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Very happy to see “Opportunities as Artifacts and Entrepreneurship as Design” in print at AMR!
Written with @Marouane_gbg and @yashmanso, I hope it will prove useful to scholars and (by extension) practitioners.
So, let’s try this thread thing (1/18)
Written with @Marouane_gbg and @yashmanso, I hope it will prove useful to scholars and (by extension) practitioners.
So, let’s try this thread thing (1/18)
In sentence: We use the design tradition’s view of artifacts to describe how opportunities-as-artifacts iteratively develop at the interface between organized individuals and their environments, where more or less concrete instantiations are used to drive the process. (2/18)
In doing so, we lean heavily on Herbert Simon’s The Sciences of the Artificial, in which design as said to involve “a relation among three terms: the purpose or goal, the character of the artifact, and the environment in which the artifact performs” (3/18)
To Simon, all design is structurally similar in that it concerns the interface between inner and outer systems. Design is then defined as the gradual development of an artifact that is made to fit with and thereby connects the two. (4/18)
In the case of entrepreneurship we take these terms to mean:
Inner (the individuals involved in the venture),
Outer (the environment in which they operate),
Interface (the design artifacts and design principles through which these are related). (5/18)
Inner (the individuals involved in the venture),
Outer (the environment in which they operate),
Interface (the design artifacts and design principles through which these are related). (5/18)
Artifacts thus become relevant when part of iterative design principles that aim to “establish initial conditions for the next succeeding stage of action” with the ambition of taking the next step “with a better body of knowledge and a greater capacity for experience”. (6/18)
In line with design theory, we also describe how entrepreneurial artifacts exist on a spectrum ranging from vague and abstract ideas to the gradually more concrete and material artifacts used to drive the design process in the face of uncertainty. (7/18)
This is of course not unique to entrepreneurship. Using sketches, storyboard, prototypes etc. as intermediate design-artifacts to drive iterative design processes is common across design oriented professions (and conceptually across design oriented academic fields). (8/18)
Having discussed design science in general—and focusing primarily on artifacts and principles of design—the bulk of the paper is then spent developing two ideal types of entrepreneurial design that we term “Experimentation” and “Transformation”. (9/18)
In experimentation, entrepreneurs use distinct artifacts to represent the central vision as clearly as possible, with the goal of gathering unbiased information about the world. A paradigmatic example is Drew Houston’s demo of Dropbox. (10/18) https://twitter.com/khberglund/status/1315580295383572481
Scholars (mostly) in this tradition include @ritamcggrath (whose work with Ian MacMillan also inspired @sgblank) as well as @teppofelin, @toddzenger, @sstern_mit, @AndyContigiani, @agambardella61, @rkatila1, @MikeLeatherbee @spinachiara1, @Elena_novelli and many more. (11/18)
In transformation, mutable artifacts instead stimulate creative interactions among heterogeneous stakeholders who thereby constitute the artifact and potentially also the environment. I discussed examples of this with Saras Sarasvathy while back. (12/18) https://twitter.com/khberglund/status/1272477835177988099
Scholars (mostly) in this tradition include people who tend not to be on Twitter, such as Saras Sarasvathy, Nick Dew, Raghu Garud, Ted Baker, Reed Nelson, Satish Nambisan, and @RobertoVerganti. (13/18)
In terms of theoretical implications, we suggest that entrepreneurship (as a field of management) has much to gain much by abandoning the “dual nexus" in favour of the proposed “design triad” of inner system/artifact/outer system. (14/18)
In terms of managerial implications, focusing on artifacts and principles of design will bring scholars closer to the practice of entrepreneurship and to theories and models developed by @sgblank, @EricRies, @pretotyping, @pmarca, @paulg, and @AlexOsterwalder. (15/18)
Indeed, most practitioner theories suggest ways of working experimentally with concrete instantiations to gradually design abstract artifacts that are made to fit the external environment. (16/18)
The “business model ontology” developed by @AlexOsterwalder is an interesting hybrid. The BMC was developed in a dissertation project in the field of Information Systems, where design science, if not the norm, is quite normal.(17/18)
This is getting a bit long, so I’ll conclude by suggesting that:
“we make opportunities real by treating them as artificial”. (18/18)
“we make opportunities real by treating them as artificial”. (18/18)
P.S.
The paper isn’t really about “opportunities” as currently interpreted, which is a pretty vacuous concept. Nor do we seek to engage in any “opportunity war”. We simply use the term to signify 'the entrepreneurial artifact’ in as abstract a way as possible. (P.S. 1/5)
The paper isn’t really about “opportunities” as currently interpreted, which is a pretty vacuous concept. Nor do we seek to engage in any “opportunity war”. We simply use the term to signify 'the entrepreneurial artifact’ in as abstract a way as possible. (P.S. 1/5)
Instead of opportunities, we could have talked about "the venture” (preferred by many scholars), “the startup” (preferred many practitioners), or “the It” (which is Alberto Savoia’s @Pretotyping charming term for that unknown thing being designed). (P.S. 2/5)
Still, if reconceptualising opportunities as design artifacts leads to fewer attempts to reify the metaphorical opportunity concept as used by Kirzner and Schumpeter (whether as objective existing or subjective perceived), I would be very pleased. (P.S. 3/5)
A bit more on reification and how Kirzner in particular has been misunderstood by entrepreneurship scholars https://twitter.com/khberglund/status/1305422775071518720 (P.S. 4/5)
If you don’t have access to AMR and would like a copy, just let me know! (P.S. 5/5)
