The Foundations of Innovation

In 2000, two scholars published a short paper that told an entire field what it was for.The field was entrepreneurship research. The scholars were Scott Shane and Sankaran Venkataraman. The paper was...

For most of the twentieth century, entrepreneurship research had a problem it could not name.It studied entrepreneurs. It studied opportunities. It studied outcomes. It produced a steady stream of fi...

 Eleven essays in, the series has covered ten thinkers. (Schumpeter, Darwin, Kahneman, Ries, Drucker, Christensen, March, Blank, Dosi, Sarasvathy.)Each piece stood alone. That was the design. Each th...

Herbert Simon did not set out to study entrepreneurs.He set out to understand how people actually make decisions, as opposed to how economists assumed they did. What he found changed the behavioral s...

The Foundations of Innovation Series  A year-long series on the ideas that built the startup world and the one idea still missing from them all. For nearly a century, the greatest minds in economics,...

In 1982, an Italian economist published a paper that changed how a generation of researchers thought about technological change.Giovanni Dosi was working through a problem that Schumpeter had named b...

In the late 1990s, a doctoral student at Carnegie Mellon set out to answer a question the field of entrepreneurship had been asking sideways for decades.Saras Sarasvathy wanted to know how expert ent...

Steve Blank spent twenty years building and selling companies before he figured out why most of them almost failed.Not why competitors failed. Why his own companies, the ones he built and ran and too...

In 1991, James March published what would become one of the most cited papers in organizational science.In it, he described a fundamental tension at the heart of every learning system: the choice bet...