Design principles for entrepreneurial validation: An integrative review from a design science perspective

Entrepreneurial validation is a central activity in entrepreneurship through which entrepreneurs collect and analyse information to validate assumptions about a potential market's needs, the appropriateness of the proposed solution, and/or the viability of the business model. Although research on entrepreneurial validation is developing, knowledge remains fragmented across scholarly and practitioner literatures, resulting in limited coherence and a lack of evidence-based guidance for entrepreneurs. Drawing on design science, we employ the Context-Agency-Mechanism-Outcome (CAMO) framework to integrate research on entrepreneurial validation from different fields and synthesise the empirical findings into four design principles. We contribute by organising concepts that prior literature has tended to conflate or treat interchangeably, setting a new research agenda, and extending design knowledge through the development of evidence-based design principles of entrepreneurial validation. Overall, we advance evidence-based entrepreneurship by strengthening entrepreneurial validation's theoretical foundations and offering practitioners an initial, provisional step towards a more actionable, empirically grounded validation practice.