Introduction to uncertainty

Before heading into how science can be applied to entrepreneurship, I will briefly discuss the differences and similarities between doing science and entrepreneuring. The first differences come from the degree of uncertainty.

The scientist knows the only actors playing a role in research are the evidential truth and him/herself. There's a consensus, a common agreement among all scientists. You can practice the easy task of highlighting the best features of science by simply analyzing religious paradigms based on dogma and rituals (more on this later).

While working in hard science, any particular research has a  predefined, finite set of possible outcomes. More generally, in between all the effort to be financed in research, one must be almost completely sure something awaits to be obtained or confirmed. In hard science, you normally deal with a high degree of certainty and well known theoretical and logical frameworks. If something is known and you don't understand it, there's someone in the world who will guide you and tell you the current "absolute truth", something one really appreciates as a student.

In science what you say is always more important than how you say it, truth is not based upon interpretations and your decisions are not based on current weather, that hour's mood or sports results.

The world of hard science is that all-objective world which may give many a headache, but it's comforting and reassuring for the scientist and our view of theoretical stability. It seems quite clear in science that there's nothing long, committed effort cannot achieve.  In the end, the goal of science is to know it all.

Evidently, there's nothing more necessary in a startup than applying the scientific method. So, "what's the deal?", you may ask. Well, while in entrepreneurship one acts according to unpredictable and hard-to-model objective and subjective reality, in science one is more than fine thinking seemingly objective reality approximation models working pretty well. Of course, the difference is huge. Another huge difference relies in attitude, since an entrepreneur has no conception of the word "objective", "exact", "predictable" or "consensus", he/she might act with humbleness and open minded skepticism: there's nothing absolute and, for the most part, nothing you can't try, even if it seems logically ill.

But, where does all this entrepreneuring uncertainty come from?

That's my next post.