Mapping the conceptual structure of entrepreneurship knowledge in Iran: A co-word Analysis

Objective: Entrepreneurship means starting and managing a new business that may lead to value creation, employment, and innovation. Entrepreneurship research includes the scientific and promotional activities of researchers in this field to explain, investigate, and analyze various entrepreneurial and economic elements and dimensions related to management and other business issues. The field of entrepreneurship in Iran has also attracted the attention of organizational and individual researchers. The boom in this field has created the need to study the research structure from a conceptual point of view using scientometric techniques. Therefore, in the current research, the research activities of this field are examined in the form of articles to draw a structure to evaluate the concepts and compare it with what has been done at the international level. In the case of this research, seeks to answer these two basic questions: What is happening in the field of entrepreneurship research in Iran? And what conceptual dimensions have researchers paid attention to?
Methods: This research is practical in terms of the purpose. To analyze the intellectual structure concept of knowledge in the field of Entrepreneurship, a combination of scientometric methods, information clustering, and network analysis were used. The research tools include scientometric software such as: "Ravar_matrix, Ucinet, NetDraw, and VOSviewer”. The research community includes all articles in the field of entrepreneurship in domestic magazines from 1994 to October 2023. (1373-1402).
Results: The findings indicated that in the last two decades, research in the field of entrepreneurship in Iran has grown significantly and many researchers have played a role in its scientific productions. The results related to co-word Analysis showed that more than 3 thousand concepts were mentioned in the research of this field in Iran and the concepts of "organizational entrepreneurship, entrepreneurship education, and innovation" were the most frequent among all concepts. Also, the co-word pairs "entrepreneurship-organization","entrepreneurship-development"and entrepreneurship-village" had the most co-occurrences. In addition, the concepts of social entrepreneurship, entrepreneurship, and academic entrepreneurship were identified as emerging concepts in research. The results related to clustering showed that the knowledge of this field in Iran consists of 7 main clusters. The first cluster (entrepreneurship related to the organization or organizational entrepreneurship), the second cluster: (expansion and development of entrepreneurship), and the third cluster (academic and knowledge-based entrepreneurship) are ranked first to third in terms of the number of concepts, respectively. Other clusters, respectively, in the fourth cluster (empowerment of entrepreneurship in the community (social entrepreneurship) 11 concepts, the fifth cluster (the role of creativity and innovation and risk-taking in entrepreneurship and businesses) 10 concepts, the sixth cluster (the role of information and communication technology and knowledge-based companies) 10 concepts, and in the seventh cluster (culture, individual and environmental factors in the field of entrepreneurship (individual entrepreneurship)) 7 concepts have been formed. Conceptual network analysis indicates that the concepts of this field have many relationships and the average density of the network is .2671 which means that the network is relatively dense. This number means that about 26% of the connections are formed in the network and somehow the conceptual network of entrepreneurship in Iran is dense. Also, the concepts of "organizational entrepreneurship, innovation, rural entrepreneurship, entrepreneurship development, and entrepreneurship education" have a powerful and high-density network.
Conclusion: Solving the problems of societies depends on the creation of new energies with an entrepreneurial approach. Therefore, the academic sector of the country, as the main base for the production and dissemination of entrepreneurial knowledge, is of special importance in the process of development and progress of research activities in this knowledge-oriented field. Undoubtedly, solving the ever-increasing problems of societies, university education, and the impact of information technology have had an impact on the growth of research in the field of entrepreneurship in Iran. The results of this research provided a big picture of the issues raised in the research of this field. Specifically; According to the articles in this field, the knowledge clusters of entrepreneurship in Iran are not far from what is at the global level, and Iranian researchers have also paid attention to the areas prone to entrepreneurship in their research. Also, according to the density number of the network, it can be concluded that the concepts have an acceptable relationship with each other and there is a kind of conceptual convergence in entrepreneurship research. This research was carried out in response to the research proposal of Khaseh et al. (2017). It is hoped that the officials, curators, and researchers who work for the development of this field will use the results of this research.