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... Read More
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... Read More
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,... Read More
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... Read More
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... Read More
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... Read More
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... Read More
In the late 1990s, Clayton Christensen was asked to help a school district solve a discipline problem.Students were disrupting class. Talking out of turn. Acting out. The district had tried the obvio... Read More
Week 5: What Drucker Actually Said About the Business You're Building In 1994, Peter Drucker published an essay in Harvard Business Review that should be required reading for every founder before the... Read More
Week 4: The Lean Startup's Missing Layer In 2011, Eric Ries published a book that genuinely changed how a generation of founders thinks about building companies. The Lean Startup: How Today's Entrepr... Read More