Andreas Rauch’s paper was among the three most cited publications in Entrepreneurship Theory and Practice in the decade 2009 to 2019, with more than 3,200 citations. The paper was co-authored by Johan Wiklund, George Lumpkin, and Michael Frese. It is a testimonial of outstanding scholarship, which is possibly due to three issues: First, his publication was the first one that could show that the relationship between entrepreneurial orientation and performance is comparatively high. The effect size across studies is much higher than, for example, the relationship between innovation and performance or the relationship between planning and performance. It was obvious that we identified an important relationship in the domain of entrepreneurship and maybe the strongest relationship uncovered so far because entrepreneurial orientation goes directly at the heart of entrepreneurship. Second, from their results it became obvious that there are third variables affecting the relationship between entrepreneurial orientation and firm performance. As a consequence, researchers started looking into such explanations. Finally, since the importance of the relationship is so obvious and since it was established across studies using meta-analysis the results suggest strong practice implications that firms should develop a strong entrepreneurial orientation. It also inspired a lot of researchers in business and entrepreneurship research to use the method of meta-analysis. To this end, their article was one of the first meta-analyses in business).
