Entrepreneurship Research

Virtually all literature on entrepreneurship and on different policies to promote the creation of enterprises comes from Europe and the United States. Research on entrepreneurship in Latin America; in particular, in Peru, is at an early stage of development. There is a profound lack of data regarding many aspects related to the creation process; life cycle of firms and the key factors that influence competitiveness. The weakness and even absence of public strategies for entrepreneurial development is due, at least in part, to this lack of knowledge. Not only is our interest focused on Entrepreneurship, but also on Management of Technology and Social Responsibility.

Regarding the research methodology we propose to implement a mixed research method approach involving multi-industry surveys, interviews and case studies to collect empirical data. This seeks to identify patterns and regularities among these initiatives. Mixed methods are likely to produce some concepts that do not fit into existing theories or models or previous understanding but which in fact provide new complex and less evident explanations of the research questions. Case study method and survey research are a systematic way of looking at what is happening, collecting data, analyzing information, and reporting the results. The product is a sharpened understanding of why the instance happened as it did, and what might be important to look at more extensively in future research. Thus, they are especially well suited because this research project is a hypothesis-generating rather than a hypothesis-testing approach to a complex and not yet well-understood topic. In the analysis of the data, we will compare and identify patterns across cases by using tables and matrices, a tool used extensively in multiple case analyses.