子谦译文｜创业教什么：六种主流创业理论的对比研究(34)

The first conceptual dimension speaks to the way entrepreneurial methods conceptualize the inherent uncertainty present in current or future situations that entrepreneurs face as part of their venture creation efforts (cf. Gomory 1995; McKelvie et al. 2011). The view of future outcomes has important implications for how uncertainty should be managed (Sarasvathy and Dew 2005b). Apart from design thinking and business planning, the other methods explicitly or implicitly approach the notion of uncertainty, presenting it as one of the main reasons for the relevance of their prescriptions and proposing ways to manage or reduce it. The meaning of the term uncertainty, however, diverges along three main paths (cf. Packard et al. 2016). The first meaning is relevant to effectuation, in which uncertainty is ontological; that is, the future is unknowable in principle (Readetal.2016;Knight1921).Thus, the future is constructed by actors who are jointly creating it in unpredictable ways (Dew et al. 2008). The second meaning of uncertainty is seen in discovery-driven planning and prescriptive entrepreneurship, and frames uncertainty as epistemological; that is, the future is knowable through information gathering strategies (Fiet and Patel 2008). Here, uncertainty can be mitigated by entrepreneurs expanding their knowledge base. The third meaning for uncertainty reveals itself in the lean startup methodology, where a more implicit and colloquial meaning is found, incorporating concepts such as ambiguity and risk. It is most similar to epistemological uncertainty, the reduction of which hinges on the need to gather information (Murray and Tripsas 2004).