The future is in the past: A framework for the Marketing-Entrepreneurship Interface (MEI)

In this article, we review milestones in the 30+ year history of conceptualizations of the Marketing-Entrepreneurship Interface (MEI) in order to develop an overdue unified framework. This framework finally achieves the original mission of the “Charleston Summit” - to create a research framework for the MEI. We update the 4-perspectives view proposed by Hansen and Eggers (2010). In particular, we retain the first perspective, which is the commonalities between the domains of marketing and entrepreneurship, as is. In updating the perspectives, we define the fourth perspective as entrepreneurial and SME marketing and we combine the second and third perspectives into a single framework. We review some major concepts within the two domains and provide numerous suggestions for future research that emerge from the framework. Our conceptualization of the MEI creates a vast array of research possibilities for MEI scholars old and new.