Uncertainty, knowledge problems, and entrepreneurial action

Abstract

Whether new business ventures emerge in the context of start-ups or corporate giants, one of the enduring and fundamental assumptions underlying theories of entrepreneurial action is that entrepreneurs operate in uncertain environments. And yet, nearly a century since the unveiling of Knightian uncertainty as a precursor to profit-making, the identification, description, and operationalization of uncertainty as a construct continue to exhibit conflicting definitions, tautological measures, and unwitting conflation with more precise constructs along the spectrum of ignorance and unknowingness. The purpose of this study is to review the multiple research streams that together constitute the literature on knowledge problems to identify critical boundary conditions of uncertainty as an analytical construct. Based on this review, we then set forth a multi-level research agenda for exploring entrepreneurial action under conditions of ambiguity, complexity, equivocality, and uncertainty.