During the last twenty years, the dominance of the business-planning paradigm in entrepreneurship scholarship and education has obscured the potential value of improvisational skills in entrepreneurial firms. Entrepreneurial improvisation occurs when the design and execution of start-up activities occur simultaneously, that is, when entrepreneurs make it up as they go along. This paper presents theory and illustrative material related to the patterning of transitions between pre-planned and improvisational modes of action in the face of episodes of failure. We present hypotheses about the influence of characteristics of firms’ governance networks and financial and temporal slack on whether entrepreneurs will switch between pre-planning and improvisational modes in the face of setbacks and failures. Our pilot study interview evidence is consistent with several of these hypotheses, and suggests additional possibilities.

Business planning is perhaps the most common course in the contemporary entrepreneurship curriculum (Vesper and Gartner, 1993). Supporting this effort, students and entrepreneurs can find dozens of texts and guidebooks and a proliferation of software directed at helping them to write better business plans (Lumpkin, Shrader, & Hills, 1998; Sahlman, 1997). Students are urged to compete in business plan competitions. Many small consulting firms focus on helping clients write business plans. Advocates use a variety of rationales for why entrepreneurs should create business plans. Some advisors have claimed that plans provide a disciplined framework for making strategic choices (Linneman & Kennell, 1977; Thurston, 1983). Others claim that plans serve as the foundation for budgeting and control systems (Churchill, 1984), encourage developing a contingent view of the future (Block & MacMillan, 1985), and—perhaps most important of all—are required in many cases as part of the financing process (Rich & Gumpert, 1985; Sahlman, 1997).

However, informal evidence suggests that many entrepreneurs do not create formal—or in some case even informal—business plans. Honig and Karlsson (2001) found that sixty percent of a sample of nascent entrepreneurs in Sweden had written business plans, while about one-quarter had no business plans at all. Lumpkin, Shrader and Hills (1998) found that only forty-one percent of the firms in their sample had written plans at time of start-up. We know of no prospective longitudinal studies of relative rate of success of start-ups with and without plans. However, Bhide’s examination of over 200 successful businesses found that over forty percent had no plans at all, while only 28% had “full-blown” plans (Bhide, 1994, p. 48), suggesting that even if valuable, formal plans may not be necessary

Indeed, prescriptive admonitions notwithstanding, the literature evaluating the effects of formal planning—such as the sort of planning that results in written business plans—in smaller firms has been ambiguous at best. Robinson and Pearce (1984) reviewed 50 studies and found a great deal of prescription and very little empirical investigation. Bracker, et al. (1988) found moderate support for a relation between planning sophistication and financial performance in a sample of 73 firms between 6 and 17 years old with between four and one hundred employees. In a meta-analysis of fourteen studies of firms with fewer than 100 employees, Schwenk and Shrader (1993) found small but significant correlations between formal planning and performance. However, the data did not allow the authors to address the possibility that firms with better performance then decide that they can afford more sophisticated planning (Mintzberg, 1994). In a small sample of start-up technology firms, Baker and Aldrich (1994; Baker, et al., in press) found that most firms had created plans only in order to obtain financing, and that in most cases the financing attempts failed. Similarly, among a random sample of almost 400 nascent Swedish entrepreneurs, Honig and Karlsson (2001) used logit regression and found no significant relationship between a written business plan and indicators of performance such as first sale, profitability, or abandonment within the first twenty four months. Subsequent qualitative interviews led them to suggest that entrepreneurial business planning is an institutional norm that may frequently be followed for a variety of reasons having little to do with direct impact on performance. Of course, even if business plans don’t help entrepreneurs to make better strategic choices or to execute better, they might improve survival and performance by increasing firm legitimacy among various stakeholders (Aldrich, 1999; Aldrich & Baker, 2001).

In this paper, we take a somewhat different critical slant on the role of planning in entrepreneurial firms. Much of the prior planning (and control system) literature assumes that a Taylorist split between planning and execution (Taylor, 1911; Jelinek, 1979; Mintzberg, 1994) provides an appropriate analytical frame for investigating firm behavior and performance. This assumption permits clean analytic separation of firms’ planning behaviors and competencies from the work of “execution.” We call this the pre-planned design (PPD) model. PPD’s implicit behavioral model posits a temporal progression in which planning leads to execution which leads in turn to performance. Contemporary research on “fast cycle” development and learning practices challenges— but does not discard—the implicit Taylorist temporal model by suggesting that elapsed time from the start of planning to the start of execution can be and is being reduced (Eisenhardt & Tabrizi, 1995). In our research, we adopt an analytical framework that accommodates the extreme case in which planning and execution are inseparable both temporally and substantively. That is, the design and execution of a specific activity are one and the same process. We suggest that adoption of a framework that explores the limits of Taylorist research to explain the impact of planning on entrepreneurial performance can improve research on planning in entrepreneurial firms.

We contrast the PPD model with organizational improvisation (OI). In PPD, design precedes and guides execution; design activities may be distinguished, temporally and substantively, from execution. In contrast, Weick (1993, p. 6) suggests that in improvisation “there is no split between the composition and the performance . . . no split between the design and production.” In improvisation, planning and action take place at the same time because they are inseparable both analytically and phenomenologically. Improvisers are neither planning an activity to take place in the future nor executing a plan made in the past. Instead, they create their design as they carry it out. Thus, we adopt Moorman and Miner’s (1998a, b) definition that organizational improvisation (OI) occurs when the execution of activities in an organization converge—temporally and substantively—with their design.

It is important to note that improvisational activity is not thoughtless activity. In a pure form Taylorist model, of course, all of the thought takes place at the level of planning, and actual activities are intentionally rendered as thoughtless as possible. In contrast, improvisation attends closely to the emergent design and context of activities, as a jazz player attends to the other players and to what has already been played. Many organizations also house a great deal of “routine” activity, which is thoughtless insofar as it becomes detached from specific intentions and lacks novelty. In contrast, improvisation displays intentionality and in most definitions (Miner, Bassoff and Moorman, 2001; Moorman and Miner, 1998) implies some degree of novelty.

Prior work on OI has argued that competence at improvisation may be an important organizational skill, particularly in emergent and ambiguous environments (Crossan, 1998; Eisenhardt & Tabrizi, 1995; Moorman & Miner, 1998; Weick, 1993) and in the face of rapid technological change. Rich descriptive literature suggests that even very basic strategic choices may be improvised (Quinn, 1980; Pascale, 1984; Mintzberg and McHugh, 1985) and recent work has begun to investigate specific processes through which strategic improvisation occurs (Baker, et al., in press; Miner, Bassoff and Moorman, 2001). Organization scholars have described improvisation in a wide variety of settings (Hutchins, 1990; Preston, 1991; Weick, 1993), but most prior work on OI has reported on improvisation in relatively large, well-established organizations (Eisenhardt & Tabrizi, 1995; Moorman & Miner, 1998a,b). OI and PPD may each be effective and appropriate tools in different circumstances. For example, perhaps careful and detailed pre-planning makes a great deal of sense for established organizations in relatively stable environments, while skilled improvisation makes most sense in highly volatile environments. However, we suggest that for entrepreneurs in technology-intensive environments, the choice of proper action mode—between OI and PPD—may be difficult to make, based on the reasoning below.

In established organizations, many or even most activities are determined neither by PPD nor by OI; instead, they are determined by pre-existing routines (Cohen & Bacdayan, 1994; March & Simon, 1958; Nelson & Winter, 1982). But entrepreneurs are not able to rely on extensive portfolios of routines specific to the new firm’s mission or context. They must rely more heavily on combinations of pre-planning and improvisation to determine firm activities (Aldrich & Auster, 1986; Baker, et al., in press). Environments of rapid change and technological complexity further reduce the attraction of reliance on routines. Thus, young growth-oriented technology-intensive firms present a promising context for studying the interplay of PPD and OI in determining firm behaviors, because improvisation may be especially likely to occur in this context. In the rest of this paper we draw on theories of improvisation, attributional biases, and problemistic search to develop a series of preliminary hypotheses regarding PPD and OI in high technology start-ups. We then report early exploratory data from a pilot study that explores these hypotheses in preparation for further development and empirical study and testing. This study is part of a continuing attempt to develop an empirically-grounded descriptive and predictive theory of strategic improvisation in entrepreneurial firms. This framework may also serve as a foundation for sensible prescriptive advice to students and entrepreneurs.

While it may sometimes be fair to characterize whole organizations as more or less “improvisational,” organizations typically combine some degree of pre-planned design, routines and improvisation (Mintzburg, 1994). The literature suggests that PPD and OI are distributed across a variety of activities and functions in organizations. For example, Miner, Bassoff and Moorman (2001) found that a science-based firm that developed research instruments showed an enduring capability to improvise fruitfully in technical areas such as trouble-shooting and creating new products on the fly. The same firm did not show equivalent improvisational tendencies or competencies in administrative and other non-technical areas. In a contrasting firm, these authors found improvisational patterns in marketing areas, but not in technical work.

Deeper understanding of the value of improvisation and tradeoffs between OI and PPD requires that we explore the processes by which these action modes unfold in specific firms and in specific activities. We do not yet have an explicit understanding of whether and how individual organizations shift activities between OI and PPD action modes. A fundamental understanding of how organizations make transitions from one mode to the other will be crucial if—as advocated by contemporary observers (Brown & Eisenhardt, 1998)—managers and entrepreneurs seek to deploy both PPD and OI action modes over time.

No previous study of which we are aware has directly tackled the specific question of how organizations might come to make transitions between OI and PPD in particular activities. Prior qualitative research does describe cases in which sudden, unexpected failure has triggered switches from an improvisation to pre-planned design (Baker et al., in press). These action modes may represent instances of learning from failure, a subject of increasing salience in organization and strategy theories (McGrath, 1999; Miner, Kim, Holzinger, & Haunschild, 1999; Sitkin, 1992). However, the evidence on switches between action modes remains anecdotal, and we know little about the factors that enhance or impede the impact of failure events on the tendency to switch modes. Learning theorists have long argued that failure or setback events could trigger search behavior (Cyert & March, 1963). Their work implies that the search might extend to changing firms’ general mode of action, but prior work does not include systematic tests of this idea. Important contrasting work emphasized that such transitions are not inevitable; failure may prompt escalation of commitment, rather than transitions (Staw, Sandelands, & Dutton, 1981). A fuller understanding of learning from failure requires understanding when failure is likely to lead to transitions and when it is not.

Impact of the Firm’s Governance Network

Young firms rely on a wide variety of outside advisors and stakeholders for advice, information and access to resources (Aldrich & Zimmer, 1986; Dubini & Aldrich, 1991; Hansen & Wortman, 1989; Powell & Brantley, 1992). This network of advisors may be very informal, but provide a support and governance function much like the formal board of directors in an established corporation. We therefore refer to this group of advisors and stakeholders as the young firm’s “governance network.” Among members of the governance network, we distinguish between “insiders” and outsiders.” Advisors vary in the extent to which they are knowledgeable about and involved in the day-to-day activities of the firm. In addition, the length of time that governance network members have known the founders and their length of involvement with the firm may influence their familiarity as “insiders.” The first two hypotheses predict that the mix of insiders and outsiders will affect the likelihood of a transition between action modes.

We propose that the likelihood that a perceived failure will generate a transition in action mode depends on whether failure is attributed to the actions that preceded failure or to circumstances that derailed an otherwise sensible approach. If failure is seen as the result of misfortune and circumstance, the attribution is less likely to lead to a transition than if the failure is seen as failure on the part of the entrepreneur. The actor-observer bias suggests that relative to observers, actors are more likely to attribute negative outcomes to environmental circumstances (Nisbet & Ross, 1980; Ross, 1977). Outsiders in the governance network may behave like “observers” of the entrepreneur and the firm. They may therefore be more likely than insiders to attribute failure to failed approaches, rather than to unlucky circumstances, and therefore to suggest transitions in approach. Moreover, work on formal corporate boards (Wade, O’Reilly III, & Chandratat, 1990) suggests that outsiders—in this case defined as board members not appointed by the current top manager—are more likely to challenge and resist managers’ perspectives and decisions.

Preliminary Hypothesis 1: The greater the proportion of outsiders in the firm’s governance network, the greater the chances of a transition from one action mode to another when setbacks or failures occur.

Business plans may serve as tools to communicate a common approach to various people who are involved in an activity and also as statements of behavioral expectations. Advisors and external stakeholders, who may have little direct influence over day-to-day activities may require firms to create business plans as a way of establishing expectations against which performance may be monitored (Mintzberg, 1994; Sahlman, 1997; Thurston, 1983). Differences in functional background and training lead to differences in how people perceive and define business issues and differences in the tools they bring to bear to solve problems and exploit opportunities (Fligstein, 1987; Mizruchi & Stearns, 1994). In our sample of science and technology-based start-ups, we expect to find that governance networks include advisors with business backgrounds, but also scientists with little or no business experience. We expect that advisors with business experience will have more familiarity with the control and other values of business plans, and that this familiarity will make them more likely than scientists to see firm setbacks as opportunities for influencing firm behavior through planning.

Preliminary Hypothesis 2: The greater the proportion of members with business experience and the higher the aggregate number of year of business experience in the firm’s governance network, the greater the chances of a transition from improvisation to planning, but not from planning to improvisation when setbacks or failures occur.

Stakeholders—especially financial stakeholders—vary in their ability to benefit from increased returns that entrepreneurs may generate by taking on increased risks. At one extreme, bankers generally have no “upside” on their commercial loans; even if a firm is wildly successful, the bank will simply get back the money they have lent and accrued interest (Fama, 1985). At the other extreme, common equity holders have a residual claim on whatever returns the firm generates and may thus experience a tremendous upside if firms in which they have invested do better than expected. This structural difference in incentives leads bankers and other debtholders to behave with greater risk aversion than equity investors. Banks act on this risk aversion by requiring borrowers to agree to various covenants that serve to restrict entrepreneurs from engaging in riskier activities than those described in requesting the loan (Berger & Udell, 1994; Hillier & Ibrahimo, 1993). We expect that one way debt-holders will attempt to constrain the riskiness of entrepreneurs’ behavior is by influencing them to engage in pre-planning. Firm setbacks and failures may be particularly important opportunities for debt-holders to exert this influence.

Preliminary Hypothesis 3: The higher the number of debt holders in the firm’s governance network, the greater the chances of a transition from improvisation to planning, but not from planning to improvisation when setbacks or failures occur.

Impact of Organizational Slack

Failures may be large enough to destroy a firm; even a minor disaster may cause the disbanding of a small young firm. However, the existence of slack resources—perhaps for young firms in the form of an initial endowment (Fichman & Levinthal, 1991)—reduces the likelihood that any particular failure will cause a firm to disband. In general, we expect that slack in material resources provides a buffer for entrepreneurs, allowing them to continue business as usual—maintaining the same action mode, whatever that is—even in the face of failure or setbacks. Material resource slack refers to the extent to which material and financial resources are greater than the minimum required to support the firm in its current activities (Cyert & March, 1963). Although threat-rigidity research has suggested that failure can produce resistance to change (Staw et al., 1981), new firms are exceptionally vulnerable to major setbacks; lack of resources to buffer the firm will make failure more salient and thus enhance the chances of change away from the current action mode.

Preliminary Hypothesis 4: The lower the level of material resource slack, the greater the chances of a transition from one action mode to another when setbacks or failures occur.

Time has long been acknowledged as a potential scarce resource in organizations (March & Simon, 1958). Contemporary researchers have begun to examine more closely the dynamics of temporal scarcity and slack. We define temporal slack as having more time to complete a project or task than the minimum required for execution of the project or task. Prior research on organizational improvisation has consistently suggested that organizations sometimes improvise when they perceive that action is required but that there is insufficient time to plan (Eisenhardt & Tabrizi, 1995). This may occur, for example, when the rate of key technological change is faster than a feasible planning cycle for the organization (Moorman & Miner, 1998). When failures or setbacks occur and temporal slack is absent, entrepreneurs may feel constrained to act, but be uncertain about how long it might take to plan tasks in advance, or how much planning will help. In the face of this uncertainty, we expect that time-pressured entrepreneurs are likely to opt more frequently for transitions to improvisation.

Preliminary Hypothesis 5: The lower the level of temporal slack, the greater the chances of a transition from PPD to OI, but not from OI to PPD when setbacks or failures occur.

In this paper we report on a pilot study through which we were able to improve the theory and methods we will use in a follow-on empirical test of our hypotheses. The pilot study consists of interviews with fourteen entrepreneurs drawn from the same population in which the later study will be conducted. We have begun interviewing founders of 60 high-technology-based start-up companies, five years old or less, located in the Dane County, Wisconsin area. Of the 60 firms, 30 will have university faculty founders; the other will have non-faculty founders. The 60 firms are a stratified (by founder type) random sample selected from several hundred firms identified by Dun and Bradstreet as fitting our target firm profile.

Our semi-structured interviews begin with open-ended questions but move toward standardized probes to gain key variables for use in statistical testing of our hypotheses. The first part of the interview asks founders to tell the story of their business and what they see as important events and people in that story, including employees, advisors, and sources of various financial and other resources. The second section collects structured information on failures and setbacks and modes of action prior to and after each such reported event. In pilot interviews we developed and adapted a series of measures (not detailed here) for variables corresponding to each of the constructs in our hypotheses and for a set of control variables. Some of our measures draw heavily on Moorman and Miner (1998) and others are new. The data described here draw on both the unstructured qualitative and structured quantitative parts of our first fourteen interviews. The focus of our exploration is on whether a switch in action mode followed perceived set-backs or failures. Thus the ultimate unit of analysis for this work will not be an individual firm, but a particular set-back incident.

Our pilot interviews yielded early information that is consistent with several of our theoretical hypotheses, and we report illustrative data here. We also report on several observations that suggest more nuanced links between the key variables.

Hypothesis 1 (Outsider in governance network will increase transition chances)

Of the five firms that had outsiders in their governance networks, four underwent at least one transition; no transitions occurred when a firm had no outsiders. In most cases, outsiders became influential explicitly because entrepreneurs wanted to make some kind of change. For example, one founder wanted to move beyond technology consulting and explained the decision to turn to outsiders—“We had the resources we needed in terms of technology, but in terms of operations, maybe not. . . . If I wanted to run a million dollar consulting business, I would not need to do this. But I want to create a business that can run without me.” One founder decided after several years that he didn’t want to run an “entrepreneurial” firm any longer, but wanted to move toward more professional “administrative” management. The firm had invested about $800,000 in a new application service provider (ASP) initiative, making decisions based on an intuitive understanding of the market. As part of raising additional financing, the firm added several outsiders to its board. In short order, the board disciplined the firm to a formal planning process and then cancelled the ASP project.

In two incidents, the degree of board change was substantial and this led to transitions in action mode. One founder’s entire board resigned at one time, and he replaced his carefully crafted plan with an improvised strategy that involved a second mortgage on his house and cold-calling for clients. A software firm gradually lost advisors who were replaced by people who were previously strangers to the founder. These new board members were dissatisfied with the firm’s prospects, and demanded the founder switch from his carefully planned approach to the education market and pressured him to improvise a product to fit the booming internet market. When the Internet bubble burst, board members left and another round of new members have refocused the firm on a more traditional business model, supported by careful analysis and planning.

Hypothesis 2 (Experienced governance network will increase OI to PPD transitions)

Obtaining data for the level of experience of the governance network has been difficult and in most cases in this pilot, we relied on founders’ estimates. We classified firms as having “experienced” governance networks if at least half of the members were described as having at least five years of prior business experience. No transitions between action modes occurred after failures in any of the firms that had inexperienced governance networks throughout the study period. Eleven of the fourteen firms had experienced networks at some time during the five years. Hypothesis three suggested that when firms had experienced networks they would be more likely to make transitions from OI to PPD, but not from PPD to OI. The level of business experience in firms’ governance networks shows no asymmetry in direction of changes in action mode. However, although we had not predicted this pattern, in this pilot when firms had experienced governance networks they were more likely overall to experience transitions. When firms had inexperienced governance networks they reported no transitions in action mode.

Hypothesis 3 (Debt-holders in governance network will increase transition chances)

Of the fourteen pilot companies, only three described their debt-holders as members of their governance networks at any time. The remaining firms had borrowed very little money, or had used proceeds from personal loans, and the providers of this financing had little or no influence on how these businesses were run. Hypothesis 3 predicted that debt-holder members of the governance network would increase the chances of a transition from OI to PPD, but not the reverse. In addition to making equity investments or lending money directly, members of a firm’s governance network may—of course—provide guarantees or pledge collateral that make bank loans possible. Several founder stories suggest a more complicated role for debt in shaping transitions between action modes. For example, one firm experienced an unprofitable quarter after four years in business, and requested a temporary increase in its credit line. When the bank refused, the firm brought on three new board members, who guaranteed loans at a different bank. The “new” board moved quickly to force the entrepreneur to move from a starkly OI approach to moderate levels of pre-planning. The board also insisted that the founder remove several of the early improvisational “cowboy” employees.

Hypothesis 4 (Low material resources will increase transition chances)

Ten of the fourteen pilot firms indicated moderate to severe material resource deficits in at least one period. Of the four firms that reported having enough money, two said their firms were not very capital intensive at current growth rates, and two firms had been successful in raising adequate financing. Three of the firms with material deficits and one with no material deficit had transitions. Several of these firms appeared quite desperate, willing to take any approach to running their business that they thought would help them move forward.

Hypothesis 5 (Low temporal resources will increase PPD to OI transitions)

Ten firms indicated that they had significant time pressures at some periods, with four action mode transitions in response to failures. In the pilot data, there was not any asymmetry favoring transitions from PPD to OI in the face of time pressures. However, more of the firms with time pressured situations seemed dominated by OI. This is consistent with the idea the time pressure may be linked to improvisation. It may also, render the risk of transitions from PPD to OI less than the risk of transitions from OI to PPD across the pilot sample. Only four of the fourteen founders indicated that they were not under significant time pressures at any time. These four founders indicated that they worked normal hours, and had taken several weeks of vacation or in one case, a summer of four day workweeks. None of these firms described any action mode transitions that took place while they had slack time. Three of these firms had consistent PPD action modes. The fourth firm had a consistent OI action mode. The founder’s inability to raise additional funds stymied his activities and left him with extra time on his hands.

The observations described above are consistent with the idea that characteristics of start-up firms’ governance networks and material resource and temporal slack may sometimes shape action mode transitions in the face of failure. Our early data also suggest two new potential dynamics that will allow us to enrich our theoretical framework. First, when firms were small, they seemed less likely to make transitions between PPD and OI despite both minor and catastrophic failures. Second, the data pointed to additional ways that debt may influence transitions between OI and PPD. Specifically, in some cases, it was the role of board members as guarantors of debt that provided a mechanism by which debt influenced transitions from OI to PPD (rather than through the direct influence of banks.)

We speculate based on this pilot study that the hypotheses regarding the existence of any transition may be better supported than the directional hypotheses, but we will need a larger number of events to examine this systematically. Overall, we are encouraged by the results of the pilot and have begun refining our theory, redesigning our interview instrument and developing our sample for an empirical test of our hypotheses.

Systematic research is beginning to corroborate anecdotal evidence that improvisation is a common activity in entrepreneurial firms (Baker, et al., in press). This highlights the potential power of studying planning and execution as complementary facets of entrepreneurial management and as joint predictors of firm behavior and performance. Research which looks only at planning separate from execution would exclude improvisation; studies of execution that ignore planning would likewise describe only a falsely non-improvisational world. At this point, careful theorizing and evidence about the specific processes through which improvisation unfolds and interacts with other action modes is obviously important.

In addition, we know very little about the survival and performance consequences of various combinations of PPD and OI. We speculate that many different combinations are characterized by equifinality. For example, in some circumstances, improvisational competence may make up for lack of attention to planning, or planning competence may reduce the value of skilled improvisation. It may well be possible, as suggested by many (Eisenhardt & Tabrisi, 1995; Hatch, 1997; Crosson, 1998), that improvisation has higher value for firm survival and performance in newer industries, faster-growing industries, and in the face of technological volatility. However, these intuitively appealing notions require systematic empirical research before they can be assumed to be valid. In addition, there is a great deal of cross-industry variation even when we look just at entrepreneurial firms in technologically volatile and rapidly growing industries. Our theoretical understanding of the role of improvisation in entrepreneurial performance will benefit from empirical studies that address in detail the variation observed in the structure of entrepreneurial opportunities.

Entrepreneurship education in this country is dominated by a PPD approach, despite broad awareness of the existence and possible benefits of improvisation. This study provides a theoretical foundation and exploratory data regarding patterns of OI and PPD that can develop in entrepreneurial firms. The stream of research building on this foundation will provide at least two practical benefits. First, it will support research to understand how to manage and structure combinations of OI and PPD activities. Second, it will help to further delineate appropriate training in improvisational skills for students and entrepreneurs. As entrepreneurship educators, we currently assume that we can teach people how to design and structure their firms’ activities. We do our students a disservice by assuming that we can’t teach them how to improvise well or by simply ignoring the issue and pretending that most entrepreneurial firm activities are driven by design. This research stream should help us to teach our students a more coherent and balanced set of entrepreneurial skills.

CONTACT:Ted Baker, Department of Management, University of Wisconsin, Madison WI, 53706; (T) 608-238-4666; (F) 608-263-4392; tbaker@bus.wisc.edu

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