Entrepreneurship as a science of the artificial

This essay connects four key ideas from Herbert Simon's "Sciences of the Artificial" to recent research on entrepreneurial expertise: (1) natural laws constrain but do not dictate our designs; (2) we should seize every opportunity to avoid the use of prediction in design; (3) locality and contingency govern the sciences of the artificial; and, (4) near-decomposability is an essential feature of enduring designs. The essay is based on a series of conversations and emails with Simon about the empirical findings of my doctoral dissertation that involved a protocol analysis study of expert founder-entrepreneurs. (C) 2003 Elsevier Science B.V. All rights reserved.