| For at least the past 20 years, there has been an ongoing debate between scientific rigor and practical relevance in academic research, causing a disconnect between academics and entrepreneurs. Instead of an either-or debate, we explore innovative modes of practice-inspired academic research, by creating a space in which researchers and practitioners collaboratively identify and collectively explore meaningful research questions - research questions that will be useful to entrepreneurs in practice and publishable in global research journals. This PDW will actively demonstrate how to research opportunities can be discovered/created through the same customer discovery and design thinking processes that we teach our entrepreneurship students. At the end of this PDW, scholars will have designed a research project inspired by practicing entrepreneurs. Furthermore, as a scholarly community, we will also brainstorm how to best publish this practice inspired-research. To build the discussion, the workshop features a panel of practicing entrepreneurs, VCs, and incubator managers from the Boston area who will raise a set of questions that are important to them and for which they would like answers. The academic moderators will ask questions based on what is known from research to further refine the research questions and work with participants in small groups to describe a set of studies that might help answer these questions. Groups will share plans-of-study and refine through audience discussion. The goal is to describe avenues of inquiry that will solve practical questions facing entrepreneurs and result in theory-driven empirical advances that can be published in top entrepreneurship outlets. |