子谦译文｜创业教什么：六种主流创业方法的比较(11)

Business planning emerged as a prominent collection of principles and guidelines in the early 1960s and attained widespread acceptance in the 1970s (Ackoff 1981; Porter 1980). It was mainly used to structure the operations of existing firms and guide strategic decisions, but throughout the years, it also served as a useful tool to signal legitimacy. Therefore, entrepreneurs began using it as a communication tool to attract investment (Karlsson and Honig 2009). The prevailing bias of venture capitalists and other funding agencies a t the time put business planning at the forefront of the agenda for aspiring entrepreneurs (Upton et al. 2001). Numerous “manual books” were published to demonstrate what business planning processes looked like and how aspiring entrepreneurs should go about conducting them. To complement the business planning approach and to adapt it to the conditions of high uncertainty assumed by entrepreneurs, scholars such as McGrath and MacMillan (1995, 2000) proposed a new set of guidelines for using planning strategies in entrepreneurship. These were grounded in a philosophy of incremental development rather than a grand, long-term (often five-year) plan that was formulated before any entrepreneurial activity was even initiated. In their book entitled The Entrepreneurial Mindset: Strategies for Continuously Creating Opportunity in an Age of Uncertainty, they championed experimenting with entrepreneurs’ subjective beliefs and assumptions around doing business that had been taken for granted in business planning practices.