Bold, broad, rigorous, and…relevant? Designing entrepreneurship research for translation

Entrepreneurship research should strive for relevance—the potential to influence the thoughts, decisions, and actions of those who practice entrepreneurship. Despite the Journal of Business Venturing’s (JBV) efforts to foster relevance, submissions often fail to demonstrate their potential for practical usefulness. Addressing this problem involves making practical relevance a guiding principle of research design that complements traditional academic standards for publishing in JBV. It also involves forgoing attempts to make research directly usable by practitioners, who rarely read scholarly journals like JBV, in favor of enhancing its suitability for translation in outlets intended for those audiences. We introduce three design criteria—importance, insight, and impact—to guide the creation of translatable research that honors traditional academic standards. Our discussion touches on what the design criteria mean, how they make research translatable, how scholars can satisfy them, what they look like in exemplar JBV publications, and why they matter now. Indeed, designing research with practical importance, insight, and impact in mind may yield academic contributions more suitable for dissemination beyond academic circles, positioning entrepreneurship research to achieve practical relevance. • Entrepreneurship research should aim to be relevant to practitioners. • Practitioners rarely (if ever) read research in scholarly journals like JBV . • Achieving relevance depends on research's translation in practitioner outlets. • Three design criteria—importance, insight, impact—can make research translatable. • Key environmental changes increase the urgency of producing such research.