**10. Conclusions**

We have used this forum to provoke because we care about the progress in our field. We believe that we need more debates over dominant approaches because challenges to long-standing models are simply not as prevalent as they should be (Renwick et al. 2019). Unchallenged dominance should not exist because it often turns theorizing into a business. To be a better field, we need the maintenance of its idea inventory to be as strong as initial gatekeeping. We should not require a fully-formed better model to displace a bad or outdated model; such an artificial hurdle simply stifles new ideas that are not ye<sup>t</sup> fleshed out. We need to be better decision-makers ourselves in order to provide continuously improving and self-critical understandings of entrepreneurial decision-making so that those real entrepreneurs can also improve. Additionally, we need to more aggressively and more actively research rather than simply being content with reporting on what appear to be divergent or leading-edge behaviors.

Science requires the critique of dominant models. Such critiques o ffer the basis to identify places for improvement, to argue for proposed specific improvements, and to warn of concerns from applying prescriptions that rely on those models' current weaknesses and flaws. Such post-publication gate-keeping is crucial for a young field like entrepreneurship. We gate-keep to restrict the ideas that our field publishes, legitimizes, and hopes will positively influence practice. We do so because we believe that no benefit arises from accepting ideas that are unproven, false, misleading, incoherent, amoral, illogical, insu fficient, poorly-explained, poorly-structured, trivial, repetitive, obvious, or useless. Unfortunately, we do not have a good (post-publication) mechanism for mitigating harms that could come from adhering to once-accepted ideas17. We have no formal process for 'theory removal' (and whatever it is that does exist is severely broken due to conflicts of interest—Arend 2019).

We have taken this opportunity to move our science forward by first critiquing two dominant approaches, and then by outlining three di fferent alternative approaches (all of which that do what the dominant approaches do not while retaining the common underlying logic of di fferentiated value-creation). There are many further alternatives worth exploring that deserve the journal pages and follow-on testing and analysis more than the two approaches that have dominated over the last two

<sup>16</sup> We sugges<sup>t</sup> that the best way to manage the meta-challenges described is to: first, break it down into recognizable pieces—i.e., the resources, partners and transactions; second, consider these pieces in combinations, optimizing, and evaluating them as possible (and interdependent) sub-systems; and, third, do this over several possible dynamic, evolving future scenarios, where sequencing has effects.

<sup>17</sup> Failing to attend to the maintenance of the knowledge base of our field (e.g., by never removing ineffective or detrimental ideas) seems antithetical to a field's health, let alone its legitimacy. In fact, it is illegitimate for a younger field that has been improving its research quality to be rejecting new papers that do not live up to that higher quality while retaining old papers that also do not. The failure to put any effort into maintenance of the field's ideas is hypocritical given how very much effort we put into initial gatekeeping of ideas. We give peer editors and reviewers incredible power despite the potential conflicts of interest involved, despite the inexplicable utter lack of transparency involved (e.g., in how reviewers are assigned), despite an imperfect double-blind basis, and most often despite no guarantee that any underlying empirical data is valid (as most of it is primary and proprietary). We tolerate the standards imposed by the gatekeepers, regardless of the full knowledge that papers that should not have been accepted are and papers that should have been accepted are not. Yet, we balk at the mere suggestion that some entity should be responsible for correcting such errors or that peers should be held accountable for allowing them. Instead, we hold to the idea that the market will make the corrections naturally, even while we study a phenomenon that is only made possible due to market failures (Venkataraman 1997). Let us be clear, our 'market for ideas' is beset with failure. Call it Arend's Law—*that every self-regulated market will eventually drift towards corruption; and, that drift will accelerate as the market expands* (in the number of participants and the size of the stakes involved).

decades, and that remain flawed and incomplete. Our hope is that our peers, editors, and audiences interested in entrepreneurial decision-making research will push harder to realize that that diversity of thought is what makes us stronger.

**Funding:** This research received no external funding.

**Conflicts of Interest:** The author declares no conflict of interest.
