Editorial—Understanding before celebrating: Entrepreneurship beyond imitation, certainty, and comfort

In an era marked by permanent disruption, accelerated technological change, and growing uncertainty, entrepreneurship research faces a decisive challenge: whether to merely replicate dominant narratives or to interrogate them critically, exposing their limits, paradoxes, and unintended consequences.This issue of the Journal of Entrepreneurial Researchers deliberately chooses the second path.The contributions in this issue move beyond celebratory or deficit-based narratives, offering critical and empirically grounded analyses of entrepreneurship as a complex, context-dependent, and systemically embedded phenomenon. Entrepreneurship in Low-Density Territories: From "Exceptions" to TheoryA further reason this stance matters is that much of entrepreneurship and innovation scholarship has been forged in high-density environments, with abundant venture capital, large proximate markets, and thick institutional networks.Yet an increasing share of entrepreneurial reality unfolds elsewhere: in small economies, remote islands, peripheral regions, and low-density ecosystems where constraints are structural rather than temporary.These territories are too often treated as marginal cases, where the task is merely to "adapt" models imported from hegemonic centres.The journal's mission is different: to treat low-density contexts not as a deficit, but as an analytical frontier, one that can generate concepts, evidence, and policy insights with broader relevance.In such settings, isolation, resource constraints, brain drain pressures, and market thinness do not simply reduce opportunity; they reshape the very mechanisms through which entrepreneurial resilience, innovation pathways, and sustainable value creation emerge (Collins & Murtagh, 2025).