Creation Opportunities: Entrepreneurial Curiosity, Generative Cognition, and Knightian Uncertainty

Entrepreneurs as Scientists: A Pragmatist Approach to Producing Value Out of Uncertainty

“…While the pragmatist entrepreneur seeks to reduce uncertainty by actively forming a well-structured belief, this belief forming effort introduces its own form of uncertainty. Unlike exogenous uncertainty that exists independent of entrepreneurs and largely outside their control (Downey, Hellriegel, & Slocum Jr, 1975), this form of uncertainty is endogenous, as the belief is self-selected from the myriad imaginable (Arikan, Arikan, & Koparan, 2020;Gans et al, 2019;Packard & Clark, 2020a), and therefore reflects the idiosyncratic background, experience, and biases of the entrepreneur. The selected belief is often new and contrarian (Christensen & Knudsen, 2020)-a feature most often necessary (though not sufficient) to generate value, but one that also easily allows those choosing beliefs to claim bad ones are good, which greatly complicates objective evaluation of the belief (Benner & Zenger, 2016).…”

External Enablers of Entrepreneurship: A Review and Agenda for Accumulation of Strategically Actionable Knowledge

“…It also invites process-oriented theorizing (see von Briel et al, 2018) which Shane and Venkataraman’s (2000) focus on discovery of pre-existing opportunities came to downplay (Korsgaard, 2013). This can induce process-oriented theorists’ attention to external conditions despite their active aversion to conceptualization of objective opportunities (Alvarez & Barney, 2007, p. 15; Arikan et al, 2020). One type of theory elaboration would be to add not only EE variance but also a temporal dimension (see Davidsson & Gruenhagen, 2020) to otherwise static, agent-centered theories.…”

“…Shane and Venkataraman’s (2000) notion of objective opportunity has not been effective in addressing these phenomena (Davidsson, 2015; Dimov, 2011; Korsgaard, 2013). At the same time, the crucial role of external change in the above examples makes active neglect of the external environment in theorizing new venture creation (e.g., Alvarez & Barney, 2007; Arikan et al, 2020) increasingly absurd. Accordingly, our review reveals an emerging surge of interest in the reviewed type of research, albeit still at a moderate absolute level (cf.…”

Heuristic Methods for Updating Small World Representations in Strategic Situations of Knightian Uncertainty

“…Foremost among the former are capacities and dispositions such as imagination, creativity and curiosity, that are crucial to envisioning possible futures, as well as an actor's prior knowledge, experience and expertise, and the reasoning and problem-solving methods used (associative thinking, analogical reasoning, fast-and-frugal thinking, etc.) (Alvarez & Porac, 2020;Arikan, Arikan, & Koparan, 2020;Brandenburger, 2017;Felin & Zenger, 2017;Gavetti & Levinthal, 2000;Grégoire et al 2010;Lovallo et al, 2012; from that associated with the absence of numerically definite probabilities or the possibility of unforeseen consequences. Pontikes & Rindova, 2020;Porac & Tschang 2013;Rindova & Courtney, 2020;Simon, 1947).…”