Entrepreneurship, innovation and performance: Why context matters

The paper is aimed to analyze, under a theoretical point of view, challenges in individuating innovative new entrepreneurial business ventures and start-ups and measuring their performance. Entrepreneurship has been widely studied during the last decades, however empirical findings in assessing performance are often contradictory to one another. Moreover several studies on entrepreneurship neglect analyzing the role of context in which entrepreneurial activity is carried on and, conversely, the impact that entrepreneurial activity has on its contexts (business, social, cultural and institutional one) of reference. Here we suggest some directions for contextualizing entrepreneurship studies, namely about assessing and measuring performance.