Entrepreneur as preschooler: the process perspective on entrepreneurial performance
13 May 2026
12:30 -14:00
Times are shown in local time
Open to: All
Room W2.01 (Cambridge Judge Business School)
Trumpington St
Cambridge
CB2 1AG
United Kingdom
Join our Strategy and International Business seminar
Speaker: Professor Kathleen Eisenhardt, Stanford University
About the seminar topic
Successful creation of new businesses is a fundamental interest at the nexus of strategy, organisation theory and entrepreneurship. Several holistic theories of successful entrepreneurship have emerged including the theory-based view (and related lean startup), entrepreneurial strategy and effectuation. While valuable, these lenses often neglect insights from process research, especially work that relies on rich, longitudinal and comparative cases. Our aim is to introduce the ‘process perspective’ on entrepreneurial performance and the related entrepreneur-as-preschooler analogy. Like entrepreneurs, preschoolers face an unfamiliar world in which they learn, theorise and imagine in order to mature successfully. A core activity of preschoolers is parallel play in which they engage in self-focused activities next to peers, but not with them. Our primary contribution is to describe the process perspective on entrepreneurial success, including its distinctive views on rivalry, multiple ways of learning, simple theorisation, hybrid problem solving architecture, and imagination. Its repeated themes of timing, sequence, and sub-optimality fit particularly well with the uncertainty, ambiguity and velocity of the nascent markets that entrepreneurs often enter.
Speaker bio
Kathleen Eisenhardt is the Stanford W Ascherman MD Professor and a faculty member in the Stanford Technology Ventures Program and the Digital Economy Lab. Her recent book (co-authored with Don Sull) is Simple Rules: How to Survive in a Complex World (Houghton Mifflin Harcourt) which explores how simplicity tames complexity in business, life, and nature. She is also co-author (with Shona Brown) of Competing on the Edge: Strategy as Structured Chaos (Harvard Business School Press) and the author of over 100 articles in research and business journals.
Professor Eisenhardt’s research focus is strategy and organisation, especially in technology-based companies and high-velocity industries. She is currently studying the use of ‘simple rules’ heuristics, strategic interaction in new markets and ecosystems, strategy making in marketplaces, and business model design. She often uses multi-case theory building methods and more recently machine learning for theory building. She has received the career Scholarly Contribution Award from the Academy of Management and the Global Award for Entrepreneurship Research, among others. Professor Eisenhardt consults at senior levels with firms in industries ranging from Internet, telecommunications, software, and biotech to agribusiness, semiconductors and clean tech.
Professor Eisenhardt is an elected Fellow of the Academy of Management, Strategic Management Society, and British Academy. She has served on the editorial boards of ASQ, Organization Science, Academy of Management Journal, Academy of Management Review, Strategic Management Journal and Strategic Entrepreneurship Journal. She has been a Fellow of the World Economic Forum (Davos), a member of General Motors’ Science Advisory Committee, and a board member of MWH Global, an international engineering design and construction firm. She serves on the Advisory Board of Start-Up Chile. She has been a Distinguished Visiting Professor with Insead’s Entrepreneurship and Family Enterprise area.
Register
No registration required. If you have any questions about this seminar, please email Luke Slater.