Over the weekend, Andrew Hargadon made one of his typically thoughtful observations:
Anything can be hard work if you let it: running in circles can take just as much time and energy as moving forward. And in this way, most perspiration in innovation is misplaced—spent perfecting what inventors and entrepreneurs are already comfortable working on. If they're engineers, that means perfecting the mousetrap; if they're managers, it means more planning. Hard work, but not necessarily the right work for turning a new idea into a new business.
One of the core principles in the Business Development Programs at the Center for Entrepreneurship is to instill in our science, engineering, and business students a bias for action. That means, first and foremost, identifying the right actions: the activities that will move a new venture forward rather than run it in circles.
In a post titled The E-Myth, Uncertainty, and the Evolution of Entrepreneurs, I noted the importance of thinking and acting, a trick that is made doubly difficult by our propensity to do that with which we are most comfortable. We tend to stick with what we know and do what affirms our personal sense of competency. So, analysts analyze, and engineers engineer. We fail to close the learning loop: observe-orient-decide-act. Effective learning requires that we make iterative trips around the learning loop.
Nevertheless, in the context of innovation, I believe that Hargadon's emphasis on action is appropriate. Companies, in particular, are staffed with capable analysts and managers skilled in observing-orienting and (sometimes) deciding. However, when something is truly new and different, there is little valid data to analyze—data has to be generated through experimentation. Unless we generate valid information, we're just sculpting fog. Resolving uncertainty, learning, and progress require a bias for experimental action. Action primes the pump and makes our analysis and decisions more effective.
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