In a nutshell
Most entrepreneurship research is designed to impress reviewers, not to help entrepreneurs. This paper argues that studies should be built with real-world relevance in mind from the start, using three criteria: importance, insight, and impact.
This is a bit of a different one. As you know, Research Recap is usually about translating research about entrepreneurship education for educators, students, and practitioners. This time however, we’re recapping research about research itself. This article takes a hard look at why so much scientific insight never makes it beyond journal pages and how we might change that. In other words, it’s a paper about relevance – and since the whole point of Research Recap is to make research relevant, we simply had to write about it.
So, let’s start where the authors do: academia runs on strange fuel: publications, citations, and impact factors. Relevance to anyone outside the ivory tower often comes as an afterthought – if at all. Waldron, McMullen, Newbert, Payne, and York think this is a problem, especially in entrepreneurship since it’s a field that’s meant to be an applied social science.
Their argument is basically that if your research doesn’t matter to entrepreneurs, investors, or policymakers, then what’s the point? To tackle this, the authors introduce three design rules to make studies more translatable – that is, more capable of being turned into useful insights for practitioner audiences. The first is importance, which means choosing topics that are timely and consequential in the real world, not just gaps in the literature. In other words, study problems entrepreneurs actually face. The second is insight, which requires explanations that genuinely clarify what’s going on. This involves avoiding jargon for its own sake, striking a balance between rich contextual detail and broader meaning, and passing what might be called the “mother test”: if your findings would make her respond with a flat “Well, duh,” it’s time to go back to the drawing board. Finally, there is impact, which demands more than a perfunctory closing paragraph on “practical implications.” Instead, it calls for spelling out how the research could guide real decisions, behaviours, or strategies in plain language, so that practitioner outlets can actually pick it up and carry it to the audiences who need it.
Publication Date: July 2025
Authors: Theodore L. Waldron, Jeffery S. McMullen, Scott L. Newbert, G. Tyge Payne, Jeffrey G. York
Institutions: Louisiana State University; Indiana University; Baruch College; University of Colorado Boulder; Oklahoma State University
Study Type: Conceptual/editorial article
Sample Size: N/A
Research Focus: How to design entrepreneurship research that is both academically sound and practically relevant
Research Methodology: Conceptual framework, illustrated with examples from prior publications
Main Findings: Introduces three criteria (importance, insight, impact) for designing “translatable” research that can be disseminated beyond academic circles; argues that entrepreneurship research should aim for practical relevance from the start.
Citation: Waldron, T.L., McMullen, J.S., Newbert, S.L., Payne, G.T., & York, J.G. (2025). Bold, broad, rigorous, and…relevant? Designing entrepreneurship research for translation. Journal of Business Venturing, 40, 106511. Link
The authors point out that very few entrepreneurs are spending their evenings browsing the Journal of Business Venturing. Instead, translation happens through other channels – think open-access sites like EIX, or magazines like Inc. and Forbes. By designing for translation, research can reach millions rather than dozens.
This is not, the authors emphasise, a call to abandon rigour however. Bold theorising, broad relevance across contexts, and careful methodological work still remain the non-negotiable backbone of good scholarship. What they argue instead is that rigour and relevance should be seen as complementary rather than competing values. A study designed to be practically meaningful does not have to compromise its theoretical depth; in fact, thinking early about how findings might be translated can sharpen the clarity and focus of the research itself.
The practical landscape may also be changing in ways that support this shift, since universities are beginning to pay closer attention to how research travels beyond the academy. Indicators such as practitioner articles, policy engagement, media presence, and knowledge exchange activities are starting to appear in tenure and promotion reviews. In other words, translation is moving from “extra credit” to part of the official scorecard. This doesn’t mean every paper must read like a how-to manual for entrepreneurs, but it does mean that research with both rigour and relevance may increasingly be rewarded, rather than treated as a nice but unnecessary add-on.
In the end, this paper is both a critique and a roadmap. It gently roasts academia’s obsession with publishing for itself, but it also offers a workable checklist for producing scholarship that actually helps the people it studies. Which, you could argue, is why most of us got into this field in the first place.
