The phenomenological method in entrepreneurship

Abstract

There is a lot of research on entrepreneurship but most of them focus on the external factors of entrepreneurship. Very few researches investigate the internal factors of an entrepreneur such as their own lived experiences. Understanding entrepreneurship means knowing deeper about their concept and meaning about it. The essence of entrepreneurship emerges from the real and true entrepreneurs, those who have their lived experiences. It is in line with the phenomenology, which tries to illuminate and identify through the people’s perception. The world and reality has its meaning through a person who experiences it. Every single person has his own concept about the world. It is applied also to entrepreneurship. The meaning itself will drive and motivate an entrepreneur to start a firm. Entrepreneurial activity has a purpose. To uncover the meaning, a researcher should emerge and go deeper to the lived experience of the entrepreneurs and use their stories as the main source of information without any influence and preconceptions of the researcher. In this paper, the writer is going to explain phenomenology as a research method and why it is suitable in doing research on entrepreneurship.