Entrepreneurship research would benefit from a mechanism gathering activity data from a large number of entrepreneurial initiatives. This paper starts by building on Zott and Amit’s activity system perspective to introduce a holistic activity model of entrepreneurship containing seven steps and 29 elements. This model has been used by 13,927 entrepreneurial projects between the years of 2015 to 2022. By applying a digital, non-participant observation method, this led to the development of a dataset containing information on 935,745 activities. We use three concrete research cases to exemplify how this model, method and dataset can be utilized for bringing research on entrepreneurial activities forward.