How Does Entrepreneurship Go Beyond Technology Commercialization and Economic Development to Driving Social Innovation and Human Development?
One could argue that Bill Gates and Pierre Omidyar have done as much if not more for social change and human development than Turing, von Neumann, Mother Teresa, or Nelson Mandela. Yet there is an important difference. The latter are necessary but insufficient, the former sufficient but unnecessary. Turing and von Neumann were necessary to create computers, but neither computers nor electronic auction sites were necessary for human development. Yet sweeping social changes resulting in a variety of new possibilities for human development resulted from the products of eBay and Microsoft. Similarly, one cannot imagine the end of apartheid or the care of lepers without Mandela and Mother Teresa even if they could not have accomplished these alone. But one can imagine climate change problems being resolved through a variety of commercially viable renewable energy products each of which may not be necessary in itself. Entrepreneurs operate in and continually create a world in which no particular set of conditions is necessary for success and progress. Their job is to implement sufficient even if unnecessary conditions instead. Each solution they implement may be local and temporary, but successful solutions are usually spatially and temporally stable enough and profitable enough for us to move the goalpost to a new threshold of human aspiration.
One might argue that whether one emphasized the role of necessary but insufficient causes such as those embodied in heroic individuals or the sufficient but unnecessary solutions offered by a method such as the entrepreneurial method is a matter of one's worldview. But the choice of worldview makes a real difference in the world. And therefore, which worldview we adopt in formulating policies and designing pedagogy is not something we can leave entirely to individual scholars' subjective viewpoints. It is necessary to build on the variety enabled by such subjectivity, but an intersubjective consensus is crucial and worth striving for if we are to build on the potential offered by the thesis we are advocating here--namely to move beyond entrepreneurship as a phenomenon to extracting the principles and techniques comprising its method and making them widely available as part of basic education.
In social science, it is customary to regret the difficulty of finding sufficient conditions that guarantee the achievement of valued objectives, even as we discover necessary conditions upon which we ought to build our solutions. Utopias are notoriously hard to come by and impossible to sustain once found. The optimal social choice problem in economics is a case in point. The Nobel prize winning economist, Kenneth Arrow proved the impossibility of creating a system that would guarantee optimal social choice (Arrow, 1951). One inference we can draw from the theorem is that that mysterious and elusive thing called human "judgment" is and will always be inevitable in our efforts to achieving better social choice. On the one hand, this is cause for dismay, but on the other, it may be cause for real hope. Another Nobel laureate, Amartya Sen, showed the feasibility of achieving local optima with a little bit of effort at getting sufficient numbers of people on the same page (Sen, 1999). Others have also contributed to the optimism. Lindblom, for example, provided a marginal mechanism that could lead (or in his words "muddle through") to better choices even in the face of overall disagreement on larger principles (Lindblom, 1959).
Studies of entrepreneurial action offer a procedural rationality for accomplishing such local coherences leading to spatially and temporally limited optima (Simon, 1978). Such optima provide sufficiently stable conditions that enable human progress. Progress can include building on past successes as well as tearing down and reshaping parts of the present that do not work well. Which to do when is decided through the kaleidic dance of evolving stakeholder networks of varying sizes that implement the entrepreneurial process we have been describing. Entrepreneurial action, our studies show, is above all, interaction--interaction over time, between stakeholders, and through local transformations of every kind of environment imaginable. The procedural rationality embodied in these interactions not only reshapes economic and social landscapes, it reconstitutes individual preferences and values, making over everything from utility functions to cultural identities. Only by conceptualizing entrepreneurship as a method can we hope to push its uses beyond technology commercialization and economic development and put it to work to build social innovations that make a positive difference in human development.
In the face of such a radical and transformative process such as the one propelled by this larger view of the entrepreneurial method, how can we distinguish a for-profit venture from other kinds of endeavors?
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