Defining Healthcare Entrepreneurship: A Delphi Study

Abstract

Healthcare entrepreneurship is a growing area of interest for researchers and practitioners in entrepreneurship and healthcare alike. Given the global pandemic and COVID-19, we have recently seen a significant increase in healthcare startups, particularly with a focus on data, wearables, artificial intelligence, and virtual reality, that make care more accessible. However, healthcare entrepreneurship as a domain of research is not well defined and studies are disparate across disciplines. Defining the domain of healthcare entrepreneurship can not only have an important impact on society, but stimulate research and bring together stakeholders from multiple disciplines to investigate key questions. Therefore, we pose two questions: Is healthcare entrepreneurship a sub-domain within the broader domain of entrepreneurship? And: How can healthcare entrepreneurship be defined, including its leading theories, boundaries, and outcomes? We leverage the existing literature to illustrate the factors that appear to be novel for healthcare entrepreneurship compared to its parent domains and we conducted a Delphi study to gather the definitions, theories, boundaries, and outcomes of healthcare entrepreneurship with scholars across multiple fields. This article provides a working definition and research framework of healthcare entrepreneurship, proposes future research questions, and offers insights into the Delphi methodology based on our coding approach.