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Entrepreneurs Who Think Like Scientists Get Better Results

, by Claudio Todesco
A research by Camuffo and coauthors on a hundred startups highlights the difference

Entrepreneurship theory and practice emphasize the role of intuition, individual characteristics and chance in determining the business outcome. What happens if the entrepreneur acts like a scientist and chooses to articulate a theory, develop hypotheses, test them, and critically evaluate the results? Arnaldo Camuffo, Alessandro Cordova, Alfonso Gambardella, and Chiara Spina tackled this question in "A Scientific approach to entrepreneurial decision-making: evidence from a randomized control trial," a paper that was recently accepted for publication in the journal Management Science. The study was conducted in 2016-17 at Bocconi University and ICRIOS (Invernizzi Center for Research in Innovation, Organization, Strategy & Entrepreneurship). The authors provided a hundred Italian startups with a training program to improve their decision-making.

"We showed that entrepreneurs who behave like scientists perform better," Camuffo says. "We observed that they earn more revenues and pivot to a greater extent to a different idea. They can better mitigate their biases or inaccuracy when they analyze market signals, thus reducing the likelihood of incurring false positives and false negatives. Using a scientific approach to develop and evaluate entrepreneurial ideas might constitute a paradigm-shift in entrepreneurship education." The same team is working on replications of this study in other settings, including different industries and high-tech startups, in European and non-European countries. In an extension of the study, authors will also try to understand under which conditions the application of the scientific approach to business decision-making works better.

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