Last month I listened in on a teleconference that featured Reuben McDaniel.  During the call, McDaniel asserted that business people should be asking, "What can I do with what I have?"  He referred to this approach as bricolage, which means something made or put together using whatever materials happen to be available.  Sounded a lot like entrepreneurship to me, so I started digging around for a direct conceptual link between bricolage and entrepreneurship.

I didn't have to look far.

Turns out that Raghu Garud at NYU and Peter Karnoe at Copenhagen Business School have co-authored a very interesting paper titled "Bricolage vs. Breakthrough: Distributed and Embedded Agency in Technology Entrepreneurship."  In it, they compare contrasting approaches to the development of wind turbines in Denmark and the United States.  The U.S. approach is characterized by "its linear top-down orientation and the quest for a breakthrough."  Danish firms, on the other hand, "deployed prototypes designed with simple engineering heuristics to engender a process of trial-and-error learning.  Firms also learnt from each other at [a series of industry meetings]."  The analysis showed "how a bricolage approach that begins with a low-tech design but ramps up progressively is able to prevail over a high-tech breakthrough approach."  The authors concluded, "For such processes to unfold, it is important to have a diversity of linkages to foster mutual involvement of actors."

Consequently, it came as no surprise to find that Garud was on the editorial board of Emergence along with complexity stalwarts such as Stuart Kauffman and Kevin Dooley.  And, I was intrigued to note that Garud is editing a book titled, Managing in the Modular Age: Architectures, Networks and Organization.  Sounds like a good one to put on the list for discussion with the rest of my Plexus learning network.