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Predictive vs. non-predictive entrepreneurial strategies: What’s the difference, anyway?

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Abstract

Entrepreneurship research has developed and upheld the distinction between two fundamental notions of how entrepreneurial action might proceed, one being the predictive approach (causation) and the other being non-predictive or adaptive (effectuation). However, while a definite distinction between prediction and adaption may be justifiable for analytical purposes, it is artificial and, as such, of limited practical value. Neither is the predictive approach non-adaptive and nor is the adaptive approach non-predictive. Entrepreneurship necessarily involves both prediction and adaption, which ought therefore not to be treated as mutually exclusive categories that might at best overlap or occur simultaneously. This paper seeks to pave the way to a judgment-based unified notion of predictive-adaptive entrepreneurial action arguing that both prediction and adaption inevitably co-occur.

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Notes

  1. While this paper draws on the relations between strategy, operations, and tactics in its original military use, others (e.g., Ivanov 2010; Schmidt and Wilhelm 2000) confuse the respective spheres of both operations and tactics claiming that the operative sphere is the lowest, short-term-oriented one whereas tactics form the medium term middle ground between operations and strategy. Hering (2021) uncovered that misapplication of the terms in the literature.

  2. The example offered here and in the following paragraphs applies the case of an American tourist purely coincidentally, that is, with no intention to address cultural influences on entrepreneurial behavior. While there is evidence that culture is a mediating factor of entrepreneurial activity (e.g., Dheer 2017), the example merely seeks to illustrate the outlined entrepreneurial process. An entrepreneur acting according to the lowly predictive/lowly adaptive process might equally be of French, German, or South-African origin, among other options. It will be a task of future research to investigate whether a process is more common to particular cultural contexts.

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Acknowledgements

I wish to sincerely thank both the responsible Editor-in-Chief, Professor Sascha Kraus, and three anonymous reviewers for their valuable recommendations which allowed me to advance my paper further. I am also thankful for thoughtful comments on a previous version of this paper provided by participants of the ACIEK Conference 2021.

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This research did not receive any specific grant from funding agencies in the public, commercial, or not-for-profit sectors.

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    David J. Rapp

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Rapp, D.J. Predictive vs. non-predictive entrepreneurial strategies: What’s the difference, anyway?. Rev Manag Sci 16, 2161–2179 (2022). https://doi.org/10.1007/s11846-022-00519-7

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