Entrepreneurship – the fundamental question for economists and business theorists alike.
Today’s excitement about AI suggests looking again at Knight’s research. Many peg him as introducing ‘uncertainty’ – defined in contrast to ‘risk’ – but this skips how Knight was pursuing a ‘knowledge-based’ theory of the firm. In this way he anticipated Nonaka & Takeuchi’s approach to their knowledge-based theory of the firm. There is no evidence that either Nonaka or Takeuchi knew anything of Knight’s work. The publication of their ‘Knowledge Creating Company’ (1995) took the business school community by surprise. The subsequent development of the knowledge-based theory of the firm, and its management, has been disappointing. Many see it as a variant of the RBV. But today’s puzzles over what an AI system ‘knows’, how it acquires that knowledge, and its ethical significance, illuminate how entrepreneurs might come to learn whatever it is that they ‘know’ that others do not, what we presume as the source of their competitive advantage and the ‘rent’ that is their profit. These puzzles might also help flesh out the emerging ‘judgment-based views (JBV).
Aside from the ongoing Knight-oriented research, there are now two Cambridge Elements lists under way – business strategy AND business history.