Issue to be Considered for Entrepreneurship -4

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?

Issue to be Considered for Entrepreneurship -3

Who Is Not a Potential Entrepreneur?

If the category we call entrepreneurs includes not only those who seek and find opportunities but also those who make them almost serendipitously from readily available bits and pieces, and moreover, if we include their self-selected stakeholders who help transform the amorphous vision into valuable new ends through commitments contingent on the unexpected, who could we exclude from the category of potential entrepreneurs? The answer simply is: no one. Therefore, in our efforts to educate, legislate, and acculturate an entrepreneurial society, we may want to follow the precedent offered by the scientific method, not treating science only as a profession although it can be; instead treating it as an essential part of basic education. That means starting in middle school or earlier and excluding no one. The appropriate arena for entrepreneurial education will then consist in a distinct set of reasoning and problem solving skills with or without specialized business tools of the kind found in formal business schools.

Entrepreneurship, in this view, becomes even more than a specific set of skills; it becomes a generalized method such as the scientific method--a form of reasoning and logic the exercise of which would be as useful a skill as arithmetic, reading, writing, and basic scientific reasoning (Sarasvathy, 2008). And at least as important as civic engagement, civil discourse and the critical development of moral and ethical judgment. Entrepreneurship, then, is not merely a career option or a fallback position in cases of employer downsizing or economic downturns; it comes to be seen as a widespread driver of social change (Weber, Heinze, & DeSoucey, 2008).

Issue to be Considered for Entrepreneurship -2

How Are Markets Made?

Received wisdom in economics suggests that markets exist either as obvious or latent demand and market competition acts as a discovery procedure to develop technological and other forms of innovation to provide solutions to both (Hayek, 1984). Historical evidence does not always support this for demand does not always pre-exist even in a latent or dormant form (Lancaster, 1971). Moreover, a market is more than demand and supply (Fligstein, 2002). Markets are complex webs of relationships and logistics involving the entire spectrum of organizational challenges from individual initiative to collective action (Olson, 1996). Neither theories of free markets nor governmental and institutional theories are sufficient to explain the coming into being of new markets. According to Santos and Eisenhardt (2009), entrepreneurs use "soft power" strategies to co-construct organizational boundaries in order to dominate nascent markets. Histories of well-known ventures from Wedgwood to Estee Lauder suggest that creativity, wile, and chutzpah have to combine with serendipity and endless extended efforts in creating and sustaining new social networks (Koehn, 2001). That is why most new markets are surprises--highly improbable and hence difficult to predict before they actually come to be (Sarasvathy & Dew, 2005).

Two sets of evidence attest to this: Negative evidence provided by the sheer abundance of failed predictions (including those by entrepreneurs whose own endeavors helped falsify their own predictions) and positive evidence from unanticipated new markets. Here is a list in no particular order:

Even entrepreneurs celebrated as prescient and visionary after the fact often had to build their markets brick by brick, long after the proverbial light bulb of discovery went off over their unsuspecting heads. When Howard Schultz came back from Italy wanting to build his first coffee shop based on Starbucks, the original founders of Starbucks would have none of it. At the turn of the twentieth century in India the Kirloskar brothers could not sell their six metal plows even though they clearly increased productivity tenfold over wooden plows. Not until they worked with social reformers and the independence movement to educate a large swathe of farmers on the links between economics and patriotism could they grow their venture into the enduring firm it is today. Edison had to learn similar lessons in marketing the incandescent bulb in the United States. Preachers inveighed against its use as the work of the devil--how else could the abominable separation of heat from light have been accomplished? (Baldwin, 2001). And Grameen Bank was no exception in having to change the world before it could grow its market for what might seem the easiest product to sell--uncollateralized loans--because Bangladeshis had a taboo against women touching money--literally (Yunus, 2009).

In most cases, successful entrepreneurs appear like visionaries after the fact, persistent, almost pig-headed visionaries at that, steadfast in the single-minded pursuit of their vision in the face of skeptic naysayers and in the absence of resources within their control (Tellis, Golder, & Christensen, 2001). But a microscope on their early actions highlights another story--one of doing the doable and stitching together a variety of stakeholder commitments, many from folks who self-selected into the process (2) in return for a shot at shaping the vision (Sarasvathy & Dew, 2005). Often neither entrepreneurs nor their stakeholders had quite articulated a coherent vision of the market until after it came to be. In fact, it is the co-creation of the vision, a vision that concurrently gets embodied into the components of the new market emerging from the process that is the primary result of the entrepreneurial process. Here the familiar story of uncommitted prospects haggling over a mouthwatering pie is replaced by the reality of self-selected stakeholders actively engaged in shaping committed ingredients into unanticipated new confections. So who is actually the "entrepreneur" in this process of market creation, if not the prescient, persistent visionary hero who makes it all happen against incredible odds?

Issue to be Considered for Entrepreneurship -1

What Do Entrepreneurs Do?

Over twenty years ago, Gartner (1988) made a compelling case for studying what entrepreneurs do rather than who they are--namely that they undertake activities leading to the creation of organizations. Since then, the field of entrepreneurship research has come to consider "opportunity" as the central construct of its distinctive domain (Venkataraman, 1997). For now, we can begin our exposition of the entrepreneurial method with the provisional assertion that entrepreneurs recognize, find and make opportunities (Alvarez & Barney, 2007; Sarasvathy, Dew, Velamuri, & Venkataraman, 2003). Conventional wisdom as well as a large portion of academic research has focused on how good entrepreneurs are at searching for opportunities and finding and exploiting them (Baron & Ensley, 2006; Erikson, 2001; Shane & Venkataraman, 2001; Singh, 2001). Which begs the question, of course, where all these opportunities come from in the first place? Who leaves the big bills on the sidewalk for the alert entrepreneur to find and cash in? Answers range from new developments in science and technology to the dynamics of the socio-economic environment including demographic, regulatory, and institutional changes (Shane, 2004). These answers, while quite correct in some cases, are far from complete. For (a) not all entrepreneurial opportunities are created through demographic, regulatory, and institutional changes--some are co-created through the entrepreneurial process itself; (b) in fact, some of those demographic, regulatory, and institutional changes themselves result from entrepreneurial drivers, conscious or unconscious, intentional or unintended; and (c) even when opportunities may originate in demographic, regulatory, and technological changes, they are subject to the Panglossian fallacy--namely that they can be claimed to pre-exist the process and deemed "discoverable" precisely because the process discovered them. Counterfactually, it is virtually impossible to prove the existence of opportunities that did not come to be. Finally, it is also possible to conceptualize opportunities in different ways so that what appears as discovered at one point in time may be shown to have been co-created at another

For example, there is mounting empirical evidence that opportunities are often created by the entrepreneurial process itself--in other words, entrepreneurs and their stakeholders often end up co-creating new opportunities that neither they nor those of us in their immediate periphery could or did anticipate (Read et al., 2009; Sarasvathy, 2008). What is more interesting is that the most experienced entrepreneurs explicitly implement such a co-creation process--that is, they act and behave in ways that generate and power this virtuous cycle (Read et al.). Entrepreneurial efforts thus generate a perpetual motion machine, as it were, that moves Adam Smith's invisible hand beyond static efficiency into an endless dynamic of new opportunities. But there is a kicker to this cornucopian process--namely, that the nature of these new opportunities is inherently unpredictable--even what counts as an "opportunity" becomes in a way difficult to define before it actually comes to be.

For example, what was the elevator pitch for Starbucks? Coffee consumption in the United States had been on a steady downward trend for almost two decades before Starbucks was created. Could one really argue that this was a market waiting to be tapped by an alert visionary? Nor was it an act of heroic individual creativity--Howard Schultz did not found the original Starbucks company nor was Starbucks the first specialty coffee shop. Peets Coffee was already a niche business in California. The tapestry of the Starbucks we know so well today was painstakingly stitched together from a variety of stakeholder inputs including those from customers, commercial artists, and community leaders who knowingly or unknowingly participated in a co-creation process that has transformed urban landscapes from Seattle to Ankara (Koehn, 2001).

How about Google? Clearly not the first commercially viable search engine--and certainly not the magnitude of success envisioned even by its own founders who were at one time eager to sell it for a million dollars. Luckily for them, there were no takers (Battelle, 2006; Vise, 2005). If we are to twist the Google story to fit our theories of latent demand, then we would be hard put to describe what is not a potential market. Our sidewalks will be strewn with big bills, or even constructed entirely out of stacks of currency that we only need pick up as we go (Kirzner, 1973, 2009; Olson, 1996). Surely we need a way out of this absurdity.

Future trends of Entrepreneurship

Introduction

Scientific progress often occurs through phenomena that do not "fit" dominant wisdom--be it the kink in the orbit of Mars that led to Kepler's laws or the Galapagos islands that necessitated The Origin of Species. Entrepreneurship, in our considered opinion, is proving to be such a beast. Over four decades of research have almost always led either to "mixed" results in terms of theories from other disciplines or have actually raised challenges to dominant wisdom in both the disciplines and the functional areas. Take for example, the evidence for and against psychological traits such as risk-propensity (Miner & Raju, 2004; Stewart & Roth, 2001) or the liability of newness, adolescence, and obsolescence (Bruderl & Schussler, 1990). Or the uneasy need for the notion of "institutional entrepreneur" in sociological approaches that otherwise seek to privilege structure over agency (Battilana, Leca, & Boxenbaum, 2009; Dimaggio, 1988). Or the futile struggles of economists to create a place for "The Prince of Denmark" in their otherwise powerful and persuasive morality play (Baumol, 1968; Schumpeter, 1942). Combine this with the growing trends in pedagogy and practice that have moved beyond for-profit firms into social, sustainable, and even public entrepreneurship. All of these cry out for us to confront the possibility that we might have made what philosophers call a "category error"--namely, putting a thing into a class to which it does not belong, or mistaking a larger set or meta-category for one of its constituent subsets (Ryle, 1949). (1)

What if we have been thinking about entrepreneurship the wrong way? What if we temporarily suspend our thinking of it as a sub-discipline of economics or management, or a subset of courses taught in business schools, and recast it as something as large as a social force--somewhat like democracy in the eighteenth century or the scientific method in the seventeenth? In fact, when we examine the history of the scientific method and its incorporation into basic education, the parallels are uncanny. Without getting mired in the philosophical debates surrounding the existence and usefulness of the scientific method, we simply use the name "scientific method" to capture the notion that the world can be systematically studied and understood in terms that do not include divine revelation or special mystical abilities. As the eminent cosmologist and science educator Carl Sagan explained it, key elements of this notion can be traced back to the craftsmen and merchants of Greece, prominent among them being Democritus (Sagan, 1983). However, it was only as recently as the sixteenth century that Francis Bacon urged the idea that the work of navigators, inventors, and craftsmen can be a model for scholars (Bacon, 2004). Eventually, through the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, the scientific method developed into the predominant and most reliable way to harness Nature's potential for the achievement of human purposes.

The Analogy Between the Scientific Method and the Entrepreneurial Method

For the analogy between the scientific method and the burgeoning notion of the entrepreneurial method to work, we do not particularly need to get into the details of what exactly constitutes each method, although we do not hesitate to outline certain possibilities in Table 1. The point of imminent importance is the realization that such methods can and do exist. Putting this realization to work does not require us to accept a utopian view of either science or entrepreneurship in terms of the outcomes they engender. Nor does it dismiss the role of other ways to achieve positive social impact. Again the point of immediate relevance is not that entrepreneurship or entrepreneurs are universally good or that other methods are to be discarded, but that this new(er) instrument--the entrepreneurial method--is of considerable value worthy of packing in our rucksack as we move forward as a species.

The specification of teachable and learnable principles of scientific approaches to understanding nature and then putting that understanding to work in the pursuit of individual and societal objectives took several centuries. Yet today the scientific method is taught not only to potential scientists in professional schools at graduate or postgraduate levels, but to everyone, starting at an early age, as an essential mindset and skill that forms the core of all education--in line with reading and writing and arithmetic. Such broad and early dissemination has propelled a democratization of what was originally accessible only to a few who were endowed with divine revelation, inborn genius, or the wealth and status that allowed science be pursued as a "gentleman's pastime." The democratization begun in the seventeenth century by Bacon and others, moreover, has now led to millions of "ordinary" scientists working in systematic ways to make possible the amazing industrial, technological, and subsequent social revolutions of the eighteenth, nineteenth, and twentieth centuries. As Shamoo and Resnik (2009) point out, "it is estimated that there are more scientists alive today than all of the scientists who have lived during the past 2,500 years of human history (Weaver & Dickson, 1988)."

We believe a similar path of revolutions is waiting in the wings with entrepreneurship. Based on about four decades of rigorous research into the phenomenon of entrepreneurship, we are beginning to realize that the phenomenon may hide a generalized method capable of changing the way we live, work, and play, and transforming the courses of the careers we build, the shapes of the communities we live in, and the evolution of the socio-political and economic systems we are a part of. That is why delving a little deeper into the history of the development of the scientific method may be a useful task here. Let us begin with Francis Bacon, usually recognized as the earliest of modern philosophers of science to spell out the key elements of what we now know as the scientific method. In the preface to his treatise on the subject, Novum Organum, Bacon states as one of the aphorisms: "The sole cause and root of almost every defect in the sciences is this; that whilst we falsely admire and extol the powers of the human mind, we do not search for its real helps." There are two laments here--the first, that the dominant wisdom of his day overemphasized the traits and abilities of individual scientists and the second, that the philosophers of his day did not search for the codifiable principles and techniques that lay beneath what masqueraded as special abilities a very few people were endowed with. Both laments evoke conversations in entrepreneurship research today.

The first lament is not unusual. Early explanations for science, like those for most endeavors resulting in valuable contributions to human and social welfare, tend to hinge on the observation that these accomplishments can be attributed to a few selected people. Only as we study and understand what these people actually do that a more accessible pattern emerges that can then be codified and taught and propagated widely enough to become a viable tool of value creation writ large. Thus pre-scientific explanations of knowledge creation consisted in the notion that some special people are able to (are even born to) "read the signs"--from the True Book (of God or Nature). In other words, scientific ability was largely an inborn trait or an accident of birth and circumstance, and not a matter of systematic study or training. This strikes us as an interesting parallel to the traits literature in entrepreneurship. It was natural for our field too to begin trying to describe entrepreneurs in terms of their traits (McClelland, 1961) and also to try to isolate what made entrepreneurs different from non-entrepreneurs (Brockhaus, 1982; Stanworth, Blythe, Granger, & Stanworth, 1989; Woo, Cooper, & Dunkelberg, 1991). And even though some believe that this stream of work has been discredited, it appears to resurface in new ways (Baron & Ensley, 2006; Baum, Frese, & Baron, 2007; Gartner, 1988; McClelland; Zhao & Seibert, 2006).

Of course the argument is more nuanced in recent studies and goes beyond simply differentiating entrepreneurs from non-entrepreneurs in general or trying to identify certain traits as predictors of startup and success. Even strong proponents of the importance of personality traits tend to aver that "... a model of the effects of personality traits on business creation and business success must include other individual differences variables as well as nonpersonality variables, such as action strategies, cognitive ability, and environment, which are additional predictors of performance" (Rauch & Frese, 2007).

The second of Bacon's laments is not as usual, and was especially radical for his time. The idea that scholars should observe in detail and actually learn from "craftsmen and tradespeople," however talented, was not easily palatable. Yet, that was indeed the source of the "real helps" that Bacon sought to codify into the principles of the scientific method and techniques such as the "crucial experiment." In articulating these, Bacon had to do two things: on the one hand he had to struggle against the traditions of the times, especially with regard to what counted as "evidence"; and on the other, he had to draw together fragments of ideas from his contemporaries that held the seeds of a new way of thinking about basic concepts such as "evidence." What counted as evidence in his day consisted primarily of testimony and authority. Both of these could involve religious sources such as the scriptures as well as secular ones such as human witnesses and opinions. The idea of evidence as independent of any person or divine revelation, in other words empirical evidence of the kind familiar to us, was just beginning to be spelled out around the time Bacon wrote his thesis on the scientific method (Hacking, 1975).

We believe we too are beginning to grapple with Bacon's second lament as applied to entrepreneurship, namely the central tenets of how to do entrepreneurship as opposed to key traits that differentiate entrepreneurs from other presumably "normal" or mundane human beings. Here too the historical parallels are evocative. In a study of the social origins of the scientific method, Zilsel (2000) showed that real science was born when the experimental method of the craftsmen was adopted by the university-scholar and the humanistic literati. A similar trend can be found in entrepreneurship where in-depth case studies and qualitative research combined with larger empirical tests are beginning to provide details of how actual entrepreneurs make decisions and take action (Baker & Nelson, 2005; Eisenhardt, 1989; Ozcan & Eisenhardt, 2009; Santos & Eisenhardt, 2004; Sarasvathy, 2008). The movement here has the potential to go beyond a purely scholarly one of formulating and testing hypotheses to active interactions between research and pedagogy and practice that can inform and transform one another. If we pursue this potential, the result will be a method of thought and action whose efficacy is established as much through actual applications and the resultant outcomes in the world (i.e., technologies) as through their verisimilitude established through statistical or other types of evidentiary analyses (i.e., theories, models, and laws).

The next stage in this historical progression, from fascinating achievements attributed to individual ability or chance circumstance to the study and codification of a systematic method, is the realization and acceptance that the codification can (and arguably should) be made available to all. This stage is not yet a fait accompli even in the case of the scientific method. As recently as the second half of the twentieth century, Simon (1979), for example, was driven to take the time and effort to argue that there is no qualitative difference between the processes of revolutionary science and journeyman science--i.e., anyone can learn to do science and do it well. In other words, extraordinary scientists are neither a separate species of scientists, nor is the way they do science mystical and beyond the comprehension of more "ordinary" scientists. Furthermore, he had to shore up this argument with a series of experimental and historical studies that laid bare the basic elements of scientific discovery as it actually happens, rather than as it is supposed to happen according to armchair theorists and philosophers of science (Klahr & Simon, 2001). This raises a central issue for entrepreneurship researchers: Can key elements of the entrepreneurial method be the same for the extraordinarily successful entrepreneurs as well as the ordinary entrepreneur (who may or may not ever succeed in terms of standard measures of performance such as return on investment)? In other words, can anyone who wants to learn it be taught to do entrepreneurship well? We believe the answer is yes.

As Feyerabend (1993) and others have provocatively argued, there may be serious holes in the notion of an ironclad scientific "method"--be it the one embraced by Carnap or Popper or others before and after (Hacking, 1983). Yet the notion of a scientific approach to solving problems, especially those related to discoveries about physical and material reality is a meaningful and useful one. We usually know what we mean when say, "Let us approach this scientifically"--as opposed to say, biblically, or politically or any other way. Similarly, the notion of tackling problems in the human realm using an entrepreneurial as opposed to sociological, spiritual, or even an economic approach is a meaningful and useful distinction. Take, for example, effectual logic--a logic of thought and action that has been empirically shown to be an important component of entrepreneurial expertise (Read, Dew, Sarasvathy, & Wiltbank, 2009). This logic, like the logic of experimentation in science, is actionable and consists of mechanisms that specify how to work with readily available means to co-create local transformations through self-selected stakeholder commitments. Yet it is distinguishable both from the logic of collective action and from the spontaneous order of free markets (Sarasvathy, 2008). Therefore, our claim for entrepreneurship as a method akin to the scientific method rests both on the historical parallels and recent empirical findings that feed the possibility of a Novum Artificium, as it were.

With a view to populating this claim with actual content, we pose a series of open questions that involve both a reinterpretation of what we have already learned through past research and a reformulation of existing and future research agendas in the spirit of confronting and overcoming the category error we mentioned earlier. In other words, the questions we pose below are aimed at moving us beyond a view of entrepreneurship as a sub-discipline or "merely" a phenomenon or setting for testing high theory, toward a new view of it as a powerful social force analogous to the scientific method.

Toward the Specification of the Entrepreneurial Method: Three Suggestions for Future Research

To summarize our arguments so far, there exists a distinct method of human problem solving that we can categorize as entrepreneurial. The method can be evidenced empirically, is teachable to anyone who cares to learn it, and may be applied in practice to a wide variety of issues central to human well-being and social improvement. These arguments imply that it could be a useful and valuable enterprise for scholars of entrepreneurship to begin researching entrepreneurship as a method as well as a phenomenon or setting for testing theories from other disciplines. We believe that researching entrepreneurship as a method will entail (1) making the inter-subjective a key unit of analysis, (2) seeing heterogeneity as a basis for the design of human artifacts, and (3) specifying the role of the entrepreneurial method and the mechanisms that embody it.

Making the Inter-Subjective a Key Unit of Analysis

Currently, the dominant convention with regard to psychological and sociological approaches to entrepreneurship research consists in using either the individual or the team as the unit of analysis (Packalen, 2007; Ruef, 2003). An exhaustive search of the literature turned up virtually no journal article on details of the numerous relationships and deals that entrepreneurs routinely negotiate with a wide variety of stakeholders. Even a rare exception such as Rea (1989) used survey methods that call for individual responses from one party to the relationship--venture capitals in this particular case. It is rather surprising that over four decades of empirical work has not even scratched the surface of intersubjective interactions between entrepreneurs and their stakeholders, be they early partners, customers, suppliers, professional advisors, employees, or the local communities within which the fledgling new venture is located. Considerable work has been done on alliances and social networks. But the bulk of these studies seek to identify characteristics of alliances and networks that contribute to firm performance.

Almost the entirety of social networks research takes networks as mostly given and outside the control of human action, hence not a source of valuable input into developing a method of doing entrepreneurship. In a recent and rare exception that examined qualitative case studies of alliances in the wireless gaming industry, Ozcan and Eisenhardt (2009) asserts this: Extant research addresses attributes of high-performing alliance portfolios but not how executives originate such portfolios ... and then goes on to develop an inductive model that seeks to take the literature beyond a deterministic account of dyadic interdependence and social embeddedness. Even scarcer are studies that actually look into the structures of deals and the processes through which the deals came to be structured the way they are. In our considered opinion, an entire unexplored terrain of possibilities lies dormant in the area of how entrepreneurs transform bits and pieces of current realities into valuable new opportunities through productive interaction with others.

Even the literature that is directly focused on negotiations has mostly neglected new venture creation processes. Consider for example, that Bazerman, Curhan, Moore, and Valley's (2000) classic and comprehensive review of the growing literature on negotiations does not include the words "venture" or "entrepreneur" at all. Also, the very idea of "transformation" or "design" or "co-creation" as opposed to "bargaining" is new to the literature on negotiations. Linda Putnam's (2004) exhortation to negotiation scholars to incorporate transformative notions is a case

On the one hand, negotiation research has shown that people often fail to reach mutually beneficial agreements even when they may be readily available (e.g., Bazerman & Neale, 1992; Thompson, Gentner, & Loewenstein, 2000). On the other hand, research has also begun to show that such agreements are reached and even new and unanticipated ones forged through repeated exchanges between the same negotiators (Pruitt & Rubin, 1986; Thompson et al., 2000). Indeed, Lawler and his collaborators have shown that commitment leading to stable group formation occurs through a process of repeated negotiated exchanges:

The development of relational cohesion and commitment is an endogenous process that emerges from the interaction between actors. (Lawler & Yoon, 1996, p. 90)

All these examples from sociological and psychological literatures on relational exchanges and interpersonal negotiations point to fertile untapped resources for future entrepreneurship research. Furthermore, fully embracing the proposition that "Most of our approaches to the world are mediated through negotiation with others," (Bruner, 1986) has important implications not only for new research, but also for re-examining and challenging existing dogma in our field. Furthermore, we believe that a deeper understanding of stakeholder relationships in entrepreneurship can both challenge and contribute to the literature on negotiations and relational sociology.

Seeing Heterogeneity as a Basis for the Design of Human Artifacts

More recently, Davidsson (2008) has argued in some detail that the phenomenon of entrepreneurship exhibits heterogeneity along several dimensions and across every aspect of research including design, sampling, operationalization of variables, and analysis. The study not only catalogs the various types of heterogeneity problems that arise in the context of entrepreneurial/venture performance, but also suggests strategies for dealing with these problems. Several of these fixes have to do with taxonomizing the phenomenon, strictly bounding samples to particular industries or other dimensions of the taxonomy, developing comparable metrics, and seeking to find natural experiments or designing controlled laboratory experiments.

Davidsson's arguments about heterogeneity are also applicable at the level of the entrepreneur. As we pointed out in the beginning of this article, the vast literature on the role of individual traits and personality variables has produced mixed results at best. One reason could be that "entrepreneur" is not a monolithic category. Instead it may be that we need a taxonomy of entrepreneurs (whether organized around motivations, skills, industry, opportunity, or other relevant dimensions) and look for differences between subcategories in the taxonomy. However, we would like to contend that the problem of heterogeneity in entrepreneurial behavior goes deeper than the need to taxonomize entrepreneurial phenomena, that it is a more fundamental characteristic of human beings and human action in general--a peculiar triple helix of heterogeneity at that. Studies ranging from genetics (Lewontin, 1972) to meta-analyses of industry histories (Mairess & Griliches, 1990) all point to a possible fallacy in trying to categorize human behavior according to a priori traits or formal models. In other words, the evidence seems to suggest that heterogeneity is amazingly persistent and continues to appear at every level of analysis. Sarasvathy (2008) described three sources of unpredictability in human behavior as follows:

Whereas heterogeneity as defined here appears to be a species trait that shows up in behavior in spite of institutions that nudge, push, and even compel people toward conformity and coherence, liability and conceptuality appear to be just as likely to be driven through interactions with other individuals as being something innate and individual--i.e., inter-subjective, not merely subjective. Instead of starting with the assumption that human beings can a priori be grouped into stable categories in one way or another, what if we began our theorizing with the opposite assumption--that there are no stable categories; what matters is difference and change, continual flux of one sort or another? At first glance, this seems to make the problem of entrepreneurial (even all behavioral) research intractable and futile. But a second look suggests a productive opportunity for exciting new research. And that is the possibility that all categories are artificial--not in the sense of unreal and useless, but in the sense of carefully, yet interactively and iteratively designed (consider, for example, the U.S. Constitution) and/or emergent through patterned and path-dependent processes (such as technology ventures and standards bodies).

Another way to capture this argument is to begin researching entrepreneurship not only as a social science, but as a science of the artificial (Simon, 1996). Some specific lines of future research along these lines could include: attributing coherence in risk-taking behavior not only to innate traits but also to learned experience and deliberate practice; or, taking traditional conceptions of team building as finding members with shared interests who buy into the leader's vision, and adding to that a conceptualization of leadership as a process of designing goals from partially articulated and partially vague and inchoate preferences of a growing stakeholder network. The latter would be consistent with Geroski's (2003) argument that new markets come not only from well-articulated but unfulfilled demand, but also from inchoate demand that can be shaped through particular product offerings that allow them to coalesce into new preferences, needs, and wants.

Specifying the Role of the Entrepreneurial Method and the Mechanisms that Embody It

If we accept the thesis that entrepreneurship is a method such as the scientific method and/or a social force such as democracy, there is an enormous task ahead of us in specifying when and where exactly the method can be applied, not to mention considering in great detail the mechanisms that constitute the method and how they can be applied. We have argued in this article that the entrepreneurial method can tackle a wide range of problems in the human social realm. It is necessary, however, to investigate and explicate the problem space in more concrete terms. For example, when and how does the entrepreneurial method compete with other approaches such as scientific, regulatory, sociopolitical, etc.? More interestingly, perhaps, how can the entrepreneurial method complement and leverage other approaches, say, in the alleviation of poverty or in the achievement of social justice? We believe recent history is rife with natural experiments that can help tackle the task of greater specification of the problem space. Take the case of climate change, for example. Both nonprofit and for-profit entrepreneurial ventures compete with as well as leverage regulatory reform, R&D initiatives, corporate philanthropy, and international aid in this arena. It would be interesting, not to say impactful, to develop empirically grounded as well as a priori and formal theoretical frameworks that allow us to specify how exactly to mix and match synergistic strategies across different approaches and when and where to allow the methods to compete to let better solutions evolve.

The types of scholarly endeavors called forth by the task described above are also necessary at a more micro-level--namely in the case of particular mechanisms that embody the entrepreneurial method. With the historical advent of democracy as a form of political action, for example, voting mechanisms became a new area of research. Over decades of cumulative research, political scientists, economists, sociologists, legal scholars, and others have developed a vast body of work relating to a variety of voting-related phenomena (Riker & Ordeshook, 1968; Saari, 1989; Schuessler, 2000). We believe a similar fount of intellectual possibilities awaits us in connection with the entrepreneurial method. The mechanism of affordable loss in contrast with techniques such as DCF and real options (Dew, Sarasvathy, Read, & Wiltbank, 2009) provides a glimpse of one such mechanism. Bricolage is another such mechanism (Baker & Nelson, 2005). By mechanism therefore we mean specific learnable and teachable techniques such as those available in accounting, finance, and supply chain management. To be useful for becoming a building block of the entrepreneurial method, such mechanisms have to "hang together" logically--i.e., they have to be internally consistent with each other and "make sense" in terms of the overall purpose of the method, namely to unleash the potential of human nature to achieve desired ends and to generate viable and valuable new ends.

There exist several sources of data for building such mechanisms. Often these are data collected for other purposes. Take for instance the various types of stakeholder contracts that entrepreneurs enter into in building and growing their ventures. Several empirical studies in entrepreneurship use contracts as the basis for analyzing specific aspects of entrepreneurial performance. To cite but a few: Using alliance contracts as primary data, Weaver and Dickson (1998) challenged the importance of resource-based and environment-based factors in alliance performance and Reuer, Arino, and Mellewigt (2006) deepened our understanding of antecedents to governance choices. Franchisor-franchisee contracts have also proved useful in understanding how entrepreneurs create and manage relationships in trying to grow their ventures (Jambulingam & Nevin, 1999; Leblebici & Shalley, 1996). Other studies have looked into research (Deeds & Hill, 1999) and customer (Yli-Renko, Sapienza, & Hay, 2001) relationships and yet others have investigated the VC-entrepreneurial venture relationships through the design and ongoing management of "deals" and term sheets (Cumming, Schmidt, & Walz, 2010; Petty & Gruber, 2009). The relevant fact here is that a wide variety of contracts exist as potential data to examine how entrepreneurs craft and manage relationships with a wide variety of stakeholders. While these have mostly been used to understand performance of particular aspects of venturing, they could also be used as data to begin inductive theorizing about specific mechanisms (say equity versus debt) or particular relational preferences (say control rights over certain types of decisions and not others) that constitute the entrepreneurial method.

Why and how would these mechanisms matter? Until now, for the most part, we have focused on entrepreneurship as a phenomenon and we have tried to understand how to create the conditions for good entrepreneurial performance whether at the firm level or at the societal level. That is akin to asking "What explains the discovery of penicillin or plate tectonics?" or trying to understand the role of government funding in the nature and magnitude of scientific output. To specify the method of science or of entrepreneurship, however, we have to roll up our sleeves and actually observe experienced entrepreneurs in action, read their diaries, examine their documents and sit in on negotiations--as did the scholarly and humanistic literati of Bacon's time. And as we extract and codify the "real helps" of entrepreneurial thought and action, we need to figure out ways to embody them in particular techniques and mechanisms that we refine in the laboratory and the classroom with a view to carefully determining the logical relationships both between these mechanisms and how they connect to the unleashing of human potential. In short, we have an exciting time of hard work ahead of us.

Conclusion

In sum, we have argued here that by thinking of entrepreneurship as a subset of other disciplines such as economics or treating it as a setting for testing theories from these disciplines, we may be in danger of falling into a category error. One way out of this error is to reformulate entrepreneurship as a method of human action, comparable to social forces such democracy and the scientific method, namely, a powerful way of tackling large and abiding problems at the heart of advancing our species. This reformulation puts us on the brink of an exciting new endeavor encompassing pedagogy, policy, and practice in ways that are yet to be invented. Only if we choose to embark on this endeavor may we actively participate in and help shape a revolution that is already tiptoeing into the twenty-first century.

Entrepreneurship education in Bangladesh

During the 1970s the population of Bangladesh grew at an annual rate of nearly 3 percent while its food supply grew at an annual rate of only 1 to 2 percent. The country kept getting poorer and poorer as a result. By 1980, as the population approached 90 million, it was one of the poorest countries and the largest recipient of foreign aid--in the world. The World Bank was the largest donor of this aid. By 1980, however, the Bank concluded that its $200 million per year or more of aid to Bangladesh was being very inefficiently used, and that all economic units in the country had very low productivity--to a large extent because of a lack of sound management. The Bank further decided that the expenditure of several million dollars to improve management education would have a very high ROI.

The author had worked in Bangladesh (then known as East Pakistan) from 1969 to 1971 on a Ford Foundation project to create an Institute of Business Administration within the University of Dhaka. That university, along with two others, offered a three-year Bachelor of Commerce (B-Comm) degree and a one-year Master of Commerce (M-Comm) degree. The new Institute was to offer an American-style, two-year MBA. Believing that one of the critical needs of developing countries is the fostering of both entrepreneurs and an environment within which entrepreneurship can flourish, the author designed and introduced a course in entrepreneurship. He was able to teach this course only once, however, for in the middle of the second year the revolution started and he and his family were evacuated from the country.

In 1980, the author was asked by the World Bank to return to Bangladesh to design a project to improve management education in the three universities mentioned above and in a Management Development Center (a subdivision of the Ministry of Industry) which ran management seminars and offered non-degree courses. The result was a five-year, $8 million project which would bring 80 Bangladeshi professors to the U.S. for additional degrees, and bring 12 to 15 U.S. professors to Bangladesh as short-term advisors. (The project also contained a number of other components.)

As part of the project, the author again returned to Bangladesh in 1983 as an advisor to curriculum revision and, in the ensuing discussions, the three Faculties of Commerce agreed (as one of many changes) that they should introduce two courses in entrepreneurship: a required course for all undergraduates and an elective course for all master's degree students. The idea was that all of the undergraduate students should be exposed to the theories of entrepreneurship, the role of the entrepreneur in history, and the role of the entrepreneur in the industrial development of Bangladesh; and then study some cases of successful Bangladeshi entrepreneurs who might serve as role models for the students. It was hoped that, as a result of exposure to such a course, the potential entrepreneurs in the senior class would identify themselves and take the elective entreprenurship course during their M-Comm program. (It should be noted that over 90 percent of those who complete the B-Comm go on to study for the M-Comm.)

A year later, the author was asked to return for one month to Bangladesh as the Advisor on Entrepreneurship. The question in his mind at this point was, "What can be done in such a short period of time that will be of lasting value?"

Until independence, classes in most elementary schools, and in all secondary schools and universities in Bangladesh were taught in English. Since 1971 all of these schools have switched to the Bengali language. Consequently, the students have not been able to read U.S. texts, which most of them would be unable to afford in any event. The author felt that suitable textbooks should be developed for these courses and that these should be published locally and in paperback, so that the students could afford them. (The estimated appropriate price was $3.) It was also believed essential that the textbooks be written in Bengali by the professors who would be teaching the courses and that they be based on the realities of the political, economic, social, and administrative climate in Bangladesh.

The first three weeks of the author's visit were devoted, a week at each university, to identifying the professors who would probably teach the entrepreneurship courses which were to become part of a revised curriculum, and to include these professors, the department chairmen and the deans in a series of discussions on the importance of entrepreneurship for the development of Bangladesh and the importance of having this subject taught at their institutions. Meanwhile, arrangements were made for the organization of a workshop in Dhaka, during the fourth week, to be attended by the five or six professors from each university who might eventually teach the course.

The workshop had four objectives. First, all of the future professors of entrepreneurship were to become acquainted with the literature in this field, including textbooks which had been developed in the U.S. Second, all were to participate in designing the two courses to be offered in Bangladesh. Third, all were to be involved in designing the textbooks which would form the basis of their two courses. Fourth, all were to be involved eventually in writing these textbooks, and hence be committed to using them in their classes.

To help achieve the first objective, the author brought to Bangladesh a suitcase filled with relevant books and articles. HE lectured about these writings at the workshop and made them available for perusal by the participants.

To aid in achieving the second objective, a guided discussion was held which included all workshop participants and resulted in general agreement concerning the objectives, content, and teaching approach for the two courses. The participants were then divided into smaller, working groups to design the syllabi. Drafts were assembled and distributed, and further discussion resulted in a meeting of minds on this score as well.

For the third objective, another general discussion resulted in a consensus as to the broad outlines for the two textbooks. The participants were again divided into working groups, with each group assigned to draft a detailed outline of a section of a text, indicating possible source material. These segments were later assembled, reproduced, and distributed for additional group discussion, during which agreement was reached concerning the textbook outlines.

Topics covered in the undergraduate text include entrepreneurship theory and history, development programs and sources of assistance, and case studies. The graduate text covers some of these same topics, but also includes discussions of the business environment, planning and creating an enterprise, developing a comprehensive business plan, and capital budgeting.

To make a start toward achieving the fourth objective, the participants were asked to indicate which chapters they could best write, given their special areas of expertise. This procedure resulted in specific chapters being assigned to specific professors.

It was recognized that a follow-up organization was needed. As part of this structure, a campus coordinator was selected for each university, the role of whom was to assure completion of each co-author's task and to provide for quality control. An editorial board was also selected, consisting of the three campus coordinators plus a senior editor. It was agreed that the texts would be drafted in English and, after being assembled and reviewed by the editorial board, would be sent to the present author in the U.S. for review. Upon completion of this review and any necessary revision, the manuscripts would be translated into Bengali by the chapter co-authors, reassembled and reviewed by the editorial board, and published in Dhaka.

All participants at the workshop agreed on a time schedule. All that was now lacking was a budget to provide financial incentive for the co-authors and editorial board, and to pay expenses for typing, reproduction, travel, etc. The editorial board agreed on a budget, which totaled only about five thousand dollars per book for the final draft in Bengali, ready for printing. These present writer was able to get the government and the World Bank to revise the project budget to finance the preparation of these two texts.

At the time of the writing of this article, the English language drafts of the two textbooks are enroute to the U.S. to be reviewed. The chapter authors and editorial board have kept to their schedule and budget. (It appears that the entire process just might work! In any case, the workshop organized in Dhaka by this author may be thought of as educational entrepreneurship.)

In the opinion of the author, courses in entrepreneurship are important, but not critical offerings, for U.S. business schools. In less developed countries (LDCs), however, they are critical elements of the curriculum because of the pressing need to foster entrepreneurship as a motor for economic development. Yet such courses are rarely found in LDC business schools because such schools were modeled after U.S. business schools where, until quite recently, one rarely found entrepreneurship courses. Not only have LDC business schools designed their curricula after those of U.S. business schools, they also use American textbooks--usually in English, but sometimes in direct translation. All of this has usually been done on the advice of American business professors--who apparently have known very little about LDCs.

It is vital that we recognized that the culture, the economic infrastructure, the business climate and the role of government in LDCs are far different from what is found in the U.S. The educational curricula of these countries should be tailor-made to their needs. Their textbooks can be based on U.S. texts, but should be significantly adapted to fit the national environments of particular LDCs.

Entrepreneurship development in Bangladesh

AN entrepreneur is one who always searches for change, responds to it, and exploits it as an opportunity. Can anyone be an entrepreneur? The answer is no. But with access to capital, minimum education facility and own creativity, many intelligent, energetic youth can be turned into a decent business people.

In our country, the term for an entrepreneur is a 'businessman,' which carries with it a set of negative connotations. The assumption is that one goes into business if one cannot be a banker, doctor, engineer, lawyer, professor or a corporate worker. In movies, businessmen are portrayed as crude, immoral people. In day-to-day life, a businessman is only considered successful if he can achieve conspicuous display of wealth.

Despite our negative views of 'business', the private sector has a crucial role to play in growing the economy and providing employment opportunities. The private sector is the engine of innovation in all sectors of the economy. Entrepreneurship in Bangladesh currently thrives in two sectors of the economy -- among the poorest of the poor (14 million households) and among the well-off (about 2.5 million households). The reason for this is that both of these sectors have access to institutional financing.

The change in mindset can perhaps be attributed to the realisation that notwithstanding advances in scientific, social, political and economic systems, the gap between rich and poor is widening. With many social problems continuing to plague societies and some even worsening, concern regarding the effectiveness and sustainability of governmental and welfare-based approaches to social problems has increased. This in turn has directed greater attention to the work of entrepreneurs.

Economic Development through Entrepreneurship Initiatives: No developing country can achieve sustained economic or social development without engaging effectively in the broader trade dependent economic environment. The role of such innovative entrepreneurial efforts greatly influences country's overall GDP, productivity, economic reform and social growth in the context of global economy.

The long-term goal of entrepreneurial efforts aims to ensure that poor can contribute and share the benefits of growth through enhancing their purchasing power. It will in turn encourage economies to specialise in, and concentrate on, areas where these will add relative cost advantage over other economies. Eventually, this will become a strong tool for poverty alleviation.

Entrepreneurship; A tool for Empowerment: "Entrepreneurship" has become a very significant factor for ensuring development in the least developed countries (LDCs). Entrepreneurship leads towards a broad range of aspects including financial and decision-making capacities of individual persons which ultimately results in "Empowerment". "An Empowered Nation" is absolutely necessary for the overall development of a country which can efficiently rid of the curse of poverty.

"Entrepreneurship" has a crucial role to play in low income economies. It has the power to foster growth and generate rapid and lasting reductions in poverty. For a Least Developed Country like Bangladesh, effective entrepreneurial efforts and initiatives can play an enormous, significant role in influencing social and economic policy reform and development outcomes. Bangladesh, with its high population density, widespread poverty, and susceptibility to natural disasters, is a challenging environment for development initiatives. Although government and other non-government organisations (NGOs) have initiated several developmental schemes but the progress is not that noteworthy. But this huge human resource can be turned towards a revolutionary device for effective economic growth through exploring entrepreneurial opportunities.

Around eighty per cent (80%) of our population lives in regional areas and most of them are poor. If this population can effectively be promoted with entrepreneurial skill, they can actively involve themselves in, and contribute towards, the economic development process. It is a must that this collective effort will lead the country to move forward. Necessarily it indicates that to alleviate poverty, exploring the entrepreneurial opportunities is a must. To summarise, economic situation of Bangladesh can not really improve without entrepreneurship efforts.

Fight against poverty: Entrepreneurship is often considered one of the most effective and flexible strategies in the fight against global poverty. Bangladesh has a population of more than 140 million with almost half of the population living below the poverty line. Sustainable entrepreneurial development programmes can be implemented on a massive scale that is necessary to respond to the urgent needs of those living on less than $1.0 a day, the World's poorest.

The Progress out of Poverty Index (PPI) is an assessment tool for measuring the poverty level of a country. For Bangladesh, It estimates the likelihood that a participant has income below the $1.0/Day/ Purchasing Power Parity (PPP) international benchmark. Such poor PPI can never indicate progressive development emerging in a country. Thus, there is a great need to think out of the box to enhance economic advancement.

The most important fact behind entrepreneurship is economic freedom and self dependency. Bangladesh is a lower income country which is deprived of enjoying the essence of global economic benefits and left far behind the financially viable scenario. There should be effective proposals designed to provide suggestions how to improve present socio-economic picture with strategic advising in decision-making to excel in positive economic impact. In this situation, these proposals can be a critical catalyst to strengthen entire development process that most developing countries are grappling with.

What should be our approach? We must initiate to explore the potential excellence and open scopes for people of all classes across the country and exploit these for the constructive development of the society and country. The government also needs to ensure that people of small means should have access to facilities to undertake economic activities at appropriate scales throughout the country. Once the overall framework is in place, mobilisation of more resources and more effective utilisation of the available resources will be facilitated. If all these factors work together under one umbrella, only then economic progress and development, along with poverty alleviation target, can be achieved.