Report on the seminar on Research Perspectives in Entrepreneurship

Participants included: 	Kenneth Arrow, Morton Kamien, Mancur Olson,

			Donald Sexton, Herbert Simon, and S. Venkataraman

This is a report on the seminar held on November 14, 1997, at the Graduate School of Industrial Administration at Carnegie Mellon University in Pittsburgh, PA.  The seminar was meant primarily to be  a conversation among the participants with some inputs from the audience --  a conversation, not to settle on a theory of entrepreneurship, but to determine some important research questions in trying to understand entrepreneurship, which he defined as the origins of new economic activity.

A list of all the questions raised during the day is presented in the Appendix.  During the course of four and a half hours of discussion, the following five issues were identified as distinct but intertwined topics involving entrepreneurship: 

1.         Entrepreneurship as a disequilibrium phenomenon

2.         Entrepreneurship as the recognition and pursuit of opportunities by individuals:

3.         Entrepreneurship as part of novelty producing activities in general:

4.         Entrepreneurship as a developmental objective/Conditions for entrepreneuship:

5.         Methodology:  The role of case studies, anecdotes, and natural experiments