A topic of growing interest in entrepreneurship research is how entrepreneurial ventures address grand challenges. This literature, we argue, tends to produce a panacea myth by suggesting that entrepreneurship is the universal remedy for existing social and environmental ills. Starting from the claim that the persuasive power or ‘stickiness’ of the panacea myth depends not only on what it explicitly says (in terms of ideas and beliefs) but also on what it leaves out, we suggest that the exclusion of explicitly political and holistic explanations of grand challenges such as Iris Marion Young's theory of structural injustice, which we use as an illustrative example, precipitates a ‘constitutive absence’ whose mythic function is to sanitize the image of entrepreneurship as the preferred solution to grand challenges. In an effort to denaturalize the panacea myth, we first identify three ‘figures of thought’ – coined ‘extrapolation fallacy,’ ‘political agnosticism,’ and ‘positive acculturation’ – that define the content of the panacea myth while simultaneously excluding theoretical concepts and frameworks, such as structural injustice, that conceptualize grand challenges as structural, multidetermined, and inherently political problems that are not necessarily amenable to stand-alone entrepreneurial approaches and solutions. Second, to loosen the grip of the panacea myth, we suggest rethinking entrepreneurship research in terms of who is involved, what methods are used, and how we talk about it. Taken together, these tactics create an opening in entrepreneurship research for a more complexity-sensitive and political understanding of grand challenges that cultivates a more humble and realistic depiction of entrepreneurship's problem-solving capacity.

创业研究中越来越受关注的一个话题是创业企业如何应对巨大的挑战。我们认为，这些文献倾向于通过暗示创业精神是解决现有社会和环境弊病的万能药来制造一种万能药的神话。万能药神话的说服力或“粘性”不仅取决于它明确表达的内容（在思想和信仰方面），而且还取决于它遗漏的内容，从这一主张出发，我们建议排除明确的政治和整体性因素。对重大挑战的解释，例如艾里斯·马里昂·杨（Iris Marion Young）的结构性不公正理论（我们将其用作说明性例子）引发了“本质性缺席”，其神话功能是净化创业精神作为应对重大挑战的首选解决方案的形象。为了使万能药神话非自然化，我们首先确定三种“思想形象”——创造的“外推谬误”、“政治不可知论”和“积极文化适应”——它们定义了万能药神话的内容，同时排除了理论概念和结构性不公正等框架将重大挑战概念化为结构性、多决定性和固有的政治问题，这些问题不一定适合独立的创业方法和解决方案。其次，为了摆脱万能药神话的束缚，我们建议重新思考创业研究的参与者、使用的方法以及我们如何谈论它。总而言之，这些策略为创业研究创造了一个机会，使人们对重大挑战有更加复杂性和政治性的理解，从而培养对创业解决问题能力的更加谦虚和现实的描述。