Effectuation: Elements of Entrepreneurial Expertise

Saras Sarasvathy

With inputs from:

Nicholas DewEdward

FreemanBrent GoldfarbGraciela KuechleJeanne LiedtkaAnil MenonStuart ReadHerbert SimonS.

Venkataraman

Robert Wiltbank

The First Empirical Journey

Question:What are the teachable and learnable elements of entrepreneurial expertise?

Subjects: 27 expert entrepreneurs (Founders of companies from $200M to $6.5B)

Method: Protocol analysis (80 hours of tape; 1500 pages of data)

Theory: Sarasvathy, 2008 (Effectuation: Elements of Entrepreneurial Expertise)

Results:Over 63% of the subjects used an EFFECTUAL logic more than 75% of the time

Empirical Journey Continued

• Comparisons with novices– 89% of experts used effectual more frequently than causal logic,

while novices demonstrated a noticeably opposing preference, with 81% using causal more than effectual. (JBV 2009; JM 2009)

– Experts used 11 types of transformation techniques – not merely new combinations (JEE 2009)

• Comparisons with experienced corporate managers (ASQ WP)

• Development of a survey instrument

• Comparing angels and venture capitalists– emphasizing prediction has no impact on investor success or

failure, while an emphasis on control reduces investment failure without reducing success rates. (JBV 2009)

• Comparisons across countries, doctoral dissertations, teaching

Cognitive Distribution ofNew Venture/Topline Decision Making

Effectual

CausalLowLow High

High ExpertEntrepreneurs

ExperiencedVCs

Angels

OrganicGrowthLeaders

CorporateManagers

NoviceVCs

NoviceEntrepreneurs

Quotes from Expert Entrepreneurs

• “I don’t believe in market research actually, I’d just go sell it.” (E1)

• “Traditional market research says, you do very broad based information gathering, possibly using mailings. I wouldn’t do that. I would literally target, as I said initially, key companies who I would call flagship, do a frontal lobotomy on them.” (E26)

• “I think you have to be right in there -- eyeball into the reality of what does the customer look like..” (E3)

• “I believe very much in the sort of Studs Terkel approach.” (E7)

Expert entrepreneurs

hate market research

underweight or eschew predictive

information

The Key Finding

• To the extent we can predict the future, we can control it

• To the extent we can control the future, we don’t need to predict it

How do you control a future you cannot predict?

Principles of Effectuation (AMR 2001)

• Bird-in-hand principle:Start with Who you are, What you know, & Whom you know (Not pre-set goals/opps)

• Affordable loss principle:Invest what you can afford to lose – extreme case $0 (Not expected return)

• Crazy Quilt principle:Build a network of self-selected stakeholders (Not competitive analysis)

• Lemonade principle:Embrace and Leverage surprises (Not avoid them)

• Pilot-in-the-plane principle:The future comes from what people do (Not inevitable trends)

Dynamics of the effectual network (JEE 2005)

Who I amWhat I knowWhom I know

What canI do?

Effectual stakeholder commitmen

ts

Interactions with other

people(Affordable loss)

Non-predictive control(SMJ 2006)

Co-create

Plan Persist

Adapt

Low

High

Low High

PREDICTION

CONTROL

= Non-predictive control

How do you control a future you cannot predict?

You co-create it through stakeholder commitments

PlanPersist

Adapt

Dynamics of the effectual network (JEE 2005)

Who I amWhat I knowWhom I know

What canI do?

Effectual stakeholder commitmen

ts

Interactions with other

people

New means

New goals

NEW MARKETSAND NEW FIRMS

Expanding cycle of resources

Actual Means

Converging cycle of constraints

Actual courses ofAction possible

(Affordable loss)

Who We areWhat We knowWhom We know

What canWe do?

Claus Meyer, Meyer Group – at CBS, Denmark

Pierre Omidyar on eBay

• Almost every industry analyst and business reporter I talk to observes that eBay's strength is that its system is self-sustaining -- able to adapt to user needs, without any heavy intervention from a central authority of some sort. So people often say to me - "when you built the system, you must have known that making it self-sustainable was the only way eBay could grow to serve 40 million users a day."

• Well… nope. I made the system self-sustaining for one reason: Back when I launched eBay on Labor Day 1995, eBay wasn't my business - it was my hobby. I had to build a system that was self-sustaining… …Because I had a real job to go to every morning. I was working as a software engineer from 10 to 7, and I wanted to have a life on the weekends. So I built a system that could keep working - catching complaints and capturing feedback -- even when Pam and I were out mountain-biking, and the only one home was our cat.

• If I had had a blank check from a big VC, and a big staff running around - things might have gone much worse. I would have probably put together a very complex, elaborate system - something that justified all the investment. But because I had to operate on a tight budget - tight in terms of money and tight in terms of time - necessity focused me on simplicity: So I built a system simple enough to sustain itself.

• By building a simple system, with just a few guiding principles, eBay was open to organic growth - it could achieve a certain degree of self-organization. So I guess what I'm trying to tell you is: Whatever future you're building… Don't try to program everything. 5 Year Plans never worked for the Soviet Union - in fact, if anything, central planning contributed to its fall. Chances are, central planning won't work any better for any of us.

• Build a platform - prepare for the unexpected... …And you'll know you're successful when the platform you've built serves you in unexpected ways. That's certainly true of the lessons I've learned in the process of building eBay. Because in the deepest sense, eBay wasn't a hobby. And it wasn't a business. It was - and is - a community: An organic, evolving, self-organizing web of individual relationships, formed around shared interests. (Omidyar, 2002)

Markets and Opportunities: Made, as well as found

Not just a jigsaw puzzle

More like a crazy quilt

EFFECTUATIONE l e m e n t s o f

E n t r e p r e n e u r i a l E x p e r t i s e

N e w H o r i z o n s i n E n t r e p r e n e u r s h i p

SARAS D. SARASVATHY

www.effectuation.org