Heurísticas no empreendedorismo digital: identificação e framework de suporte à seleção, aplicação e aprendizagem empreendedora

Abstract

Decision-making and action in environments such as Digital Entrepreneurship involve a significant degree of complexity, change, and uncertainty. Plus, entrepreneurs are severely constrained by information and resource scarcity. This scenario makes the phenomenon of entrepreneurial decision-making and action relevant for research and practice. Several tools seek to support such phenomenon; however, they are still tied to the mainstream of research and his beliefs in optimization methods, classical rationality, and in the understanding that more models, more data, more calculus, and more optimization led to better decision making. On the other hand, evidence from literature shows the opposite: For environments like the exposed, heuristic-based decision-making is superior in terms of better performance, higher speed, and reduced costs. Since heuristics are simple, they are easy to remember, communicate, and update, preventing the loss of critical knowledge in organizations. They are also useful to entrepreneurial learning and to support coordination on the fly. It is known that heuristic portfolios constitute foundations of capability creation related to innovation, organizational change, and the fragile balance between efficiency and flexibility, especially since heuristics portfolios accumulate a large volume of knowledge that is actionable to decision-makers. Nonetheless, literature on heuristics presents gaps related both to the identification of heuristic portfolios and to the structure that such a portfolio may have. These gaps hamper the diffusion of heuristics and their benefits, especially among inexperienced entrepreneurs. From these issues, a research question was drawn to guide this study: Which are the main organizational heuristics used by digital entrepreneurs? From this question, a secondary one is related to the challenges of heuristics and tools selection. To answer, a robust methodological procedure was carried out following principles of template analysis: more than 1600 pages of books containing a high volume of heuristics were coded, involving more than 70 cases of digital entrepreneurship. 1834 heuristics were obtained and organized in the first version of a portfolio of organizational heuristics. To amplify the accessibility of the identified heuristics, this portfolio was built over an easy-to-use tree diagram structured in four levels. With the goal of helping diffusion of heuristics and its benefits, with a special focus on entrepreneurial learning. The study contributes to an expansion of the concept of ecological rationality, helping to solve challenges related to the selection of heuristics/tools through adaptation to the environment and to the tasks/challenges at hand. Finally, a contribution is made to the field of empirical research which uses codification procedures to study heuristics: Unlike more mature research fields that use codification procedures, there were no template of reference in Digital Entrepreneurship field of research. So, the template developed for codification may evolve into a reference template to the field.