Entrepreneurship Is Still Where Science Was in 1600

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In 2011, two professors at the University of Virginia, Saras Sarasvathy and Sankaran Venkataraman, penned a research paper entitled Entrepreneurship as Method: Open Questions for an Entrepreneurial Future, and in it, they made an argument that should have been a turning point.

“There exists an ‘entrepreneurial method’ analogous to the scientific method spelled out by Francis Bacon and others with regard to the natural realm.”

They weren’t talking about business school case studies or MBA electives. 

They meant a universal, systematic way of creating value under uncertainty, i.e., the entrepreneurship equivalent of the scientific method. 

And they spelled out the implications:

“One normative implication of accepting the argument would be to teach entrepreneurship not only to entrepreneurs but to everyone, as a necessary and useful skill and a way of reasoning about the world.”

The parallels they saw were uncanny. 

Before Bacon, science was seen as a gift

It was an inborn talent or divine blessing.

The professors put it bluntly:

“Scientific ability was largely an inborn trait or an accident of birth and circumstance, and not a matter of systematic study or training.”

That’s exactly how most people still talk about entrepreneurs: 

• born risk-takers
• visionary outliers

The UVA professors argued this was the same mistake our ancestors made about science. 

Instead of obsessing over traits, they said, study what entrepreneurs do and then codify it, teach it, and “propagate it widely enough to become a viable tool of value creation writ large.”

They even challenged the entire framing of the field:

“What if we temporarily suspend our thinking of [entrepreneurship] as a sub-discipline of economics or management, or a subset of courses taught in business schools, and recast it as something as large as a social force — somewhat like democracy in the eighteenth century or the scientific method in the seventeenth?”

Bacon’s Breakthrough

Francis Bacon’s genius wasn’t in making discoveries himself. It was in figuring out how discovery worked, and writing it down. 

He looked past the “special” people and studied their process.

That shift, from worshipping individual genius to documenting repeatable steps, turned the experimental method of craftsmen into the scientific method we still use today.

The result was a multiplication without precedent. As Shamoo and Resnick note:

“It is estimated that there are more scientists alive today than all of the scientists who have lived during the past 2,500 years of human history.”

The UVA professors believed entrepreneurship is standing at the same threshold. After four decades of research, they wrote:

“We are beginning to realize that the phenomenon may hide a generalized method capable of changing the way we live, work, and play, and transforming the courses of the careers we build, the shapes of the communities we live in, and the evolution of the socio-political and economic systems we are a part of.”

That is the opportunity. 

The problem is that, unlike Bacon, no one has actually codified the entrepreneurial method yet.

What’s Missing

The professors sketched the outlines: entrepreneurs don’t just find opportunities, they often create them.

They co-create markets with stakeholders.

They act under uncertainty by shaping the future rather than predicting it.

“For example, there is mounting empirical evidence that opportunities are often created by the entrepreneurial process itself…But there is a kicker…namely, that the nature of these new opportunities is inherently unpredictable.”

And they were adamant about who this applies to:

“Who could we exclude from the category of potential entrepreneurs? The answer simply is: no one. That means starting in middle school or earlier and excluding no one.”

But an outline isn’t a method. 

The “entrepreneurial method” is still where the scientific method was before Bacon’s Novum Organum: glimpsed, but not yet fully written down.

Building the Method

That’s what we’re doing at The School of Entrepreneuring.

We’ve undertaken a structured research effort to codify the entrepreneurial method — one that is domain- and industry-agnostic, designed to work whether you’re launching a SaaS platform, a coffee shop, a social enterprise, or a local service business.

Our approach draws from both quantitative and qualitative signals, including:

• Proprietary CB Insights data — millions of data points on industries, companies, and founders, revealing patterns across both successful and failed ventures. I founded the company and a lot of our seminal work to predict private company health has served as a great foundation.
  
• Founder narratives — a growing archive of entrepreneurial stories from How I Built This to Masters of Scale to Side Hustle School to name just a few, capturing the decisions, pivots, and recoveries behind real-world outcomes.
  

Codifying the method won’t eliminate failure, just as the scientific method didn’t stop scientists from running experiments that didn’t work.

What it did was create a repeatable process that multiplied the number of practitioners and the number of breakthroughs by orders of magnitude.

That’s our goal: a process that increases both the number of entrepreneurs and the quality of their work for generations to come.

As the professors concluded:

“There exists a distinct method of human problem solving that we can categorize as entrepreneurial. The method…is teachable to anyone who cares to learn it, and may be applied in practice to a wide variety of issues central to human well-being and social improvement.”

We believe they were right.

And we’re committed to building it and bringing it to students at The School of Entrepreneuring and beyond.

Stay tuned for results of our research or if you’d like, stay updated by signing up for my newsletter here.