How can science and engineering teach entrepreneurs to develop successful business plans?
Acclaimed scientists have a common denominator: They started with a question which led them to a huge discovery, but they did not make their discoveries answering their first questions. Each attempt to solve their questions led them to improve their questions and dive deeper in their quest for getting the right answer. Nowadays, the scientific method is being used not just in natural sciences but in social sciences and in entrepreneurship. The Lean Series (Lean Start-Up and Running Lean by Eric Ries and Ash Maurya respectively) follow the scientific and engineering method because each step that requires validation starts with a hypothesis, then it is tested, and finally you draw conclusions. Questions help you to define the problem, elaborate hypotheses, and design mechanisms to test them, and entrepreneurs use them to try their business hypotheses. Under this argument I claim that scientists and entrepreneurs have things in common: they use questions to test their ideas, and through them, they can develop successful business and discoveries.
Tesla has a famous quote: “I don’t care that they stole my idea; I care that they don’t have any of their own.”
This phrase has a profound implication which applies for both scientists, engineers, and entrepreneurs. He meant that because It is very unlikely that you will have the solution to an unknown problem at the first try, it is important to have this ability to generate new testable ideas which can be candidates to solve your problem, and in one of this attempts you will get it right. He did not care for the idea stealing because a problem can be solved using different approaches; a single problem has multiple solutions, so one can borrow a solution to a different problem to adapt it to their own problem. Questions help us to generate ideas, so improving our questions enhances our ideas.
Want to learn about how scientific approaches can help you solve daily-life problems? Stay tuned for the next publication.
For further reference of how the scientific and engineering method works and which questions sustain the method, navigate through these references:
