This chapter is a result of long-standing interest in three different research areas that rarely intersect or are even seen as of mutual interest: biography, entrepreneurship and innovation. The reasons why biographical research and entrepreneurial research have rarely engaged in an effort of interdisciplinary communication are easy to identify. Entrepreneurial research is a branch of business economics that specialises in the founding of new ventures, mainly small businesses (Gartner, 1985), and in particular the problems of legitimisation that such new ventures encounter as they seek to gain trust among potential stakeholders and business partners (Gartner, 1990; Gartner et al, 1992; Aldrich, 1999). These difficulties, which can be summarised as the ‘liability of the new’ (Stinchcombe, 1965) put organisational issues related to strategies for overcoming the assumed liability of the new at the centre of business-oriented research. This explains why interest in the role of the person in the founding of new ventures is fading (Aldrich, 1989).

Putting biography into analyses of migrant entrepreneurship

William Garnter (1989, p 47), writing from a business economics point of view, has criticised current entrepreneurial research, laconically stating that, “Who is an entrepreneur is the wrong question”. Such a position certainly does not reach out to what is the main assumption of biographical research, namely that a detailed knowledge of a person's life history matters and gives researchers a privileged access to the type of life worlds in which reflexive social agents attempt to construct meaning, negotiate identity and choose appropriate strategies of adaptation (Alheit, 1994; Kupferberg, 1995; Horsdal, 1999). Knowing who the entrepreneur is, is far from irrelevant from the point of view of a biographical approach; indeed, it must be the starting point for any meaningful analysis of entrepreneurial phenomena (Kupferberg, 1998, 2002).

Interestingly, biographical research is not the only sub-discipline that entrepreneurial research has declared to be non grata. The same enmity or conspicuous indifference can be found, although for somewhat different reasons, among entrepreneurial researchers towards innovation research (Tidd et al, 1997). This is strange, given that we dealing here with two different branches within business economics. There might be several possible reasons why this is the case, for example, academic specialisation aggravated by internal competition for limited resources (financial and social capital) or attempts to achieve a more favourable balance in terms of educational programmes and academic prestige (cultural and symbolic capital).