The Duke's Discoverage

Caption: This reminds me of the data-information-knowledge-wisdom pyramid.. Source

If what I’ve heard is true, there was a time when Steve Blank and Eric Ries were just guys who had their opinions about startups like the rest of us. Since then, they have become the leading authorities in startup marketing. Will they stay like that forever or will new people become authorities after them with new, counterintuitive ideas (in today’s terms)?

What interests me is how people become authorities in some field or another, and how do I know if a random guy telling me that I should do as he says, is the future equivalent of Blank or Ries. How can we build new knowledge in a way that embraces change and new ideas –– and still makes it possible to teach a certain paradigm (like the learn startup movement seems to be right now)?

Promised land of false prophets?

Why is this important? Well, if we want to continue building successful startups in the future as well, we should also be able to learn about the changing world around us. The problem, as I see it, is that people constantly promote new ideas and as a founder it is sometimes hard to see, whose advice I should take seriously.

As an example, if I go and ask a professor of entrepreneurship (might also apply to other countries, even some parts of the US) what are the first steps in building a company, he/she might start explaining about writing business plans (opposed by Blank in the context of startups), raising funding (opposed by the lean startup ideology) and so on. And to make myself clear, this is a purely hypothetical situation and changes are slowly starting to take place as Blank & co are getting more and more mainstream publicity.

Wrong tool for the task?

The problem here is that the hypothetical professor is talking about a certain kind of entrepreneurship. Blank said in his recent keynote here in Finland that business plans are good for extending an existing business but lousy for searching for a new business model, because there are so many unknowns and assumptions. So it’s not that the professor is “lying”, but he’s just offering the wrong tool for the task, and might not know better –– at least from the viewpoint of people who believe the lean startup way is better to succeed with a startup.

And why don’t people know better? I don’t know, but perhaps it has to do with the way information becomes a paradigm –– usually, but not always, through research and then teaching. The other way is through trial and error, i.e. someone just believes enough in the information and starts getting results. Sort of like doing customer development on entrepreneurship best practices..?

Could we have the best of both sides?

Although I’m no researcher myself (perhaps I’d like to, but I like doing startups more), I still believe in the scientific method and verifying information and then passing it on to others making it possible for the rest to stand on the shoulders of giants, as the saying goes. 

The little amount I’ve observed how entrepreneurship research is done here in Finland, the problem seems to be that the researchers are not founders themselves, and that’s why even the hypotheses seem to be a little bit old fashioned. I guess that is slowly changing too, but still I think the best possibility to get new information is in the front lines.

Taking the justice into their own hands – the Startup Genome project

What pleases me a lot is initiatives like the Startup Genome project, where startup founders have decided to start gathering relevant information themselves. However, when they published their first report, someone complained that it wasn’t scientifically rigorous.

This is why I believe founders and the science community should work more closely together. The founders could help with finding relevant hypotheses and the researchers could handle the rigor part like it ain’t no thing. Ever better would be, of course, if founders could become a part of the science community and actually lead the way in finding new interesting subjects for research.

Where should we go from here?

I haven’t spent a lot of time discussing this idea with different stakeholder groups –– and that’s partly why I decided to post this to get some feedback –– but my own experiences with providing my opinions about research straight to the researchers have been positive and I would like to see more of this kind of co-operation.

The first actual startup research in Finland I heard about was by a guy doing his PhD (if I remember correctly, he was doing research about failed web 2.0 startups, so there’s similarity to be found with the Startup Genome project) to the Turku School of Economics, and the discussion with him lead to the idea of this post. 

Comments, experiences, action steps?

Do you have experiences about bringing founders and entrepreneurship researchers closer to each other? How would you go about getting the show on the road? Other comments?