Given that replication studies are important for theory building, theory testing, knowledge accumulation, and domain legitimacy, we attempted to replicate 19 seminal studies of new venture emergence that used PSED-type data; only six attempts were successful. Our humbling experience highlights how changes at the author, journal, and institutional levels—indeed, a communal effort—can encourage, facilitate, and expedite replication studies. We provide entrepreneurship scholars with ten best practices for conducting replication studies, as well as recommendations to other stakeholders to steer away from the replication “crisis” plaguing other research domains. As they say, it takes a village.
We challenge a stream of thought that focuses on drawing what we see as a frivolous contrast between creation and discovery view of entrepreneurship. Its detachment from the empirical world is tantamount to theoretical “fetishism”. We see opportunities as emergent structures, with ontologically real components, epistemologically real functional relationships, and requiring real human actions and interactions to come to fruition. This calls for building theory based on the strengths of both discovery and creation assumptions.
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