I think we have the outline of a logic of entrepreneurial action in the set of ideas that have come to be called effectuation. Effectuation suggests you start with who you are, what you know, and whom you know to come up with very doable venture ideas. Then you invest no more than you can afford to lose and invite stakeholders to support the project in a way that ensures they are really committed. The goal is to co-create rather than predict the future. These are part of a broader complex of ideas that challenge conventional wisdom such as seeing the future as something outside our control, something to be predicted. Or seeing entrepreneurship as a lonely, heroic and risky activity. Or seeing success as the product of wealth. Of course, there's a lot more to be figured out. But I think we now know enough to start teaching everyone.
Francis Bacon could not have known and probably did not even dream that his insight about a method accessible to everyone would lead to a world with iPads and Google and airplanes and defibrillators. And the women in my family, themselves unschooled in science, woke up every day to make sure their kids went to school and learned to figure out this world that changed on them in such profound and incomprehensible ways. They did not have much, but they were far from helpless. For me the most inspiring thing about the entrepreneurial method is that it is something they and folks like them everywhere can learn and use. And I know what they would use it for: to build a world in which all little girls and boys become capable of cooking up their own opportunities from scratch
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