School of Management, U. of Bath, UK, United Kingdom
The puzzle of value creation by entrepreneurs remains a key concern in entrepreneurship. Scholarship that casts entrepreneurs as scientists is a recent and potentially fruitful attempt at addressing this puzzle. This scholarship maintains that entrepreneurs are scientists, who, in Popperian fashion, conceive and test their theories of value creation empirically, pivoting or otherwise changing their course when these theories are falsified. We build on this existing work by casting a wider definition of what a scientist is by enfolding the work of other philosophers of science—Kuhn, Lakatos, and Feyerabend. In doing so, we are able to derive insights that enable us to provide, in the spirit of pragmatism, action principles for entrepreneurs to act on during their entrepreneurial journey. Crucially, these action principles consider the alignment between the key value proposition the entrepreneur holds and the different approaches in the pursuit and growth of knowledge adopted by scientists. We submit that better alignment increases the likelihood of success conditional on the premise that the entrepreneurs’ value proposition solves a genuine problem. We reflect on the implications of our conceptualization for entrepreneurship scholarship.
