THE RISE OF ENTREPRENEURAL THINKING

Bringing new products to market has a lot in common with starting an entrepreneurial venture. Both processes have high levels of risk, are characterized by ambiguous development paths and have high failure rates. However, research into how expert entrepreneurs create successful ventures has discovered that they use a profoundly different approach to commercializing new products than the common "stage-gate" process used by the majority of North American companies. Despite the commonalities between new product development and entrepreneurship, the stage-gate process inherently relies on predictive logic. This article discusses how non-predictive logic, also termed "entrepreneurial thinking," can be used to extract latent value that has been discarded during the stage-gate process, and the four principles of this approach. Here are the four key principles of entrepreneurial thinking, and how they can be applied to reevaluate product failures: 1. the Means Principle, 2. the Contingencies Principle, 3. the Partnerships Principle, and 4. the Worldview Principle.