子谦译文｜创业教什么：六种主流创业方法的比较(12)

商业计划在二十世纪60年代早期作为一个重要的原则和指导方针而出现，并在70年代获得大众的广泛接受。它主要用于构建公司的运营和指导战略决策，但多年来，它慢慢被创业者变成了一种合法的、用来吸引投资的有用的工具。当时，风险投资家和其他融资机构普遍流行将商业计划优先置于创业者的伟大抱负之前，并出版了大量的“手册”来展示商业计划流程，以及该如何实施这些流程。为了补充商业计划方法，使其适应创业者所假设的高度不确定性的环境，McGrath和MacMillan等学者提出了一套新的在创业规划战略中使用的指导方针，这些都是基于渐进式发展的理念，而不是在任何创业活动开始之前就制定的宏大的、长期(通常是五年)的计划。在《创业思维：在不确定时代持续创造机会的策略》（The Entrepreneurial Mindset: Strategies for Continuously Creating Opportunity in an Age of Uncertainty）一书中，他们提倡支持创业者的主观信念和假设，这些都是在商业计划实践中被认为理所当然的。
This opened up space for theories that emphasized “designing”new business activities rather than “planning”for them. In 2001, Saras Sarasvathy proposed five principles that served to guide the actions of expert entrepreneurs in creating successful businesses (2001). She postulated that these five principles could be conceived of as best practices and , therefore, could be learned by aspiring entrepreneurs (Sarasvathy and Venkataraman2011). Additionally, Baker and Nelson (2005) appropriated the concept of bricolage from sociology and applied it to entrepreneurship, packaging it as a set of guiding principles that entrepreneurs could use when faced with resource scarcity. In the meantime, the notion of experiment ation(Thomke1998,2003), implicitly touched upon as part of effectuation and bricolage, began to gain traction. Books and research articles that advocated similar experimental approaches to business development acquired a modicum of popularity (Fiet 2002; Pfeffer and Sutton 2006; Sull 2004). They concluded that a high degree of uncertainty can only be effectively and actively reduced through an experimental process that converts assumptions to facts. Furthermore, they argued for making decisions grounded in information gathered fromcarefully crafted experiments. Building on this idea, prescriptive entrepreneurship (Fiet 2008) offered a set of systematic theoretical guidelines for discovering opportunities amid the growing scholarly interest in the construct of opportunity. The guidelines projected a competing logic to the alertness perspective and offered new avenues for entrepreneurs to discover latent and/or create newopportunities in their surroundings.