Bootstrapping Business Start-ups: Entrepreneurship Literature, Textbooks and Teaching Practices versus Current Business Practices

Existing scholarly research on bootstrapping is limited, despite the widespread use of bootstrapping strategies in actual practice among start-up entrepreneurs. Popular academic textbooks used in college and university entrepreneurship courses seldom provide in-depth coverage of bootstrapping; many devote just a few paragraphs or pages to the subject. In sharp contrast to the coverage given in these textbooks, bootstrapping in its various forms has been advocated in, and documented by, the popular business press as a widespread phenomenon. Given that textbooks in any established discipline often draw heavily upon that discipline’s existing body of literature, it is not surprising that a lack of formal research by members of the entrepreneurship scholarly community reflects the possibility that textbooks, and courses (if they are based on those textbooks), may be out-of-step with entrepreneurial reality