L'entrepreneur ambitieux : état des lieux et perspectives

In this article, we use the epistemological triptych of Verstraete (2008) to understand the trajectory of an emerging research topic, the so-called “ambitious entrepreneurs”, from the first use of the label in 2001, up to the recent studies about the link between growth expectation and macro-economic growth. We identify a set of relevant contributions and show the privileged choices that have been made by authors from our inventory. After describing the set of contributions and their theoretical anchoring, we focus on “what” is worth being theorized, or in other words the defintion of the ambitious entrepreneur in the extant literature and the research questions that are deemed relevant in the set of identifed contributions ; “how” it is theorized, or in other words the methods that are deemed adequate to investigate the ambitious entrepreneur ; and “for whom” it is theorized, or in other words the privileged audience of the research. Accordingly, we show the strengths and limitations of such a trajectory and suggest ways to face them in future research.