Why We Need Normative Theories of Entrepreneurial Learning That Go Beyond Bayesianism

Zellweger and Zenger's (ZZ) article, “Entrepreneurs as scientists: A pragmatist approach to producing value out of uncertainty,” represents a potentially influential contribution to the understanding of decision making under uncertainty. This short paper points to two major problems in their article: it 1) seeks to reduce uncertainty to risk and ignores the problem of unknown unknowns, and 2) does not identify the key inferential problem of linking the few current data points known by an entrepreneur to her imagination as it pertains to an unknowable future. We point to devising alternative models of learning that have the potential to overcome these problems as a research effort that should be prioritized within the emerging field of entrepreneurial learning.