Research statement

Unlocking the full potential of digital footprints for entrepreneurship research

When entrepreneurs and new ventures take action in digital spaces, fine-grained time-stamped recordings, namely digital footprints, result from these encounters (Golder & Macy, 2014). For example, web surfing logs, transaction records, images and videos, GPS locations, media playlists, voice and video call records, and social media texts or e-mails are specific digital footprint types (Kosinski et al., 2016). The availability of enormous samples of these footprints, paired with computational power and sophisticated methods, opens up exciting new possibilities to gain a deeper understanding of entrepreneurial activities (Obschonka & Audretsch, 2020; Prüfer & Prüfer, 2020). For example, digital footprints allow a deeper understanding of how entrepreneurs can acquire support and resources (e.g., Barberá-Tomás et al., 2019; Jiang et al., 2019; Taeuscher & Rothe, 2021).

However, entrepreneurship research seems unprepared and, most likely, overwhelmed by the new advancements around digital footprints (Obschonka & Audretsch, 2020). Consequently, Obschonka and Audretsch (2020, p. 532) call for future research to "unlock the full potential of social media and other digital footprints for entrepreneurship research." In light of this, my research endeavors to leverage the latent insights incorporated in these footprints, aiming to offer a richer, more dynamic, and more complex perspective on the stimuli, processes, and enablers of entrepreneurial activities. To achieve this, my work is based on three pillars – digital cultural artifacts of entrepreneurs, socio-materiality of entrepreneurship, and digital external enablement of entrepreneurship.