Musings on Entrepreneurship and Innovation
Sunday, November 10, 2002Last week, I attended a lecture by Stuart Kauffman, the theoretical biologist. His talk consisted of a summary of his last book, Investigations. During the course of the lecture, I was reminded of the concept of collectively autocatalytic sets, which I've tried to apply to entrepreneurship. (The thesis being that by increasing the diversity of autonomous agents and lowering the barriers that inhibit interaction, we can encourage the conditions for emergent economic life.)
In matters of economic development, the norm is to (a) declare a "chicken or the egg" problem, (b) throw up our hands in exasperation, and (c) allocate resources politically. If we can identify the components and processes of a collectively autocatalytic set for technology commercialization, for example, we can have a roadmap for identifying which links and/or components are missing and acting to fill the gaps.
In the conclusion of Linked, Albert-Lászlό Barabási writes:
The goal before us is to understand complexity. To achieve that, we must move beyond structure and topology and start focusing on the dynamics that take place along the links. Networks are only the skeleton of complexity, the highways for the various processes that make our world hum. To describe society we must dress the links of the social network with actual dynamical interactions between people.
In other words, an understanding of the architecture of entrepreneurial networks is essential, but it not sufficient. In our experience with Pioneer Entrepreneurs, we're learning to focus on the dynamics of interactions sparked by the needs of individual members.
