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Lean Hypotheses and Effectual Commitments: An Integrative Framework Delineating the Methods of Science and Entrepreneurship

Saras D. Sarasvathy

University of Virginia

Journal of Management 2024

Recently, there is increasing interest in building theories that offer actionable guidance to the practice of entrepreneurship. Here I present a general theoretical framework, called CAVE, for understanding, assessing, and enhancing existing tools that offer such guidance. The framework encompasses a two-dimensional space with prediction and control as its axes. The CAVE framework accommodates a wide variety of extant practical tools as well as relevant concepts from psychology and economics. Specifically, I compare and contrast effectuation with lean startup within this framework. Whereas lean startup centers around hypothesis testing, effectuation focuses on cocreative commitments from self-selecting stakeholders. In other words, the former takes markets as exogenous, while the latter explicates how they can be made endogenous and why that matters. More generally, I show how these differences connect with and delineate the scientific method from the entrepreneurial method.

DOI
10.1177/01492063241236445
Volume
50 (8)
Pages
3035-3063
Language
en
Export
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Sources
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