The different approaches are nevertheless united. Entrepreneurship-as-design-science is also distinct from entrepreneurship-as-practice as the latter does not generate scientific knowledge. The aim of entrepreneurship-as-science is to contribute to explanatory knowledge on entrepreneurship instead of contributing to design knowledge devising entrepreneurial action. Examples of such questions are: ‘How to design entrepreneurship training effectively?’ or 'How to develop an ecosystem strategy?’ Following the scientific method, entrepreneurship-as-design-science poses a problem against a scientific body of knowledge, uses scientifically rigorous methods, and checks them against the body of scientific knowledge.Įntrepreneurship-as-design-science is different from mainstream research of entrepreneurship-as-science. Design science tackles ‘how to’ questions: Whereas the ‘how’ refers to the actions, the ‘to’ refers to the preferred situations in Simon’s terminology.
Following Simon (1996) design knowledge can be defined as the knowledge on devising ‘action aimed at changing existing situations into preferred ones’. Entrepreneurship-as-design-science is a distinct scientific approach to entrepreneurship that it is primarily interested in design knowledge.
