Entrepreneurs: Scientists or Preschoolers?
18 Mar 2025
12:30 -14:00
Times are shown in local time.
Open to: All
Room W2.02 (Cambridge Judge Business School)
Trumpington St
Cambridge
CB2 1AG
United Kingdom
Join our Strategy and International Business seminar
Speaker: Professor Kathleen Eisenhardt, Stanford University
Analogies are cognitive structures that can expedite problem solving by enabling individuals to use mental representations from prior situations to form an understanding of the current situation. Yet while analogies can accelerate progress, analogies can also pose challenges. Recent work at the nexus of strategy, entrepreneurship and organisation on nascent markets and new businesses highlights the relevance of 2 specific analogies: scientists and preschoolers.
Both analogies normative provide insights into the effective formation of strategies and businesses. While seemingly different, both analogies point value learning. Yet these analogies are also clearly not the same. Our aim is to explore these 2 analogies. We describe each in terms of key attributes, underlying theory, empirical support, and blind spots. We conclude that neither dominates, but rather together offer the more complete understanding.
Speaker bio
Kathleen Eisenhardt is the Stanford W Ascherman MD Professor and a faculty member in the Stanford Technology Ventures Program. Her recent book (with Don Sull) is ‘Simple Rules: How to Survive in a Complex World’ (Houghton Mifflin Harcourt) which explores how simplicity tames complexity in business, life, and nature. She is also co-author (with Shona Brown) of ‘Competing on the Edge: Strategy as Structured Chaos’ (Harvard Business School Press), winner of the George R Terry Book Award for outstanding contribution to management thinking and an Amazon Top 10 Annual Business and Investing book. Professor Eisenhardt is also author of over 100 articles in research and business journals, and the first author featured in Harvard Business Review’s OnPoint collection. She has been a Distinguished Visiting Professor with INSEAD’s Entrepreneurship and Family Enterprise area, and is the Sandra Dawson Visiting Professor at Cambridge Judge Business School for Lent 2025.
Professor Eisenhardt’s research focus is strategy and organisation, especially in technology-based companies and high-velocity industries. She is currently studying the use of ‘simple rules’ heuristics, strategic interaction in new markets and ecosystems, strategy making in marketplaces, and business model design. She often uses multi-case theory building methods and more recently machine learning for theory building. She has received the career Scholarly Contribution Award from the Academy of Management and the Global Award for Entrepreneurship Research. She has been honoured by many other awards including the Irwin Award for her contributions in strategy, the Distinguished Scholar Award from the Organization Theory and Management (OMT) and Technology and Innovation Management (TIM) divisions, the ASQ Scholarly Contribution award for the most influential paper 5 years after publication, and Strategic Management Society’s Schendel Best Paper prize.
Professor Eisenhardt consults at senior levels with firms in industries ranging from Internet, telecommunications, software and biotech to agribusiness, semiconductors and clean tech. Professor Eisenhardt was elected a Fellow of the Academy of Management and of the Strategic Management Society, and is an INFORMS member. She has served on the editorial boards of ASQ, Organization Science, Academy of Management Journal, Academy of Management Review, Strategic Management Journal and Strategic Entrepreneurship Journal. She has been a Fellow of the World Economic Forum (Davos), a member of General Motors’ Science Advisory Committee, and a board member of MWH Global, an international engineering design and construction firm. She serves on the Advisory Board of Start-Up Chile. Eisenhardt received her BS in Mechanical Engineering (Brown University, cum laude and with honours). She holds an MS in computer science. Her PhD is from Stanford’s Graduate School of Business. Professor Eisenhardt has several honorary degrees including from London Business School, Aalto University, Chalmers University of Technology.
Register
No registration required. If you have any questions about this seminar, please email Luke Slater.