Abstract
Entrepreneurs act purposefully in the face of uncertainty to exploit their opportunities. Although the action view has received much attention from entrepreneurship scholars, we know little about the multiplicative nature of entrepreneurial actions on the entrepreneurial journey. The reflective entrepreneur scrutinises what entrepreneurs see and experience, the situations and problems they may face and the approaches they may take to resolving them while moving ahead in the course of their value creation in time.
This book consists of 10 chapters in three parts. The chapters cover a wide range of interrelated premises on entrepreneurship, focused on the early stages of the entrepreneurial journey. By integrating these premises, the author aims to show us a fertile ground between order and chaos, where an entrepreneur can find his/her own balance in his/her versatile actions ahead. Moreover, the book involves the non-commercial aspects of the entrepreneurial journey including the pleasure of pursuing one’s passion, sense of failure, regret and hope. While the book predominately employs the individual level of analysis, it also opens up new perspectives by adopting the community level in introducing and explaining its core concepts. For instance, how collective actions in an ecosystem boost entrepreneurship and help/determine the winning entrepreneur or how incubators should support entrepreneurial efforts across the different stages of the journey, for example, ideation, incubation and acceleration (part 3).
In his introduction, Dimov lays the groundwork and defines the book’s core concepts and principles. The first part tries to illustrate the four areas of constant tension in entrepreneurship, namely, the asymmetry between ex-post insight (imagined future) and ex-ante foresight (realised future) of an opportunity, idea versus opportunity, genius versus lunatic, and skill versus luck concerning the actions that comprise them. Afterwards, he highlights the shortcomings of judgements based on knowledge blind spots that cause tension. The knowledge blind spots pertain to the two problems of justification and evaluation. These shortcomings limit the information available before and after the action until/unless the relevant outcome occurs. Here, Dimov brings to our attention the vital function of judgement before and after an action. While the former is a sanction mechanism to rule out specific actions by being wrong or causing noises, the latter is a means to evaluate consequences to open up useful possibilities based on learning outcomes generated by an action. Then, he draws two useful mechanisms of judgement, namely, sanction and natural attrition, which should work in concert with each other before and after the action to settle the tensions mentioned earlier.
In the second part of the book, he proposes the notion of a ‘contingent future’. The implication is that different actions in different circumstances can turn out differently, so we need to know about two general action principles to help handle them. The first is reaching milestones one after another, because we cannot look more than a few steps ahead. The second is changing direction because each milestone opens up a new sight with new courses. Given this future contingency, Dimov traces the milestones to the journey to the elements of a business model, intertwined in a tripartite design problem of market desirability, technical or operational feasibility and financial viability. However, involving all of these useful aspects raises a wicked problem. Getting to the next milestone and changing direction require a dedication of time and money, and moreover, our resources are scarce, hence the fulfilment of each element comes at the expense of weakening the rest. As such, we have to deal with inner and outer pressures associated with handling the uncertainty of the process and accepting our constraints.
Finally, in the last part, Dimov unpacks the journey from the outside. It locates entrepreneurial endeavours in a more extensive entrepreneurial ecosystem in search of enjoyment for entrepreneurship beyond the simplistic and equivocal bifurcation of triumph and loss. Using sport analogy, he identifies how it accelerates the interchange between participation and upshots, while exploiting the natural attrition associated with the process provides the means for backing entrepreneurial advancement.
In my opinion, the three parts have two notable implications: (1) they provide a blueprint for offering a process model of entrepreneurial judgement in time and (2) they allow the possibility to operationalise a refreshing construct of entrepreneurial judgement for quantitative research. These two implications have become an essential quest of modern calls for research in entrepreneurship. Nevertheless, the book is open to criticism. First, although the book contains diverse analogies and metaphors that try to tangibly show the complex elements of the journey, the reader may find the contents of the book very hard to grasp. My recommendation to readers is to first imagine a business idea from a real-case venture in the market (or consider their own nascent entrepreneurial idea) and then try to identify the development of the idea with the insights from the book. Second, one of the primary principles of the book revolves around a screening process in judgement, namely, the ‘sanctioning screen’ that rules out a specific action as right or wrong for seeking justification for an action or/and evaluating its consequences. The screening mechanism involves a comparison of information at hand with working principles (the threshold for the weight of evidence) by a truth system (pp. 30–33). Similarly, in the behavioural decision-making literature, the Image Theory’s (IT; Beach and Mitchell, 1987) mechanism uses a compatibility test for screening, which enables judgement under uncertainty. The test implies that an alternative is admissible unless its failure to meet numerous criteria (images) surpasses a threshold (violations of compatibility), in which case it is rejected. The author seems to have overlooked IT, which could otherwise boost his argumentation. Moreover, IT could provide more specific working criteria than those of sanctioning screen, which propose rather generic criteria (e.g. time, opportunity cost and resources); so, I recommend the inclusion of IT for further considerations. In my opinion, these two tips could help enhance comprehension of the readers of the book’s core message.
Overall, I see this book as a stimulating work that provides intriguing insights into entrepreneurial sense-making and action, especially for entrepreneurship scholars, nascent entrepreneurs, students and all entrepreneurship literature fans.