December 2021
Article
Strategic Management Journal

Entrepreneurial Learning and Strategic Foresight

By: Aticus Peterson and Andy Wu

Format:Print

Abstract

We study how learning by experience across projects affects an entrepreneur's strategic foresight. In a quantitative study of 314 entrepreneurs across 722 crowdfunded projects supplemented with a program of qualitative interviews, we counterintuitively find that entrepreneurs make less accurate predictions as they gain experience executing projects: they miss their predicted timeline to bring a product to market by nearly six additional weeks on each successive project. Although learning should improve prediction accuracy in principle, we argue that entrepreneurs also learn of opportunities to augment each successive product, which drastically expands the interdependencies beyond what an entrepreneur can anticipate. We find that entrepreneurs encounter more unforeseen interdependencies in their subsequent projects, and they sacrifice on-time delivery to address these interdependencies.

Keywords

Crowdfunding; Experience; Prediction; Timeline; Complexity; Entrepreneurship; Learning; Experience and Expertise; Forecasting and Prediction

Citation

Peterson, Aticus, and Andy Wu. "Entrepreneurial Learning and Strategic Foresight." Art. 1. Strategic Management Journal 42, no. 13 (December 2021): 2357–2388. (Lead article.)