What we know about neurodivergent entrepreneurship matters. It can shape how we design support, teach entrepreneurship, build programmes, allocate funding, and inform policy.
But what if the picture we have is only partial?
In her new Journal of Business Venturing Insights article, Lucy Griffiths (Swansea University / Prifysgol Abertawe) turns the lens onto neurodivergent entrepreneurship research itself. Reviewing 48 articles, she asks not only what has research found, but how have the assumptions, methods and voices privileged by the field shaped what it has been possible to know?
The review identifies four interlocking patterns in the existing literature:
🧠 ADHD-centrism: 41 of the 48 articles focus wholly or primarily on ADHD, leaving many other neurodivergences comparatively underexplored.
📊 Methodological positivism: 34 of the 48 studies are quantitative or meta-analytic, meaning measurable symptoms and statistical relationships have largely shaped the evidence base.
🩺 Medical-model framing: neurodivergence is frequently approached through symptoms, deficits and diagnostic categories, often locating difference primarily within the individual.
🗣️ De-centring neurodivergent voices: only four studies centre neurodivergent entrepreneurs’ own perspectives, raising questions about whose interpretations have shaped what the field knows.
Griffiths therefore calls for a “second wave” of neurodivergent entrepreneurship research: a critical-interpretivist turn that complements existing research by bringing lived experience, structural context, insider positionality, phenomenological approaches, and neuroinclusive research design more centrally into the conversation.
The shift is not simply towards more knowledge, but towards different ways of producing it:
Measuring → Understanding
Categorising → Interpreting
Individualising → Contextualising
Speaking about → Listening with
And perhaps that leaves entrepreneurship researchers with a bigger question:
What might we discover when we make space for different ways of knowing?
📖 Read the full article here: https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/abs/pii/S2352673426000673
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