The tacit knowledge of entrepreneurial design: Interrelating theory, practice and prescription in entrepreneurship research

Paul D. Selden and Denise Fletcher

Journal of Business Venturing Insights, 2019, vol. 11, issue C, -

Abstract: An important challenge facing entrepreneurship researchers is the “three-body” knowledge problem of how to use “theoretical knowledge” to produce “prescriptive knowledge” that communicates the “practical knowledge” of situated practice to students and practitioners of entrepreneurship. We argue that a contribution can be made to solving this problem by theorizing practical knowledge as the “know-how” to do a situated entrepreneurial practice. “Know-how” is a cognitive “capacity to act” that prescribes for a practitioner how to produce a type of outcome in a range of circumstances. This “know-how” can potentially, therefore, be reconstructed theoretically as explicit micro-prescriptive guidelines for third-party practice. To exploit this connection between practical knowledge and prescriptive knowledge, however, we first need to overcome the problem that “know-how” is largely tacit in the moment of real-time forward-looking practice. In other words, the practitioner is not directly aware of their tacit “know-how”, or “tacit knowledge”, at the time of practice. In this article, we explore the contribution design theory can make to empirically eliciting, and conceptually inferring, the real-time “tacit knowledge” of entrepreneurial practice as a precursor to producing micro-prescriptive knowledge.

Keywords: Artifact; Design; Prescriptive knowledge; Tacit knowledge; Entrepreneurial practice; Problem space (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2019
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Citations: View citations in EconPapers (2)

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Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:eee:jobuve:v:11:y:2019:i:c:17

DOI: 10.1016/j.jbvi.2019.e00122

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