Toward a Sustainable Conceptualization of Dependent Variables in Entrepreneurship Research Boyd Cohen, 1 * Brock Smith 1 and Ron Mitchell 2 1 Faculty of Business, The University of Victoria, BC, Canada 2 Rawls College of Business, Texas Tech University, Lubbock, TX, USA ABSTRACT Entrepreneurship researchers have yet to explore the full range variance that occurs in entrepreneurial value creation because we have focused almost exclusively on finan- cial performance as the dependent variable in our research. However, such arbitrary narrowness is not supported by research, which shows entrepreneurs to not focus exclusively on income maximization. Consistent with calls for an expanded view of the consequences of entrepreneurship, we develop a typology of entrepreneurship dependent variables that supports broadening the scope of entrepreneurship research to include economic, environmental and social value. Copyright © 2006 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd and ERP Environment. Received 22 March 2005; revised 30 June 2005; accepted 25 July 2005 Keywords: sustainable entrepreneurship; dependent variables; entrepreneurship research Introduction D EPENDENT VARIABLES SELECTED BY SCHOLARS FOR USE IN ENTREPRENEURSHIP RESEARCH HAVE focused on only part of the range of possible outcomes from new venture value creation strate- gies. Entrepreneurship researchers have thus been limited in their explanations of the full range variance that occurs in entrepreneurial value creation. In apparent disregard of important calls for an expansion of the dependent variable in entrepreneurship research (e.g. Venkataraman, 1997), and notwithstanding empirical findings showing other strong value motives (e.g. Amit et al., 2000), entre- preneurship research largely continues to pursue financial performance as its primary dependent vari- able, based on the somewhat narrow assumption that the motive for value creation is almost entirely restricted to profit maximization. Copyright © 2006 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd and ERP Environment *Correspondence to: Boyd Cohen, Assistant Professor, Faculty of Business, The University of Victoria, P.O. Box 1700 STN CSC, Victoria, BC V8W 2Y2, Canada. Email: bcohen@business.uvic.ca Business Strategy and the Environment Bus. Strat. Env. 17, 107–119 (2008) Published online 13 July 2006 in Wiley InterScience (www.interscience.wiley.com) DOI: 10.1002/bse.505