Entrepreneurship’s Creation School and Its Comparison-Based Approach: Assessing the Lessons for Theory’s Progression

The creation school of opportunity formation is a relatively new partial theory of entrepreneurship built upon a relatively new approach to theorizing. Given their significant respective impacts, we critically evaluate both that school and that approach to better understand their respective values to theorizing. We apply a comprehensive, critical framework to evaluate the creation school. We determine that it is not yet a theory, but that it raises several important theoretical questions, from the origins of valuable heterogeneity to which meta-heuristics should be assumed and to what types of uncertainty are involved in entrepreneurial opportunities. We then describe its comparison-based approach for theorizing, delineating it from similar approaches that also contrast against the given benchmark ideas in a field, to determine its benefits and costs to advancing the modeling of phenomena. We determine that this new approach differs from problematization and constrastivity; instead of developing assumptions from induction, it uses a strawman to simply assert them. We finish by discussing the implications for how we can take more control over what kinds of theories affect the definition, and the legitimacy earned, in important fields of research like entrepreneurship.