Making It Happen: Beyond Theories of the Firm to Theories of Firm Design‪.‬

Current theories of the firm provide no explanation for entrepreneurial success except in terms of firm success. Even when the focus is on the entrepreneur, s/he is entirely cast as a bundle of traits/behaviors or heuristics/biases that serves to explain firm performance. In this article, I suggest putting the entrepreneur center stage, adopting an instrumental view of the firm. Drawing upon the work of Simon in symbolic cognition and Lakoff in semantic cognition, I explore how we can go beyond explanations based on economic forces and evolutionary adaptation to entrepreneurial effectuation; I end with specific research questions pertaining to firm design. "Making it happen" is one of the oldest bromides about what entrepreneurs do. The prevailing wisdom in economics (bolstered by inconclusive results in management research) might suggest that all entrepreneurs do is throw darts at the proverbial bell curve, with the more successful ones merely being those that happen to land in the correct tail of the distribution. Yet the popular press and increasingly business school programs that offer courses in entrepreneurship appear to fall back on the bromide. For example, a Web search with the phrases "making it happen" and "business school" brings up thousands of links to business schools that precisely use this bromide to describe and market their entrepreneurship programs.