Nascent Entrepreneurship

Per Davidsson's 2006 monograph synthesizes roughly 75 empirical studies on how new ventures actually get started — covering who becomes a nascent entrepreneur, how they discover opportunities, and how they exploit them. It is a landmark piece of scholarship that brings clarity and a credible research agenda to a field that had been fragmented. The framework distinguishing discovery from exploitation processes is especially useful. That said, this is dense academic writing aimed squarely at doctoral students and researchers; practitioners looking for startup advice will find nothing here for them. If you are writing or supervising entrepreneurship research, this is essential reading. Everyone else can skip it.