Career experience and its association with entrepreneurial knowledge

In English Entrepreneurship researchers have recently showed an increasing interest in understanding how individuals develop ‘entrepreneurial knowledge’, which is generally referred to as knowledge facilitating the recognition of new venture opportunities and the organizing and managing of new ventures. In this paper, we examine to what extent prior career experience matter is associated with the development of entrepreneurial knowledge. Based on an analysis of 291 entrepreneurs we provide a novel insight into how different kind of career experience lead to different kind of entrepreneurial knowledge. In sum, the findings give empirical support for our conceptual arguments based on experiential learning theory of the need to distinguish between the two concepts “experience” and “knowledge” in research on entrepreneurial learning.