Perceived Environmental Uncertainty for Startups: A Note on Entrepreneurship Research from an Indian Perspective

In an entrepreneurship environment, understanding uncertainty is critical to startups because it is directly related to the context of decision making. In an emerging country such as India, uncertainties are more predominant due to the very nature of the emerging country, which is characterized by an underdeveloped institutional setup, a lack of protection for legal and intellectual property rights, underdeveloped factor markets, and high transaction costs. In this article, a systematic review of the existing literature on environment and uncertainty in an entrepreneurial, emerging-economy context identifies a gap of a new scale for perceived environmental uncertainty. Three primary contributions are made by this research. First, a literature review for existing uncertainty scales and their evaluation in the context of emerging countries is provided. Second, the research identifies a gap in the uncertainty measurement literature that is relevant to emerging economies. Finally, this study proposes a future research scope that can bridge the identified gap by exploring the factors of uncertainty in emerging countries.