Effectuation

The patchwork quilt principle

This is a principle of means-driven (as opposed to goal-driven) action. The emphasis here is on creating something new with existing means than discovering new ways to achieve given goals.

The affordable loss principle

This principle prescribes committing in advance to what one is willing to lose rather than investing in calculations about expected returns to the project.

The bird-in-hand principle

This principle involves negotiating with any and all stakeholders who are willing to make actual commitments to the project, without worrying about opportunity costs, or carrying out elaborate competitive analyses. Furthermore, who comes on board determines the goals of the enterprise. Not vice versa.

The lemonade principle

This principle suggests acknowledging and appropriating contingency by leveraging surprises rather than trying to avoid them, overcome them, or adapt to them.

The pilot-in-the-plane principle

This principle urges relying on and working with human agency as the prime driver of opportunity rather than limiting entrepreneurial efforts to exploiting exogenous factors such as technological trajectories and socio-economic trends. Each of the five principles above embodies techniques of non-predictive control – i.e. reducing the use of predictive strategies to control uncertain situations. Together, these principles point to a logic of action called effectuation

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