Linking Micro-Level Entrepreneurial Action and Macro-Level Economic Progress: The Interdisciplinary and Multidimensional Domain of Entrepreneurship

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What is entrepreneurship? Who is the entrepreneur? Why, when and how does entrepreneurship originate and what are its effects across time and border? The lack of a satisfactory definition and conceptual framework of entrepreneurship has undermined the legitimacy of entrepreneurship as a unique field of research with its own contributions. While the lack of integration of the many different aspects of the entrepreneurship phenomenon has hampered the field’s unique potential to provide insight for scholars and policymakers into the intricate, transdisciplinary processes which link micro-level entrepreneurial action and macro-level economic progress. This paper advances the progress of the entrepreneurship research field by providing a unifying definition and conceptual framework of entrepreneurship that captures the entrepreneurship phenomenon from its root cause at the micro-level, human knowledge and entrepreneurial motivation, to its far reaching effects at the macro-level, macroeconomic progress through technological innovation and the emergence of new opportunities. By exploring entrepreneurship with an interdisciplinary approach this paper identifies four mechanisms of reality enhancement, three categories of entrepreneurship, three stages of economic progress and three cumulative barriers to economic progress which together provide a unified growth theory that gives insight into why, when and how micro-level entrepreneurial action contributes to macro-level economic progress.