The Entrepreneurial Method
It’s no secret that breakthrough ideas evolve from seemingly small and often unintended discoveries. But because these discoveries were accidental, it’s easy to write them off as lucky breaks when the reality is exactly the opposite. Each of these discoveries were made under conditions of extreme rigor and procedural testing – what we can attribute to the Scientific Method.
The Scientific Method is a body of techniques for investigating phenomena, acquiring new knowledge, or correcting and integrating previous knowledge. If we look back in history, we can see a marked increase in the pace of breakthrough discoveries after the introduction of the Scientific Method.
These breakthroughs are less about luck and more about a rigorous search built on the foundation of empirical and measurable evidence. Furthermore accidental discoveries aren’t limited just to the world of science. We see lots of parallels in the world of startups and innovation as well.
Google’s now famous PageRank algorithm that powers their mission of “organizing all the world’s information” started out as a less ambitious project for ranking academic papers at Stanford University. Even while their search engine continued to gain market share, Google struggled for years to find a sustainable business model.
Their breakthrough discovery came when the company conducted a small experiment pitting an auction-based ad system, they had heard another company using at the time, against traditional banner ads. The results on that single day of testing surprised even then CEO Eric Schmidt.
Both the world of science and startups are plagued with conditions of extreme uncertainty and while startups aren’t a perfect science, we can still learn a lot about navigating this terrain of extreme uncertainty from the Scientific Method.
The thinking goes that much like the adoption of the Scientific Method accelerated the pace of scientific discoveries, the adoption of some Entrepreneurial Method will accelerate the pace of business innovation.
