Evidence-Based versus Theory-And-Evidence-Based Approaches to Entrepreneurship: Evidence from a RCT with Tanzanian Entrepreneurs

Over the last two decades, there has been a growing academic and practitioner interest in the approaches entrepreneurs take to identify, evaluate, and pursue novel business opportunities. A focal tenet of this research is how entrepreneurs learn (e.g., by doing, by thinking, or by some combination of both) and what the effects of different approaches to learning are on entrepreneurial outcomes. For this symposium, we seek to continue a deep examination of entrepreneurial learning and decision making by bringing together four working papers that examine the use of learning by doing and thinking in empirical contexts and/or develop theoretical frameworks to understand the strengths, weaknesses, and trade-offs among different approaches to entrepreneurial action and learning. The papers in this presenter symposium use field experiments in developed or developing economy contexts, large scale case study analysis, or synthesis across recent theoretical advances in entrepreneurial learning.