Matthew Flinders

This blog post is based on the Evidence & Policy article, ‘Entrepreneurial thinking: the politics and practice of policy impact’.

In a recent article in Evidence and Policy Steve Johnson suggests that entrepreneurship research may have had far more impact on society than it is generally credited with. In making this point Johnson stimulates a debate not just about the past, present and future of entrepreneurship research but about the science-society nexus more generally. In a commentary in Evidence and Policy I responded to Johnson’s argument through a focus on evidential standards and criticality.

When stripped down to its core thesis, Johnson’s argument is that entrepreneurship research may have had a number of non-academic and broadly positive impacts on society. The slight problem is that this claim relies upon enlightenment arguments about affecting public debate and shaping ideas that are incredibly hard to demonstrate or measure in a tangible manner. There are, of course, some academic studies that can claim and prove that they have shaped public discourse and affected public policy – the recent insights of behavioural economics and ‘nudge theory’ provide a good example – but such examples tend to be rare.

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