On February 28, March 1, and March 2, 2023, the Department of Innovation Management & Strategy of the University of Groningen hosted the ECSB co-branded event “Conducting Experiments in Entrepreneurship Research Workshop.” In this workshop for young scholars, we focused on the use of experimental designs to study entrepreneurship. We received submissions on a wide variety of theoretical topics, and all papers used an experimental design to test their hypotheses. This was already the fourth edition of this online workshop!
On the first day of the workshop, we started with a welcoming session, in which the organizers and ECSB President Ulla Hytti welcomed everyone to the workshop. During the opening session, we took a moment to celebrate the fact that several participants are very active members of the Conducting Experiments in Entrepreneurship Research network. These participants have participated in multiple editions of the workshop and actively engage with the resources the network has to offer. Moreover, we launched the ECSB Special Interest Group for Experiments in Entrepreneurship Research. For more information about this SIG, and to become a member, please have a look at https://ecsb.org/experiments-sig/
During the three days, we got inspired by keynote sessions by Basil Englis (Berry College, USA), Ute Stephan (King’s College London, U.K.) and David Williams (University of Tennessee, USA). On Tuesday, Basil brought all participants on the same page regarding experimental designs with his keynote “So, … what is an experiment anyway?” On the second day of the workshop, Ute discussed the need for experiments to study entrepreneurial well-being in her keynote “Experimenting to enhance entrepreneur well-being? Motivations, opportunities and challenges”. On the third day of the workshop, Dave discussed the importance of experiments to advance entrepreneurship theory in his keynote “Applying experimental methods to advance entrepreneurship research”.
After the keynote presentations, we organized parallel paper presentation sessions in which we discussed over 22 papers using experiments as a methodology. Because we strive to keep a small-scale setting at the workshop, it was possible to allocate 30 minutes to every paper, allowing time for presentation and feedback. Every paper was assigned a peer reviewer and also received feedback from an expert (workshop facilitators) present in each session. This allowed participants to receive extensive and concrete feedback on their work, enabling them to have clear guidelines on how to keep working on their papers. In this edition of the workshop, we were honored to have the presence of Basil Englis, Ute Stephan, Dave Williams, Denis Grégoire, Diemo Urbig, Magdalena Cholakova, Marco Kleine, Matthew Wood, Susana Santos, Mark Schenkel, and Silke Tegtmeier as workshop facilitators.
The guest editors for the Special Issue on “Experimental Designs to Address Current Challenges in Entrepreneurship Education Research” at the journal Entrepreneurship Education & Pedagogy, Sílvia Costa, Susana Santos, Silke Tegtmeier and Mark Schenkel, presented their editorial.
To facilitate and stimulate networking among the participants, we organized “speed meetings” in which participants had the opportunity to meet an expert in a one-on-one setting for about 20 minutes. Many participants loved this addition to the workshop format.
We have enlarged our network with more than 60 participants representing 23 countries! It is great to see the community of entrepreneurship scholars that use experimental designs grow! We look forward to reading all the great experiments presented during the workshop in print soon!
Finally, we are honored to have co-organized this event with the generous support of ECSB and look forward to the next edition.
Authors: Arjan Frederiks and Sílvia Costa, University of Groningen
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