This open access book investigates an entrepreneurial approach to building new theories. It
provides a rich understanding of how specific tools facilitate aspects of the theorizing
process and offers a clearer big picture of the process of building important new
entrepreneurship theories. The authors show that anthropomorphizing has been a critically
important tool for developing influential entrepreneurship theories. They reveal how scholars
build on their rich and highly accessible understanding of humans (i.e. the self and others)
to make guesses and sense of entrepreneurial anomalies articulate theoretical mechanisms to
build more robust entrepreneurship theories and create plausible stories that facilitate
sensegiving. Further they offer a framework that guides entrepreneurship scholars in finding a
balance to maximize their contributions and guides reviewers and editors in managing the
revise-and-resubmit process to advance the entrepreneurship field. Finally they present lean
scholarship as an approach to developing a portfolio of high-quality high-impact papers. Lean
scholarship starts with an entrepreneurial mindset and involves creating a minimum viable paper
exploring its validity adding a plausible paper to one's portfolio and managing the portfolio
by periodically deciding whether to persevere pivot or terminate each paper. This seminal
work will appeal to entrepreneurship researchers both those new to the field as well as
seasoned veterans who want to learn more about the tools that can be used to generate new
knowledge about new ventures and other entrepreneurship topics.
