From Entrepreneur to Designer: The Transferable Design Principles of the Entrepreneur

The competencies and outcomes of entrepreneurial activities spark the interest of many stakeholders across innovation ecosystems – governments, companies, entrepreneurs, and educational institutions alike. Typically, those of an entrepreneurial bent are sought after for their ability to create new ventures and deliver multiple forms of societal value, such as creating jobs, bolstering the economy, and translating technology into real world applications. Yet, beyond these outcomes, at the core of entrepreneurial activities is a qualitatively distinct design approach; and thus an entrepreneurial mindset has the potential to be a powerful philosophy to scaffold thinking and solve problems in any domain. However, very little has been explicitly written about how this mindset and problem-solving philosophy could map to domains in which new ventures are not a desired outcome. This paper focuses on synthesizing and distilling the design and problem-solving strategies of the entrepreneur to make them broadly applicable beyond business centric contexts. The paper reviews multiple literature streams in entrepreneurship, entrepreneurial expertise, effectuation, entrepreneurial firm design, and entrepreneurial opportunity recognition, problem-solving and decision-making using Boyer’s scholarship of integration lens as a guiding approach. This approach places value on integrating insights into new language that unifies concepts often dispersed across domains. Emphasis is placed on the design (problem solving) principles of entrepreneurs and their applicability across contexts, synthesizing such principles in a proposed framework of entrepreneurship as a problem-solving philosophy. Overall, the paper complements current research streams in entrepreneurship by helping further characterize the entrepreneurial method, while simultaneously opening new research and teaching directions, thus enriching the engineering education space and related fields.

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