PIONEERS IN ENTREPRENEURSHIP RESEARCH H. LANDSTROM Lund University School of Economics and Management, Sweden 1. INTRODUCTION Over the last few decades, entrepreneurship has been a "hot topic" in society as well as in education and academic research. Today, extensive educational activities focusing on entrepreneurship are taking place in universities. Research within this field has grown exponentially, the number of positions and chairs in entrepreneurship has increased dramatically, and Ph.D. programmes specialising in entrepreneurship have been introduced at various universities. On the other hand, entrepreneurship research has been criticized and the progress of the research called into question. For example, concerns have been raised with regards to: uncertainty in the domain of entrepreneurship research (Shane & Venkataraman, 2000), the presence of too many "stakeholders" in the field with diverse interests and expectations in entrepreneurship research (Blackburn, 2001), the transience of the field with a number of researchers only temporarily staying in the field (Landstrom, 2001) and finally, the highly individualistic nature of the field with a low people-to-problem ratio (Becher, 1989), i.e. the number of questions that can be posed is more or less unlimited, while the number of researchers concerned with each question is rather small. As a result, entrepreneurship research has become highly eclectic. The level of "convergence" within the field is low — old topics are discarded in favour of new ones — or, as Gregoire, Dery and Bechard (2001) expressed it, "entrepreneurship research appears less characterized by a dominant paradigm as by successive pockets of convergence". Experience from the history of science shows that, in this emerging phase, individual researchers play an important role in the development of the research field. In 1997, Aldrich and Baker stated that "Those researchers who produce research that creates an interest among others to build on their work shape emerging fields of research." In this paper I will emphasize the importance of pioneer researchers in entrepreneurship research and their role in the development of the research field and in the accumulation of knowledge. I will argue that the interest in entrepreneurs and entrepreneurship among researchers has a long history, that this interest seems to surface at different times — we can call these periods "swarms" of entrepreneurship research — and that these "swarms" are linked to economic development in society. In addition, during each "swarm" of entrepreneurship research, we can identify individual researchers — pioneers — who have produced path- breaking ideas about entrepreneurship. However, entrepreneurship research today seems