Path Dependent Entrepreneurs? A Decision Making Perspective

In November 2011, Zahra and Wright published a very thought-provoking article aimed at discussing the state of the art associated with the entrepreneurship research domain. The main idea behind that article was that, although tremendously growing, entrepreneurship still lacks strong theoretical micro- foundations. Thus, this gap negatively affects the increasing efforts aimed at considering entrepreneurship itself as a per se discipline within the management literature. This research note seeks at contributing to fill this gap through explaining how the decision making literature can be useful to develop these micro-foundations. In particular, the research note uses the concepts of hidden traps and heuristics in decision making for the interpreting of that organizational behavior widely known as path dependence. It is known that, despite the latest relevant attempts, path dependence can be considered, for many aspects, as a black box to date. Opening this black box can represent an important opportunity for the research and practice of management widely. At the same time, this opportunity appears as greatly relevant also for the research and practice of entrepreneurship specifically, in that it can help both scholars and practitioners to orient, towards higher rationality, a number of entrepreneurial decision making processes mostly associated with the earliest stages of the organizational life cycle.