The role and understanding of empathy in entrepreneurial engineering: a systematic literature review.

This study reviews how empathy and its role are conceptualised in entrepreneurial and engineering literature. Our findings can then be used as a foundation for developing contextual and theoretical models of empathy for entrepreneurial engineering. These models will help create teaching practices and approaches to prepare empathic entrepreneurial engineers. The study deployed a systematic literature review of 40 papers from engineering and entrepreneurship fields, obtained from the Scopus and Web of Science databases. The analysis involved three phases. First, a descriptive analysis of research on empathy in entrepreneurship and engineering was completed, followed by a content analysis focusing on definitions and the role of the empathy phenomenon and a co-citation analysis to identify commonly cited authors. The results of this literature review demonstrate different indicators that reflect the current state of empathy research and study trajectories of this phenomenon in the fields of engineering and entrepreneurship. These indicators include the number of papers related to empathy in engineering and entrepreneurship literature by year of publication, definitions of empathy and keywords used in analysed literature as well as list of authors and their area of interests within empathy research. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]