AOM 2011: My Birthday and Making a Contribution.

For those of you following along I am still in San Antonio, enjoying the crash course in academia. For those of you on Facebook, it told you that today was my birthday. This happens to be, objectively, true. While I reflect on what I've done in the last 24 years, I care more about what I'll do in the next 24.

In my last post, I talked about the difficulty in distinguishing what is really a contribution to canon and what is not. This post provides some insight about what's an important contribution in the entrepreneurship literature, an area that I'm interested in.

On Saturday morning, I sat in a workshop that discussed using computer simulations and models to develop entrepreneurship theory. A big reason for creating and using the models is that the real world is dynamic and it is very hard to get enough solid, real world data (the academic phrase is legitimate construct) to analyze and make meaningful inferences.

This is true of academia in general: finding data that accurately captures the chaos of the real world yet provides enough structure that patterns can be distinguished.

In the session, there was a panel discussion about what was a really big contribution and an editor from one of the distinguished journals responded about the lack of knowledge about how the entrepreneurial process works. There are many theories that describe the importance of the process and even attempt to parse the process into stages. But there's nothing solid about it.

Enter the Foundry, along with the recent emergence of startup incubators provides a test site to begin peaking into the block box that is the business discovery process.

What's interesting is that this not a new statement, a quick search on Google Scholar shows a number of publications from the mid-1980's about the use of incubator and accelerator programs for further entrepreneurship research.

So why was this forgotten? Well it's likely because most of the publications that were the impetus for the (re)emergence of entrepreneurship theory weren't written for another 10-15 years. Futhermore, we didn't have a lot of business discovery frameworks presented by Silicon Valley that we have today (since entrepreneurship is so hot right now).

It's my opinion that it's time to begin looking at incubators as data-producing power houses to begin documenting the process as it is happening in real time and start understanding what the difference between success and failure is once someone makes the leap.

For a long time, we viewed the inner workings of the brain as a "black box". Psychology simple observed behavior and tried to infer broad theories about how the brain worked. Still, the brain remained a black box until the fMRI was invented and more commonly used. We can now document what is happening in the brain in real time and start shedding more light on its "black box-ness". The same is true for entrepreneurship. We now have incubators as tools to look into the black box. For the sake of the economy and literature, I say it is time we started making better use of them.