. It will challenge the current direction of entrepreneurship research and confront the general acceptance of the tenets of postmodernism among management scholars.

Entrepreneurs do much more than manage small businesses. At the heart of entrepreneurship is the discovery process. An idea is conceived and then exploited for profit. But if the idea is neither useful nor unique, its exploitation will generate only average profits. Therefore, the idea and the process that leads to its discovery are of the utmost importance to the success of any new venture. Can the discovery process be taught, or must one be born with the talent to unearth promising opportunities? Fiet argues that entrepreneurial discovery can indeed be taught, and he proposes a theory of the informational elements that constitute the discovery process.

Entrepreneurship as an academic discipline has often been criticized for lacking intellectual rigor and a theoretical foundation. Fiet supplies both in this scholarly book, which approaches entrepreneurial competence from an academic perspective. There are three primary characteristics of entrepreneurial competence: tacit knowledge of an entrepreneur's field of endeavor, which can be improved by trial and error; the knowledge of decision rules that enable one to make rational informational investments based upon the signals of opportunities; and the unequal distribution of entrpreneurial competence among the population. Recognizing that entrepreneurs start out at different stages of competence, Fiet asserts that anyone cam improve using his book as a pedagogical aid. This volume fills a void in the entrepreneurship literature, which too often is indistinguishable from that which informs courses on small business management.

This book organizes entrepreneurship theory in a way that constitutes a new body of knowledge, which is Informational Entrepreneurship. It can serve as a basis for teaching entrepreneurship and reducing performance uncertainty. Although entrepreneurship is not entirely about information, information determines how it can be systematically understood while depending less on luck. It also offers the only known, experimentally tested approach that incorporates decision support tools. Other known approaches rely on exposition for validation; whereas, Informational Entrepreneurship uses two-sample experiments that controlled for other explanations as well as experimenter bias. It will appeal to those studying and teaching entrepreneurship who are looking for a prescriptive approach, rather than a descriptive approach.

In the only known programme of prescriptive entrepreneurship, James Fiet provides a marked contrast to the standard descriptive focus of entrepreneurship studies. Instead of the anecdotally based pedagogies that have dominated the teaching of entrepreneurship (and which do not control for luck-based success), the author lays out a programme of research to develop and test theoretically derived guidelines for how to improve the success rate and performance of aspiring entrepreneurs. Rather than describing what entrepreneurs do, he prescribes and tests what they ought to do. The author finds that the use of systematic search at the launch relates positively to both the discovery of wealth-generating ideas and the founding of ventures. The book also uncovers the characteristics of forgiving business models and discusses their teachability. Training elements of the book include a prescriptive model of how to search for and discover wealth-generating ideas, a detailed protocol for how to train aspiring entrepreneurs in the use of systematic search, and an instrument that allows aspiring entrepreneurs to test the potential of their ideas before launching a venture. The book will be of interest to business and entrepreneurship scholars and teachers, students and aspiring entrepreneurs who are looking for prescriptive tools to help them launch a successful business.