Why Entrepreneurship Research Focuses Too Much on Unicorns

Abstract

Alongside the business media, academic research on entrepreneurship has been consumed by Silicon Valley mania, caught up for decades in the wild hype over startup "unicorns" and "gazelles."In an analysis of top entrepreneurship journals, our results show a consistent bias toward high-capitalization businesses and signs that interest in these cases has picked up substantially over the past decade.Unfortunately, this level of interest doesn't match the reality of these high-capitalization events.Going public and raising venture capital funding are rare events in the world of entrepreneurship and growing even rarer.In December of 1996, the number of publicly traded companies in the US reached its peak at 8,025.Over the next 20 years, that number dropped 46%. Between 2001 and 2016, just over 100 US firms went public each year.IPOs have suffered waves of setbacks, including those associated with the dot-com bubble, the Great Recession, and the current climate of global uncertainty.In addition, VC deals have been flat since 2001.Even so, the popular and academic infatuation with highcapitalization startups persists.

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