Empathy is a frequently invoked construct in the entrepreneurship literature to study a wide range of issues such as opportunity recognition and identification, novel ideation, entrepreneurial pitching success, social entrepreneurial intentions and motivations and entrepreneurial education. In this literature review, we catalog the studies and bring out the different conceptualizations, related concepts, measure and use of empathy in entrepreneurship research. The development of a specific construct such as entrepreneurial empathy is recommended. We describe the problems in the extant literature and recommend future research directions that take empathy beyond the nascent stages of the entrepreneurship process.
