Entrepreneurship Databases: Illuminating Processes, Describing Phenomena and Steering Research

The understanding of entrepreneurship is very much guided by the data available to study the people and processes that comprise this most important activity. This paper reviews existing entrepreneurship databases, provides detail on their methodologies, makes observations as to their strengths and weaknesses relative to their usefulness to entrepreneurship researchers, and, in some cases, proposes way to improve them. A hierarchy of these databases is presented that groups the databases into categories based on their overall usefulness. The paper also makes recommendations about what types of data entrepreneurship research would provide the most benefit to this field of study.